db meets: Aidy Smith of The Three Drinkers

TV presenter and one third of The Three Drinkers, Aidy Smith, opens up to db about the need for greater diversity in the drinks trade and how he turned Tourette’s into his “superpower”.

While Aidy Smith is now flying high in the drinks world as one of the presenters of The Three Drinkers show on Amazon Prime TV, when he started out in the trade he felt he had to hide who he was to fit in. When embarking on a career in drinks, Smith hid his Tourette’s syndrome and his sexuality. “People in the industry still just have me down as eccentric,” he says.

Smith has been careful in his career choices to always pick companies that were a good fit for his personality – first for a Californian advertising agency, then moving through drinks media and international marketing. “You have that thought weighing on your mind, making you mask your true identity” he says. “You wonder, could I lose business because my tics are bad or because someone found out I was into men and that didn’t sit well with them?”

When he was seven years old, Smith was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition that manifests itself in the form of vocal and/or motor tics. One out of every 100 children in the UK has some form of the condition, the same number as cases of autism.

Smith has been keenly aware of the stigma attached to his condition throughout his career, due to the incorrect assumption that he will suddenly start using offensive language, yet “this accounts for less than 10% of people with the condition.”

On the contrary, Smith explains, “when I redirect that energy from my tics and channel it into what I love, it becomes a superpower.” Addressing the ethnic diversity gap in the industry, the latest series of his Bring a Bottle podcast features the black trio Glassmates on eight out of ten episodes. “They’re the most lovely, kind, humble guys, and no one knows spirits better,” Smith says.

Smith and fellow Three Drinkers presenter Helena Nicklin have also gotten involved with the BAME mentorship scheme organised by Jancis Robinson and Champagne Louis Roederer, and will be mentoring Saira of The Pursuit of Grapeness, a Black Asian wine writer who was shortlisted for the Roederer BAME bursary.

The LGBTQ community is still underrepresented in the drinks trade, Smith has found. “If you talked to a mixologist and a sommelier, it’s the mixologist who will probably be a little more open about being gay.” Spirits professionals, Smith believes, often have a more up-to-date attitude, due at least partly to online engagement. “It’s more of a community,” he says.

While the drinks trade has taken longer than some industries to catch up, wine professionals can be particularly conservative. “Generally, it’s about prestige when it comes to wine,” Smith says, although he does acknowledge that things are starting to change, singling out sommelier Jan Konetzki as a role model for the wine industry. “He’s not afraid to say, ‘I am who I am.’”

While exclusion in the industry often goes unnoticed, Smith and his fellow Drinkers were targeted, along with many others, in the latter months of 2020 by the anonymous ‘#winebitch’ in a series of WhatsApp messages sent to a number of members of the drinks industry that later went out on Twitter, before being circulated publicly via pdf.

Among other things, #winebitch accused Smith of hiding behind homosexuality. The accusation had a strong impact on Smith, who ended up in hospital after reading the post due to suffering a severe anxiety attack. “It was so hurtful,” he says; “but what’s worse is wondering, did that speak truth to the industry?”

Despite the incident, Smith is hopeful for the future and has found himself surprised by the open-minded attitudes of some older drinks professionals, though real change will undoubtedly fall to the younger members of the trade currently rising up through the ranks.

There’s a new generation of drinks professionals Smith calls “the age of the curious,” who are pushing things forward, including burgeoning LGBTQ brands like Gays who wine, which delivers wine and food boxes from its base in Cardiff.

Smith also applauds the current focus on health and wellbeing within the drinks industry. He and his fellow Three Drinkers presenter Helena Nicklin ran a series of videos on mental health in collaboration with Australian wine brand McGuigan during the coronavirus pandemic. For Smith, it is a deeply personal project, based on methods he has used to control and mitigate the tics associated with his Tourette’s syndrome.

Embracing who he is has made Smith a stronger and more confident person. He hopes the current noise around diversity in drinks will lead to significant change and that drinks firms will “hire people for the right reasons”, giving anyone seeking to enter the industry the chance to excel.