What Makes Great Wine Great? – A Corporate Tasting in Asia
You can talk to an audience. But it’s a whole lot better if you engage, inspire, and captivate them.
That’s my goal every time I give a corporate wine tasting, a wine masterclass, or a keynote speech. Most inspirational female speakers will create a connection with their audience, a spark that ignites a relationship and captivates the audience for their whole time together. I want the audience to feel entertained, educated, energized, and above all, feel as though they’re having one of the great wine experiences of their lives.
A great wine event starts with great wine. (That might seem obvious, but it’s often not the case. A surprising number of corporate wine tastings feature innocuous commercial wines, chosen mostly because they are inexpensive).
Great wine, on the other hand, is inherently inspiring. And great wine is what I poured for three wine tasting events I gave recently in Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In each city, we explored the topic What Makes Great Wine Great?
The wines I chose were small production, artisanal wines from California. (The wines were flown in for the tastings). Each wine exemplified one or more of the attributes of greatness—a concept I had written about in my book The Wine Bible.
Here were the wines and some of the “attributes of greatness” each one demonstrated.
MERRY EDWARDS Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc 2022 (Russian River Valley, California) $45
Attribute: Distinctiveness.
Great wines are great because they are distinctive; not because they exhibit sameness. Distinctive wines have a clear personality.
The Merry Edwards Sauvignon is seriously distinctive and delicious. There are beautiful candle wax and meadowy aromas, creamy lemon meringue flavors, a racy bolt of freshness, and a long finish.
MASSICAN California Sauvignon Blanc 2023 (California) $35
Attribute: Precision.
Great wines do not have flavors that are muddled or blurry. Great wines have flavors—whatever those flavors are—that are precise, well defined, and expressive. If flavor were a sound, a precise wine would have a flavor like the crystal clear sound of church bells in the mountains.
Massican is one of the few wineries in California that specializes in white wines. Its Sauvignon Blanc is a tightrope of vivid, alpine-fresh precise flavors.
HIRSCH VINEYARDS Estate Chardonnay 2022 (Sonoma Coast, California) $65
Attribute: Balance.
Balance is a characteristic wine possesses when all of its major components (acid, alcohol, fruit, and tannin) are in equilibrium. Balanced wines have a kind of harmonious tension.
Hirsch winery is located on what is called the “extreme Sonoma Coast” on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its Chardonnay is bursting with so much freshness, it seems like it’s going to spring right out of the glass. The wine is a harmonious balance of rich, intense fruit flavors, mouthwatering acidity, and pinpoint minerality.
CROIX ESTATE “Floodgate” Pinot Noir 2022 (Russian River Valley, California) $60
Attribute: Aliveness.
Great wines have an aliveness–a lit-from-within quality that you can sense. Such wines are often described as having energy, vitality, soul, and spirituality. Aliveness is not a flavor, but rather more like an electric current humming through the wine and heightening your awareness of it.
The Croix “Floodgate” Pinot Noir, made by a father and son team, is a rich and racy style of Pinot Noir. Its spicy, savory flavors soar onto the palate in a rush of intense energy that’s breathtaking.
CROCKER & STARR WINERY, Estate Cabernet Franc 2022 (Napa Valley, California) $125
Attribute: Beyond Fruitiness
Great wines go beyond fruit and are woven through with complicated aromas and flavors—things like tar, bitter espresso, roasted meats, blood, worn leather, rocks, wet bark, rotting leaves, and so on. These subliminal “corrupt” flavors are often what make wine fascinating.
The Crocker & Starr Cabernet Franc was one of the first Cab Franc’s in the Napa Valley, and it remains one of the best. The wine’s “dark” flavors of Chinese 5-spice, coriander, leather, smokey peat, and graphite are deep and powerful.
RIDGE VINEYARDS “East Bench” Zinfandel 2022 (Dry Creek Valley, California) $46
Attribute: Complexity.
All great wines are complex, that is, they have multifaceted aromas and flavors that reveal themselves sequentially over time. Tasting a complex wine is a head trip. Just when you think you’ve grasped the flavors, the kaleidoscope turns and new flavors emerge, revealing different facets of the wine.
Ridge is a fairly large winery, but the wines it makes—30 of them—are made in small amounts. Ridge has been a blue-chip California winery for half a century. It’s known for its layered and deliciously savory Zinfandels and for its globally-famous Cabernet Sauvignon “Montebello.”
DUMOL “Wild Mountainside” Syrah 2022 (Russian River Valley, California) $75
Attribute: Choreography.
All great wines have force, fluidity, rhythm, volume, and velocity. They are not motionless on the palate. They galvanize your senses with how they move; with their choreography.
DuMol, a small family winery, specializes in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and it brings a finely crafted elegance (a Pinot state of mind) to its Syrah. The wild berry, violets, menthol, and black plum flavors start out blossoming fast on the palate, then unfurl in soft waves to a lingering end.
REALM CELLARS “Moonracer” Cabernet Sauvignon 2018 (Stags Leap District, Napa Valley, California) $300
Attribute: Connectedness.
Connectedness is the sense you get from a great wine’s aromas and flavors that the wine is the embodiment of a particular place. Connectedness is the bond between a wine and the land it was born in. Like cultural identity, connectedness makes a wine worthy of appreciation. It says, “this wine is from this place, and can be from no other.”
Realm is a Napa Valley juggernaut. A winery that had barely been heard of ten years ago, it’s now one of the top wineries in Napa Valley. Its wines are highly allocated to great demand. Moonracer Cabernet is quintessential Napa Valley—powerful, complex, and polished, with a majestic structure, a rich core of unctuous flavor, and a spellbindingly long finish.
FREEMARK ABBEY “Sycamore Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 (Rutherford, Napa Valley, California) $170
Attribute: Ability to Evoke Emotional Response.
The final hallmark of greatness is a wine’s ability to incite emotion. Great wines can send chills down your spine. They never appeal solely to the intellect; great wines have the rare power to make us feel.
This Freemark Abbey from the famous Sycamore Vineyard has a beauty and gracefulness that is stunning. It’s the kind of wine that makes you cherish your experience drinking it. FREEMARK ABBEY is one of the most historic wineries in Napa Valley. It was founded in 1886 by the first female winemaker in California, Josephine Tychson.
Karen MacNeil is an inspirational female keynote speaker for private and corporate events around the world.
