"The Bistro Brawl"
The Curious, Complicated Relationship Between Wine and Wrestling
for Wine Enthusiast
Illustration / Research
Professional wrestling has been a huge interest of mine since I began watching in 2016. Wrestling is, at its core, pure entertainment: Shakespearean storylines about love, friendship, betrayal, good and evil; spectacles of confounding athleticism and wince-inducing scripted violence; dramatic monologuing; intricately crafted costumes; and the constant blurring between reality and fiction, all in the service of storytelling. It is everything I love about art and stories and people who are unrelenting in their passion for their craft. An art form that is tragically dismissed and and passed over by most.
I had causally pitched an idea for this article to writer Caroline Hatchett, little did I know this would turn in to a passion project that would span over a year--from giving writers and editors crash-courses in wrestling, to attending wine tastings, waxing poetic about wrestling as a socio-economic metaphor, and finally creating these illustrations to appear alongside the article in Wine Enthusiast.
"Somm-er Slam"
"The Sommentators"
"The Turnbuckle Chug"
"The Champagne-ionship"