The "Wow Factor" of Wine Tastings is Place
One of the most popular executive wine tastings I conduct is a blind tasting of top Bordeaux wines and top Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons.
The idea is not to choose a “winner,” since all of the wines are great (and expensive).
Rather, it’s to experience what I’ll call the “wow of place.” Where grapes were grown—the somewhereness of the resulting wine—is part of what makes wine so intriguing.
Quite simply, wine is a megaphone for a given place in a way that no other product is. Few of us care where the carrots we ate for dinner came from because we can’t taste “place” in carrots. But Bordeaux versus Napa Valley? Now there’s a difference to be tasted! And it can be mindblowing.
The fact that wine reveals its place with such specificity was one of the reasons it became the drink of ancient Greek intellectuals (who were endlessly curious about what the flavor of a given wine from a given place would reveal.) It also made wine the beverage of Judeo-Christian religion. Monks and religious scholars were known to scoop up a handful of dirt to literally “taste the place,” looking for those plots of ground that, year after year, miraculously produced great wine and therefore were ultimately considered sacred. In Burgundy, as one example, the monks’ revelations about their painstaking tasting experiences ultimately led to the classifications of Grand Cru, Premier Cru and Village Wine.
In the tastings I give, we’re focused a lot more (probably way more than the monks) on having a good time. But place—the heartbeat of why a wine tastes the way it does—is a part of the intrigue. It’s one of wine’s stunning wow factors.
