About Jeff Weissler
Jeff’s introduction to wine happened at home in Yonkers, NY, just 15 miles north of Manhattan. His parents had gone to Europe 2 years in a row, and they brought home a new tradition of having wine with dinner almost every night. His father would buy cases of wine from Zachys in Scarsdale at just $3.99 a bottle.
“The first time I tasted wine, I spit it out and I hated it. But being kind of a curious, pushy little kid, I’d just keep tasting and trying stuff,” says Jeff. This persistence turned to curiosity.
I think the window all the way to the lower left was the Mr. S’s Mythology Classroom…
At 16, Jeff went to his friend Owen’s house for dinner with some classmates and his mythology teacher, Mr. Sorentino. Owen’s mother was a French chef, and she made a beautiful 5-course dinner for them all to enjoy. Much to Jeff’s fascination, Mr. Sorentino had brought 5 wines from his cellar to pair with dinner — one for each course. As he poured the wine, Mr. Sorentino explained why he chose the bottles he did, and the boys didn’t want it to end. Thus the secret Roosevelt High School Wine + Food Society was born. Jeff and 3 friends regularly “conned” their mothers into contributing to a multi course dinner—salad, soup, entrée, dessert—and Mr. Sorentino paired wines to the dishes with wines from his collection.
At 17, Mr. Sorentino encouraged Jeff to join about 60 kids from around the US in an American Institute of Foreign Study trip. He spent 6 weeks in Italy, France, and Spain, making lasting friendships and exposing himself to European culture and hijinks. Each kid on the trip individually spent a night with a French family. In Rome, a family-style feast included a bottle each of unnamed red and white that were refilled as they emptied. Fast-forward to these boys puking in the Metro!
Once he returned from Europe, Jeff attended the University of Pittsburgh (let’s just say it was college in the 70s! You get the idea), then he moved back to New York to work at his family’s typography business.
He worked 4 years in a windowless office without ever taking a vacation, until one day, Jeff hit an emotional wall and took an impulsive trip to raft on the Colorado River.
As he reconnected with himself, Jeff instinctively reached back to the wine world, taking wine classes and becoming an original member of the International Wine Society in NYC. One fateful day, he walked into Zachys—the same wine shop his father used to buy wine from all those years ago—and asked for a job.
The manager responded that they weren’t hiring.
“I don’t care if you pay me or not,” said Jeff. “I would love to just come and have an experience to see what it’s like here.”
“Come back Saturday,” said the manager.
By the end of the shift on Saturday, Jeff sold 6 cases of wine, and had received a crispy $100 handshake and a job offer. He soon made another ambitious leap in the wine world, this time into fine wine wholesale. “You’ll starve,” said the boss, referring to the mostly-commission-based pay. Years later, when Jeff left his work in wholesale, he was the #2 salesman at his company.
In the late 80s, a single word grabbed Jeff and pulled him out of New York: WOODS.
With absolutely zero hiking experience, he set off on the Appalachian Trail at Black Furnace State Park in Pennsylvania. (Keep an eye out for more on this story in the blog!) When he emerged, his work trajectory shifted from merely selling wine to wine education.
In Las Vegas, New Mexico, Jeff transformed the modest beer bottle shop at Joe’s Ringside into a beer and fine wine shop with wine education classes that were written about in the Albuquerque Journal and featured on the radio. He came to be known locally as “Jeff the wine guy.”
When he returned to New York a couple of years later, Jeff partnered with long-established retailer Henry Ponzio of Suburban Wines & Spirits to start offering wine classes on a large scale. “We provided education and made it so unpretentious and so fun that people weren’t intimidated,” remembers Jeff. “It wasn’t a store, it was community.”
While conducting his wine education classes, Jeff started attending raw food retreats and health education courses around the East Coast and Puerto Rico. He became known as the “salad guy” due to his passion for organic leafy greens; why, then, was organic wine so disappointing?
Hoping to stock Suburban with organic wines, Jeff tried a few dozen organic wines and struggled to find even 6 that he liked. In the meantime, a new word started appearing in the wine world: biodynamic wines.
All good things come to an end, and when Suburban was sold, Jeff left for the West Coast to be nearer to the California wineries he admired and landed in Oregon. He pursued his curiosity around biodynamic growing practices and co-founded Conscious Wines, a company that interviewed dozens of winemakers and created content around sustainable grape growing, ultimately defining 12 practices for organic and holistic farming with which to evaluate farms. Many of these winery relationships are still intact today; Jeff continues to support Cowhorn, Johan, Dominio IV, Brick House and Brooks, among others, in his Pairings Portland inventory.
While pursuing his passion for biodynamic wines, Jeff met his partner Megan while she was in Ashland pursuing her passion of Theatre Scenic Design at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Together they moved to Portland.
With Megan’s help, in the midst of many life challenges, the idea for Pairings Portland formed in late 2012.
