Original subtitles

What-- What is a sommelier?

A sommelier is a position in a restaurant.

Who is responsible for the wine program.

They oversee service to the guests.

That's a very simple way to look at it.

You know, and I'm just keeping people happy.

I'm popping corks, a very simple job.

But that is open to interpretation.

If you don't work in a restaurant,

you're not a sommelier.

That's end of story, period.

Yeah, I don't agree.

So a sommelier is somebody

that takes care of wine, period.

Somms are now educators.

They're judges.

They are suppliers.

They are distributors.

As soon as I stop working the floor,

I'm no longer a sommelier, though.

I feel like a sommelier

when I'm opening a $5 bottle of wine

with a $300 corkscrew.

In today's world, sommelier seems to be very cool word

where you can put on your business card.

I'd like to be alive

when that definition is finally written

to my satisfaction.

Can there be any other business

where there's so much bullshit?

[no audible dialogue]

[man] To take all of the amount of information

in a sommelier's brain and translate it

into a digestible form for a guest is not easy.

It's because there's--

there's so many things you want to say,

but you don't actually want to do that

and scare people off.

You actually want to enjoy--

have them enjoy their meal.

There's so much stuff

to know about wine

and knowing how to taste wine,

let alone there's over 1300 identified grape varieties.

There's also different regions,

names, places, producers.

There's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of wines

that come out every year.

[woman] I think people who are new to wine

somehow get the idea

that they should know all that stuff about wine

before they can enjoy wine,

before they can talk about wine,

and that's really a shame.

When I go to a restaurant and I open up a wine list,

it's one of the best parts of my week

because it's an adventure.

I see a particular geographical location first,

and then I start to think about everything

that went into making that wine--

the history, the soil.

So for the average person,

a wine list is really difficult to read.

They're not-- They're not friendly.

You get a wine list in your hand,

and you look for that wine that you know,

and if it's not there, what do you do?

You know, panic sets in.

Because there's no descriptions.

There's nothing there. There's no text.

It's just a line with a producer,

where it comes from, a vintage, and a price.

The wine list becomes a very interesting exercise

in social psychology

because the sommelier, if there is a sommelier,

is where the people are nervous.

They're where the people will be very sensitive

to the price point.

They have no idea what goes with what.

[man] And that's basically the tricky part

because it's intimidating.

You don't want to look stupid.

If you're insecure and on a table

and open the wine list,

your business partner might perceive that.

Your date might see that. And you want to look good.

So that's kind of where the sommelier steps in,

which is great,

which is why we have our jobs,

so that you have these lists of wines,

and there's somebody there that can talk you through

what you're looking for.

There's a lot of great sommeliers out there,

and what they do-- and the good ones do this--

they make you take a little vacation

while you're sitting in a chair,

and suddenly you're being told

about some guy on the top of a hill

making some crazy wine, doing this amazing job,

that's got, like, really old barrels,

and there's a dog there,

and you're just totally transformed.

There is potential energy in these bottles,

and there are stories to be told.

I don't look at myself

as a cork puller.

I look at myself as a storyteller.

[McClintic] I think there's this great misconception

that winemaking is this glamorous dream job.

You know some place where

the wine is produced that's awful?

No. All wonderful places.

Ugly places have never made nice wines.

It's not because of ugliness and beauty-- and beautiness.

It's about energies

because energies build potential of a place.

And if the energies are good, the place are always harmony and beauty.

[McClintic] Yeah, wine is grown in the most beautiful places in the world.

but the actual work involved--

nothing could be further from the truth.

Wine is about rising to challenges

and overcoming adversity, and it's always just a miracle

that the stuff actually gets made and gets into the bottle.

The things that we're trying to translate

into the glass

are things that are much bigger than any of us--

the rocks, the sun, the wind, the rain.

Those are things that are eternal.

A lot of people making their living making wine

are everyday farmers.

And they spend their life

essentially controlling this plant

that does not want to be controlled.

[Meredith] The grapevine is a true vine,

and if you're not growing it on the trellis

in a commercial vineyard and you just let it go,

it will climb a tree.

Winemaking is relentless.

You know, harvest is going to come

when it's going to come, and you need to be ready for it.

It's not just that you can harvest these tracks of land by yourself.

You have to organize groups of people,

sometimes 20, 30, 40 people,

and they have to be ready on a given day

to come together harvesting these grapes.

And the logistics are mind-numbingly complex,

and everything goes wrong,

and that's a good harvest.

There's over a hundred variables

that translate into what's in the glass in front of you.

Whether it's rain,

frost,

heat spikes,

drought,

wind.

The weather could come in.

You could have a tropical storm

that's coming in two weeks before harvest.

You can have a good season all year,

but when you arrive at a harvest

and the weather changes,

and you harvest under the rain,

the good season... [laughs]

has nothing to say at the end.

[Cauble] You don't want to harvest right after the rain

because the grapes actually swell,

actually absorbing a lot of the water diluting the wines.

[Kruth] The other problem is if the weather changes

after it rains, you get disease pressure, you get mold.

You literally lose 60% of fruit to a fungus.

It's a lot of stress.

Come on, what are you going to do, not harvest the grapes?

You have to make the wine, you know,

I mean, you live on that for an entire year,

and so when the vintage comes, you pick it.

[McClintic] That's a normal vintage.

So there's a lot of unpredictability with a normal vintage.

And then there are vintages that are absolutely disastrous.

[Mattiasson] There's been plenty of wars and hails and stuff,

and they are brutal,

but it's the first time I've heard of a earthquake

screwing you up during harvest.

So at least we have

a good story to tell the grandkids on this one.

It was, like, the nicest weather we've had in I don't know how long.

Great year. We dodged the drought bullet.

We got spring rains,

everything lined up perfectly.

We had an earthquake.

We were woken up at 3:20 in the morning

with the earthquake.

Made sure the family's okay, went outside,

turn off the gas, all the earthquake stuff.

And then try to-- you know, take stock of what was going on.

And the first thing I'm thinking is

I gotta find out what's going on with our barrels.

All the barrels are--

that are normally stacked up--

are all just tossed around in there

like a mad giant

just went in there and had a temper tantrum.

I mean, it was just nuts.

This happened two days ago.

Yeah, so we're still picking up--

I mean, we're literally just--

literally picking up the pieces

because the pieces are all over the ground right now.

Our house came off the foundation,

and chimneys fell down

and all a bunch of stuff busted up.

I mean, it's like...

heavy, definitely heavy.

For some reason, even though our house is totally screwed,

and we probably lost a ton of wine,

it's kind of exciting in a weird, masochistic way,

like, all right,

you know...

[laughs]

You know, mother nature was creative this year.

This was a first.

And so the 2013's always going to carry

a special signifier now,

along with it, that this is the earthquake vintage

and there wasn't as much of it

for the producers that lost wine,

and I think it's going to be a pretty neat little legacy,

this vintage going forward.

Now this vintage is always going to be marked in that way.

I think it's pretty cool.

[McClintic] When you're talking about a vintage,

you're really talking about weather,

and weather, unlike climate, is completely variable.

There are very few vintages

that a winemaker deals with

that are problem free,

maybe like one every 10 years

you get that magical vintage.

The reality about vintages

is it's variable.

Every year is different,

but a great wine, a great vintage,

will age very, very long.

[man] Wine is living, and so wine is always evolving.

Wine is never static.

[McClintic] Wine wants to become vinegar, right?

And if you could catch it in the right place on its arc,

and it's 40 or 50 years deep,

you've got the craziest flavors

that you never tasted before.

Wines with age

are probably the dream the winemaker had

when he or she made it.

And we have the chance to drink in the moment

where that dream is realized.

We got an '88 Muscadet.

This is a bottle that probably costs about $15 now,

for a new retail bottle,

this was probably three or four dollars maybe

when this bottle was bought.

Doesn't have to be expensive. It just has to be the right bottle of wine

stored the right way, opened at the right time.

Some of the most expensive wine in the world

are crazy old bottles because there's just less of them,

and everyone wants to drink them in their peak.

I love old wine.

I mean, I love old Napa cav.

I love old Barolo.

I love old chardonnay.

I mean, I think aged wine

is just a really beautiful thing.

I generally don't like most old wine

because wine has to be stored perfectly.

Some people might think old wine is always good.

That's not correct.

Some wines should be drunk young.

And that's just the reality of it.

But when you get that, like, magical bottle,

that's been stored perfectly for 20 or 30 years

and it was meant to be, you know, it gives you an experience

that a young bottle of wine can't give you.

[McClintic] Wine does not like heat,

and it doesn't like light.

Wine being stored in your back seat,

you know, in the Vegas sun for 20 minutes

will completely ruin a bottle of wine.

There's no better wine

than a wine you have at the Domaine.

For me that's a huge part of the personality of the house,

is what's going on in the cellar.

The cellar is a very important private place

because this is where the wine rests.

This is where the wines will change.

This is where you keep your old bottles of wine,

and that's actually where you spend all of the time.

There's a sense in the cellar

that man takes the process

of growing wine to a point,

and that point involves the moment

when the cork goes in the bottle.

You walk into these cellars,

and they're very deep beneath the earth.

You're-- typically you walk down sometimes three or four or five flights of stairs,

and you come into this very dark space.

We have to duck because the ceiling's a little low,

and you can't really see very well.

And you get to the bottom,

and there's mold everywhere.

The cellar is a whole microclimate,

I will say, with the right temperature,

the right humidity.

[man] The best storage you can think of,

you know, it's always about

55 Fahrenheit, 11 Celsius

during the winter or during the summer.

You have the vapor from the wine

for the bottles,

so this create a special environment.

[Cauble] You smell the cellar.

It almost smells like the personality

of the wine.

It just smells kind of like a wet,

kind of rock, or almost like a bag of mushrooms.

And you may have seen some, you know,

like mushrooms growing on the bottles,

but even on some of the corks.

It has no effect on the quality of the wine,

but it looks pretty amazing.

[Chave] Then you have this fungus growing,

and this is totally alive.

Yeah, the Latin name is Aspergillus niger,

the black cellar mold.

And we take care of this fungus.

It's living from alcohol being in the air,

and it's keeping the air fresh,

and that's something we are very proud of.

It will change according to the time, the year.

It's going to turn white, and then it's going to be all black.

That's a sign of a very good cellar.

They treat this fungus like their little pet.

And literally they pet it.

You can touch it. It's like a black cotton ball.

You know these producers' wines,

and you're like, "Wow, this is why this wine smells like what it does."

It's not just the grapes and the soil

and the yeast that fermented it.

It's actually where it was aged in all of these different funguses.

You have the sense in a classic old cellar

that that winemaker

has taken that bottle

and given it to time.

Every single bottle has a date printed on the label, typically,

and that date tells a story

about what happened in that given year.

There are very few bottles that don't,

and one of the exceptions would probably be champagne.

So with champagne, the weather is so bad there

that it's only very, very special vintages

where the weather was perfect,

that they actually declare a vintage.

They typically blend the wine from multiple vintages together

so that way you have an even expression of champagne every single year.

When you're going to bottle a vintage champagne,

that means it's a story you actually want to tell on its own.

1969, Dom Ruinart. It's a rare bottle.

We have 19 left in the cellar,

so this would be 18 after today,

and there's probably less than 15 in the world, I would say.

Ah.

The color is...

As you can see, it's pretty gold,

which is something you expect for a 45-year-old champagne.

[Dame] White wines, as they age, develop color,

and red wines, as they age, lose color.

So there's the pigmentation.

[McClintic] As it goes, those fruit elements start to fade,

and these beautiful secondary characteristics take over.

Earthy characteristics--

flowers, herbs, spices.

[Dame] They develop that slightly nutty--

the oxidated quality.

There's still a great acidity,

some effervescence, not too strong,

but as you can expect, with such an old champagne.

All of that baby fat sheds away.

[Dame] And it becomes more of a whole than pieces.

It's very intensely perfumed.

It's this snapshot. It's this piece of history,

it's bottled history,

of what happened to those grapes in that year.

You can taste the warmth of the '69 vintage,

which was-- which was actually a very warm vintage,

a lot of sunshine, great harvest,

very healthy grapes.

And it's tend to show, I think,

that dried apricots,

dried pineapple sort of flavors.

It's really the sign of a warm year.

[swishes]

Drinking history.

It's good. Shit.

[tower bell ringing]

Our archives keep a lot of secrets.

Grapes have been here since Roman soldiers

covered Germany in the first century.

The first documents about winemaking

dates back to the year 700.

This is the invoice book

from the year 1492.

They really documented all single details

of what they sold,

when they sold the wine,

and who were the customers.

For me, I think, like, goosebumps are running down my neck

when I hold this little booklet in my hand,

and it is as old as when Columbus discovered America.

History gives wine

heart and soul.

I really didn't like history

until I got interested in wine grapes

and realized

that the history of wine

is the history of Europe.

I don't think sommeliers gravitate towards great wines of the world

because of history.

I think history naturally forges the great wines of the world.

From the beginning of our story

wine has been there.

[Meredith] If we go back thousands and thousands of years,

the very first cultivated grapevines

were just sticks that people stuck in the ground

from vines that they found in the forest.

There's a lot of evidence this happened in Spain

and in the northern coast of Africa

and in other parts of the Mediterranean coast of Europe.

Certainly the Phoenicians

began to explore the Mediterranean,

and we know that they brought wine.

The same thing happened with the Greeks,

we know that the Greeks took grapevines.

We know that the Romans did the same thing.

[Grieco] I want to go back to Rome, man.

I want to go back to the Coliseum.

I want to sit there in the sands.

I want to see a gladiator fight.

I want to eat a corndog and a big flask of goddamn grape juice

from the Romans.

The Romans drank with a vigor

that I would love to have more of in my life.

[Hepp] Caesar told his troops

to drink at least one to 1 1/2 liter per wine a day

because he knew that wine

keeps the troops healthy,

and Caesar doubled the quantity from 1.5 to 3 liters

when his troops needed to fight.

So I think this was the start of doping,

when the Roman soldiers

went into battle

after having a couple of liters of wine.

And the wine they drink

we nowadays call "golden wine."

It's not white. It's not red.

It's a combination of all the grapes

being harvested together.

It has got religious significance.

When Jesus changed water into wine,

it was probably a good start

because there must've been something there.

When they served it at the last supper,

well, you know, must've been a good vintage.

But lest we forget,

when Noah and his ark landed on Mount Ararat

in the Caucasus Mountains

of what is now Turkey,

first thing he did,

the very first thing,

was to plant a vine, grow grapes,

make wine,

and get drunk and pass out naked in his tent.

It's a spiritual beverage.

It's what-- literally spirit in the sense that it's alcoholic.

It's ecstatic in the sense it has the potential,

taken in excess,

to take you out of yourself,

which is a quasi-religious experience.

Is that the reason why it becomes a sacrament,

why it becomes Christ's blood?

Probably.

Really, the roots, in my mind,

of roles of wine we know today

came really from the monks.

[Grieco] They spent all day, every day,

out in the vineyards

working the soil, working the vines,

and, most importantly,

documenting what they did,

so quite a few of the great wine areas of Europe,

we know exactly what they did and when they did it

because of these religious orders.

In France, this happened over centuries,

and it happened at a time

without economic pressure at all.

Ultimately in Europe, history is revered.

It's part and parcel

of what they do every day.

They walk through the streets,

and it's there in front of them.

Most European winemakers now,

many of them have been handed

properties and vineyards and chateaus

from their parents, grandparents,

great grandparents, sometimes 13, 16 generations,

and they have no cost of land.

They have the vineyard.

It's their job to take care of them,

their job to make the wine.

You know, my family has been always in the wine business.

As it happens often,

in Italy or in Barolo,

my father took over his father,

which took over his father, which took over his papa.

We go back almost 200 years.

Well, I'm-- I think-- I'm the seventh generation.

My daughter is now 11th generation.

In Hermitage I'm the 16th generation,

and so we know exactly the wine I'm making in Hermitage,

I'm making from vines that were planted by my father,

my grandfather, my great grandfather,

so we know them so well.

[Parr] There's so much history at Hermitage, you know?

Think, going back in 400 BC,

when the Romans planted vineyards there,

and to think about today, there are still vineyards there.

It's still called Hermitage.

They still have Syrah. It's kind of mind boggling.

The legend of Hermitage goes like this.

There's this knight,

who fought in the Crusades,

and this guy is a war hero.

This knight comes back injured.

And as a reward, the queen of France allows him to recover

and heal his wounds on top of this hill.

And he never leaves.

And the villagers down there

know that he's up there,

this legendary war hero,

and they started calling him the hermit.

And that's how Hermitage got its name.

If you get on this journey of wine,

and you kind of get bitten by the wine bug,

and you fall in love with it,

you end up having epiphanies along the way.

One of those bottles happened to be a 1990 Chave Hermitage.

I didn't know Syrah could taste like that--

smoked meat, pepper,

Provençal herbs,

violets,

blackberry, blueberry,

granite.

I fell in love with Syrah that day,

and it was a bottle of Chave Hermitage.

Jean-Louis Chave-- he is the wine.

He lives on the hill of Hermitage.

This is the hermit.

This is the hermit on Hermitage today.

He is on that hill,

and he is connected to his little plot.

If I had to pick one epiphany wine,

one wine which made me say, "This is it,"

it's 1969 Chave Hermitage.

So I'm gonna open a bottle of Hermitage, 1969.

It's an important wine for me

because I was born in 1968,

which was a catastrophe for wine,

so they haven't even bottled a single bottle of '68,

so my dad saved for me,

a '69 red Hermitage.

Old bottles are very important

because of the memory of the Domaine.

It's like your old books.

Once you drink it, it's gone forever,

but before being drunk, like when you touch a bottle,

it's a reality.

And then you drink the wine,

and then the wines will be gone.

It will be in your memory.

His history goes so far back.

The Chave family has been there so long.

The same family, who's owned it since 1481...

[Chave] This wine was made by my grandfather

when my father started to work with him.

Maybe they were sharing some experience with my dad

that decided on that blend.

It's a piece of history for us.

Yeah, the color is perfect.

Yeah, it's a very good bottle, actually.

This whole philosophy is like people come and go,

but the vineyard is still around,

and wine can age for a very long time, actually.

When we open a bottle, we taste it,

we go back to everything what happened

from now all the way to back then,

the link between generation.

It reminds them of a time and a place...

and work that was done with specific people

in specific times. You know?

And it's like you almost see their life flashing before their eyes

in that one bottle of wine.

[Grieco] How I define greatness in wine

is that great wine--

this applies across the board--

must have a sense of balance,

complexity,

delicacy,

sense of place, a.k.a. terroir,

ability to age, and yumminess.

And I look at those six criteria, and I say, "Holy shit.

"Riesling exceeds all expectations in these six areas.

Why can't other people see this?"

Somms have a love affair with Riesling

because it's crisp,

it's high acid, it's mineral,

and when you taste as much wine as sommeliers taste,

you end up craving wines that don't fatigue your palate.

You crave wines that refresh your palate.

The biggest misconception,

probably, with the public,

is that somehow Riesling is going to be sweet,

and, yes, there are a ton of delicious sweet examples,

but there's also some amazing, bone-dry Riesling

that is not sweet at all,

and when that gets served to someone

who I know doesn't like Riesling,

they go, "Wow, this is Riesling?"

I'm like, "Yeah, it's Riesling."

Most of the great Rieslings of the world

are grown in slate soils, particularly in Germany,

but there's some incredible examples

coming from Austria

and Alsace as well.

If you look at where Riesling is grown,

and then you think about World War II

and World War I,

and how is Germany gonna occupy France,

it's literally right through that narrow corridor

that is Riesling Mecca.

The two last wars,

World War II and World War I, of course,

were quite devastating.

Most of the vineyards have been destroyed.

Most of the winemakers died,

so nobody was left to do the hard work in the steep vineyards.

[Hepp] There were big parties going on

after World War II,

from soldiers also,

so they drank and they enjoyed

all these famous vintages.

I mean, somebody comes invading your country,

and they drink up most of your inventory you can't hide.

Don't see a lot of '37s and '38s around, do you?

'39s?

The winery is now more than 270 years in family,

but that's not our original building.

We lost it in the Second World War,

by bombs.

They've adapted in that way.

I mean, they're used to it.

Look at Champagne. I mean, the whole World War I,

the trench war-- the most horrific

blood-to-nose battle to battle in history,

and at the end of the war was what?

Trenches, rats, and dead bodies. Right?

And look where Champagne is today.

Planted out with the most expensive wines in the world,

and the quality's never been better.

Our cellars were raided during the Second World War,

so we don't have anything prior to mid-40s.

The German came and they took over, actually, this house.

My great grandfather and grandfather

were smart to hide this cellar.

That's why we still have these old bottles of wine.

If you've been to some of these wineries,

you see all that history unfold.

You can't help but have a visual association

with that grape and that place

and what people went through.

I think it makes the great Riesling,

and it makes the region that much more enriching.

I love these places in the world for food or wine

where cultures clash,

and nothing pushes evolution more than conflict

and struggle.

And it forces the people to evolve,

the food to evolve, the wine to evolve.

And to me it's where a lot of the best wine and food is made.

Now, this is also a painful process, without a doubt.

The greatest winemakers

still went through a little rough patch

and then came out.

Alsace, France is so fascinating.

Whenever there was a war in Europe,

because of the location of Alsace,

we never missed one.

We never missed a war.

Alsace once belonged to Germany,

and there was wine growing in Alsace in those days.

Now Alsace belongs to France,

and they still grow wine on the same vineyards.

To explain the Alsace history,

a good example would be the three last generations.

My grandfather was born Prussian,

and he studied German.

He didn't speak any French.

My father was born just before the Second War.

And he studied half French,

and then the war came, and he studied German.

Results-- he don't speak German, he don't speak French.

He speaks Alsatian language.

My generation-- I studied French and I speak fluently French,

so three generations, three languages.

People in Alsace have the structure

of the German culture,

and they also have the romance of France.

[Parr] Clos Sainte Hune Riesling, I think,

maybe the most-- one of the most compelling wines

on this planet.

Clos Sainte Hune is certainly revered

as one of the great examples of Riesling

from one of the great Riesling growing areas

on the planet Earth.

[Parr] These wines can age 50 plus years, no problem.

[Dame] It's one of the greatest single vineyards in the world.

It produces a wine that's almost indescribable.

[Parr] Bergamot, lemon,

all these kind of flavors you get when they're young.

In its youth, it's like a slap across the face

from your mother when she's pissed off

that you came home late at night when she told you

to be home at 10:00,

but she still forgives you and loves you the next day,

and ultimately Clos Sainte Hune will do that with you also.

And then as they get older, you get that orangesuckle bergamot tea,

this very kind of honey and crushed rocks.

It's got history behind it.

It's got an unbelievable family behind it

that can go back, I think, 12, 13 generations.

Our father took over in 1952,

just after World War II,

and we know how difficult was that period.

He basically had to sell

all what he could produce,

so he only put a few bottles on the side, very, very few.

So this '62--

[chuckles] I must confess is quite rare.

And the more I handle it,

the more I have-- how you call it?

Goosebumps or chicken bumps, whatever that is. You know?

It's-- It's all what about-- this business is about,

sharing great wine

and sharing the passion for wine.

So, Julien, why don't you come here

and have a little sip with me.

So here is Julien, 13th generation.

1962 was rather exceptional for Alsace,

and I guess, like the English would say,

the proof is in the pudding.

What do you think?

Still very fresh.

Very fresh, complex minerally,

intense, shiny.

It has a great acidity,

the aftertaste.

Well, you have to put this wine in your memory.

You have to register everything.

Every little detail of each vintage

has to be registered in your mind

in order for you to eventually have it blind one day

and tell us, "Oh, my God, I remember.

This is 1962."

Huh?

We know where we come from.

I know where we are going to go.

I mean, of course I'm going to die,

hopefully earlier than you,

so we are just in transition.

We are just making sure

that what we have today,

as far as our vineyards are concerned

and the shape of the winery, if I may say,

and how the winery is performing will be donated

to our 13th generation,

in the best possible shape,

so to speak.

- Cheers. - Cheers.

Skelt. In Alsace we say, "Skelt."

Skelt. Alsatian dialect.

[Puckette] In France they do things through meticulous study,

very little experimentation,

and trying to understand

what it is that they have around them.

In the U.S. you have people over here going,

"Well, shit, can I grow wine here?"

"I don't know."

"Well, Frank, let's give it a try."

American ingenuity

is constantly playing with things.

Much of the traditional European paradigm

is based on the opposite.

We brought grapes in from Europe.

We're not even using our own grapes.

We thought one was, Zinfandel,

and then it turns out it's Croatian.

It's not even ours.

I think an American has an advantage

over European because of--

his spirit is much freer.

There's a lot of freedom for American winemakers,

wine growers,

to have an experiment with different grape varieties.

It's a good thing.

It's a young wine region.

I think in maybe a hundred years

we'll figure it out.

[McClintic] We are kids in a candy store.

We can plant any grape we want in any place.

We have no limitations.

[Puckette] Washington-- it's a crazy region

because there's all these grapes growing everywhere,

and there's-- like it has no feature,

like, "Oh, there's good red wine here.

Oh, there's good Riesling too."

Washington grows a wide range,

probably three dozen different grape varieties.

And what's amazing to us

is how we have challenged

this classic idea

that you have to grow Cabernet in Bordeaux

and Riesling in Germany

and pinot noir in Burgundy,

and you can't mix these things.

What's really great about what's happening

right now in the landscape in California

is there's so much experimentation.

We work with Trousseau Gris, Pinot Gris.

Frappato,

Lacrima di Morro,

Blaufränkisch,

Pinot Noir,

Syrah, Grenache.

Mourvèdre,

Cabernet Sauvignon.

And we have this climate

that we can do anything we want.

I'm really into Riesling. I'll fancy Riesling.

They grow Riesling here, it'd be badass.

Don't forget that most American wine businesses

are first generation,

so American winemakers,

by necessity,

have to think more about the market.

The reality is cost of living here--

it's a different animal.

You know? Like, you want to live in California

where 90% of the nation's wine comes from?

You know? Like, you gotta make some cash.

There's so much bottom-line stuff going on,

and, you know, I'm perfectly happy

with really scraping by

and roasting squirrels under bridges

as long as I can make really great wine.

Wine tradition is, in California,

is an oxymoron, in my opinion.

We don't want tradition.

That's not what this place is about.

It's not us.

What a lot of people don't understand

is California wine, after the gold rush, was booming.

We have, like, 1200 wineries now.

We had 800 wineries in the late 1800s.

It's not like we had wars fought on our own turf.

People in Alsace are hiding.

You know? They're hiding,

you know, dodging bullets.

They're trying not to die.

We didn't have these problems.

We had a booming wine industry.

We did have this one thing, however,

and the worst part of it

is we did it to ourselves.

[Lemon] Prohibition really was a break.

It was an enormous break in the way--

the whole culture of American wine.

Whatever we were trying to do before Prohibition,

it just wiped that slate clean,

and we're only going now on a hundred years

of winemaking.

It's just tragic.

Yeah, it did screw up the wine industry,

but it also stopped a whole lot of things

that could potentially still be in play

that would've been really bad.

There was no minimum alcohol.

There was no regulation.

And so when Prohibition happened,

we were, like-- everybody stopped.

We needed a little sobriety check.

We're talking about grapes that are the most popular grapes

in the United States.

We're talking about French grapes--

Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot.

These are all wines from France, grapes from France.

If Prohibition had not happened in the United States,

I think we would be much more focused

on Italian varieties.

I suspect that things like Barbera

and maybe even Nebbiolo

or Sangiovese.

Spain also might have had a greater influence.

It's often forgotten

that some of the whites in California

that were dominant pre-Prohibition were Spanish wines.

[Mattiasson] It's one of the reasons, I think, styles have changed

so much the last 56 years.

Every decade style changes because we're still figuring out

what the hell we are as an industry.

[McClintic] Then you've got this guy,

Robert Mondavi,

who comes along in the '60s,

and he's like, "I've got an idea.

"I'm going to open up a winery,

"and not only a winery,

"like a huge, ambitious winery,

"like-- like I want to take down the French.

"I want to make the best wine in the world

here in California at a time--"

It's like-- It's like, imagine the economy goes down in, like, 2008,

and you're like, "I wanna open up a car manufacturer in Detroit."

That's what Robert Mondavi did with wine.

The guy's got brass balls, man.

[Cauble] If anybody thinks about American wine,

the first thing they think about

is Napa Valley, without a doubt.

I think if Robert Mondavi didn't exist,

California wine wouldn't exist.

[woman] At that time, you know, in 1960s,

the valley was still kind of--

kind of held back, you know.

There was-- I think there was 17,000 acres of grapes.

Today there are 40,000.

Much of the valley was for sale.

It was still sort of recuperating

from phylloxera, from Depression, from the war and all that.

And many people didn't believe it,

but he went forward, built a new winery,

the first new winery since Prohibition.

So this particular bottle is the first vintage

created by the Robert Mondavi Winery,

which opened in 1966.

At one point he was small.

He was boutique. He was family owned. He was cool.

And I still think he is

because that part is, like, history.

You know? And that--

So even if you buy big wines, like, what's the story?

Why do you buy them?

Why do they become successful?

There was some guts there.

[White] This was the model that Mondavi set--

even with this first vintage is what's still in use today.

You could almost feel, like, anxiety probably in the bottle,

but also, like, hope.

I think it's amazing.

Wow, this is--

this is actually an incredible bottle.

It's very, very, very aromatic,

very perfumed.

The fruits are red and high toned,

like red apple skin

or like a dried cherry.

And then there's this beautiful

sort of cigar ash

but it's very, very vibrant

and very, very alive.

For me, I think ageability

is a necessary tenet to greatness in wine.

And this is undeniably one of the great wines.

[Dame] In your first wine,

you produce a wine of that quality

I mean, there's more than luck in that one.

I wanted to produce wine

to compete with the finest wines of the world.

Here's the Europeans. Think about it from their perspective.

You've been doing it this way from the beginning,

the times the Romans planned the damn places, right?

And all of a sudden along comes Robert Mondavi.

I went throughout the world

to find out what my competition was.

That's something which, you know, I think

we've all learned from Robert Mondavi.

He used to always go around the world

and taste other wines

and always have a bottle of Mondavi with him,

and he used to, like, always compare his wines

to other great wines.

Just an incredible voice for Napa Valley.

I think he understood that if you made a name for Napa Valley,

and how great this place is in the world, everyone rises.

So it wasn't about any particular winery.

He wanted to actually speak how beautiful this place was.

In this fine wine business,

it's not going to take five years, not ten.

It's going to take a lifetime.

You have to be willing to take a gamble.

You have to put your whole heart and soul

into what you are doing.

But that's all. It's very simple.

To figure out what a wine should cost in the marketplace

is probably the hardest thing.

There really isn't one thing

that solely determines the cost of the wine.

I run the other way when it comes to determining those sorts of things.

Um, the gut.

There is some reason why wines are expensive.

There's some reason why wines are cheap.

Wine that's inexpensive?

It is inexpensive

in a large part because the costs

of producing it were much lower.

It's because the grapes cost less to purchase.

A lot of things are mechanized

both in the vineyard and in the winery.

[McClintic] You know, you have to mechanize everything at that point.

You have to or you're not going to have

a viable economic business model.

[Meredith] And so it ends up being

a very uniform, predictable product,

and that's what it is.

It's a product.

It's a commodity product where you can buy it

for two, three, four dollars a bottle.

With wines that are 20 to 50 dollars,

presumably many of them are handcrafted,

and there's a lot of work,

and a lot of effort went into it.

I think there's this inherent guilt factor

with a lot of people

to spend over $20 a bottle on a wine.

I know my parents have it.

My parents are the best,

but there's a lot of people, a lot of family,

a lot of friends I know,

they have this guilt factor

associated with a bottle of wine

that's over $20, let's say.

More often than not, those wines are handcrafted,

painstakingly handcrafted,

and there's a lot of hands that touch that wine,

and so get the guilt out of your system

because there are a lot of people who have a job

because of you.

Well, the profession's the reason.

First you've got the guy who's got to prepare the soil,

the guy who's got to study the soil.

The guy who's gotta say, "Your soil's good for Cabernet,"

the people that farm it every day.

Then you go to the harvesters,

the people that pick the grapes.

Then it comes into the winery.

You have to have somebody who's there at the sorting table

to make sure that nothing--

what they call M.O.G., material other than grapes,

is getting into the wine.

You have the-- the guardians

who usher the grapes and the juice

into the winemaking process.

The guy who made the barrel.

If you go into a cooperage,

there are about 15 different roles

just in the cooperage alone--

the guy who's in charge of making sure

that the wood is seasoned properly.

Then the guy who's in charge of making sure

that the barrels are sanded,

then the guy who is there to make sure

that the drums are all there in the barrel is sound and tight

right down to the guy who runs the hose in it

to make sure it's tested well.

If it gets to the winery, okay.

Now you have to maintain those barrels,

and that takes a whole team of people.

And then who has to know when it's time

for the wine to come out of the barrel,

when it's time to go into the bottle.

Who's designed the label? Who's designed the bottle?

Who's going to make sure that the corks are sound

and safe and gonna be secure?

What about the capsules? Who's going to put it in the boxes?

Who's going to be involved in driving it to the port?

Taking that ship across the ocean?

And who's going to be involved in getting the container to the warehouse?

And you've got three tiers of sales element involved.

What about the guy--

the sommelier who's got to take inventory?

So up until the time the cork is pulled,

you've got, I would say,

hundreds of hands that have been involved

in this process.

[Puckette] The cost of labor? Some things cost money.

But then there's this other thing

that I'm putting my heart and soul

into this thing.

I'm making an art, a form of art.

How much is that worth? How much is art worth?

A lot of wine is a luxury product,

so when you get to that real top of the pyramid,

you're paying for how many other people

want to spend that huge amount of money

for that wine?

I'll give you an example. DRC made wine--

has made wine for many, many years.

They've always used new oak.

They've had the same vineyards,

but the price of the wine

is always higher.

Every year they increase-- almost every year--

and people buy it.

That's-- the wine is amazing. Wine is great.

Every year they produce at a very, very high level.

So that doesn't mean that, you know,

perhaps the cost of good is going up.

It's just demand and supply.

This is considered, pound for pound,

the most expensive wine in the world.

It's not uncommon for a bottle of DRC,

depending on which vineyard it is,

depending on the vintage,

to open up, current release,

five to ten thousand dollars a bottle.

It's just crazy stuff.

I think if you look at each individual grape,

depending on where you are, it could be up to $5 a grape

if you break it down to the grape. It's crazy.

Aubert de Villaine, since 1974,

has been the proprietor

of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

Um, he's the legend, man.

If you get a winery visit at DRC,

it's like the Holy Grail.

So to spend time in a cellar with that man

is like, for any sommelier or wine person

anywhere in the world that's-- that's kind of the pinnacle.

Something in the cosmos

has to align or you really gotta know somebody

to get a winery appointment there.

They don't do winery appointments.

I've never been there.

Most of my friends have not been there.

And they're some of the foremost experts

on Burgundy in the country.

Voilà. Oui.

We shall taste-- We shall open the bottle here

if you don't mind.

[McClintic] I think the mark of a legendary winery

is it doesn't matter what vintage it is,

it's going to be great,

and certainly you can say that about DRC.

In off vintages, bad vintages,

these wines trade for thousands of dollars.

It's the real deal.

You're not going to find a better expression of Pinot Noir

in the world.

This is a--

It's a bottle of Echezeaux, 2004.

And '04 is one of the vintages

where things were difficult during the season,

but we had a very good, beautiful end of season

with north wind, sun, clear skies.

It's a vintage I personally like very much.

[swishing wine]

You have this special texture,

this special way to touch your palate

that a wine of a difficult year

has a texture that is a little more sharp,

a little more acid.

This bouquet of a forest,

you know, for a unique forest.

None of yet the rose petal,

but I know it will come in what, 10, 20 years,

and it will make a delicious wine.

Uh, you know what?

I think what many people don't understand,

it's that wine is made to drink

and to-- if you are thirsty, to quench your thirst.

Many people think of wine only as an object of culture.

And it is an object of culture,

but it is-- it is also food.

It's food. It's an element.

And it's important to take it that way too.

We always like to kid around and say

that wood is the spouse of wine.

And so if you-- just as in real-life marriage,

you should choose your wife very, very carefully

'cause otherwise you're only going to pay for it in the end

in terms of quality of life.

And in this case it's quality of wine.

Oak is a vessel. You can either ferment wine in the vessel,

and/or you can age it in the vessel.

It has been the basis for a vessel to transport wine

for God knows, like, I think the Etruscans started using the barrel,

so we can say thousands of years we've used oak.

It's only in the last 25 years we've begun to say,

"I don't want oaky wine.

[McClintic] There's neutral oak,

which imparts no flavor,

and then there's new oak,

which does impart flavor.

You start with the wine.

You make it, you ferment it.

and then you put it into oak barrels.

All these additional flavors

are added to the wines.

[McClintic] French oak, you're typically going to get vanilla,

cloves, cinnamon, baking spices,

that add to the wine.

With American oak

you get dill, coconut,

even a higher extract of vanilla.

I'm not that interested in wine that tastes of vanilla.

Vanilla is not a natural taste of a grape.

It's something added.

So, let's say, instead of making wine,

let's make a drink, a cocktail,

something like that.

If you can taste the oak,

you've kind of, you know,

missed the fruit.

You can think of oak like salt.

You've had a dish that's too salty,

that's all you taste, is salt,

and so the question becomes, how much oak is too much oak?

Fifteen years ago customers liked one with more body,

more rich, more oaky, more extreme.

Now, even if you use oak,

you say, "Oh, no, I don't use oak."

Now there's certain situations

where oak is called for like salt is called for.

Right?

Certain Cabernets without oak would be so austere

and intensely harsh on your palate and grippy

that you need oak to buffer that.

And someone's opinion of what's too much and what's too little

depends on how much they like oak. You know?

What's true is you can cover up a lot of mistakes in the vineyard

and cover a lot of mistakes in the cellar with oak,

and so a lot of people abuse it in that way and say, "You know what?

We screwed up a little bit," or "These grapes are shit,

"so why don't we just slap a big vanilla bomb on it

and call it a day?"

Wine is made here, in the vineyard,

not in the cellar.

In the cellar you have to work for preserving

what the nature gave you in the vineyard.

And the wood is good way

to maintain a wine in good conditions

during the aging process.

If you look at the great oak debate,

I mean, it's politics. It's Republicans as Democrats.

They are party lines drawn

with oak and non-oak,

and it's always gonna be like that.

If you're going to look anywhere in the world,

and you want a place to see an example of this,

just look at Barolo.

[Cauble] So what we have here is a 1985 Barolo

from Elio Altare.

He is one of the most, I would say,

influential modern producers of Barolo,

and this is one of the first vintages

he actually made with using new French oak.

Barolo is a place in Northern Italy,

and the grape is Nebbiolo.

It's interesting that Barolo

was made for hundreds of years the same way,

and the aging would happen in these big botti,

these big barrels

that the grand, grand grandpas had built.

The wines were very austere,

very serious, very tannic, very dry, high acidity.

You would have to wait years before you could approach them.

This is a really rare bottle.

I think there's less than six or seven bottles

at the estates, pretty incredible story of what happened.

Some crazy winemakers,

and I include my dad Elio,

he was one of the first to start approaching the winemaking

with different techniques.

They started moving from, you know,

big botti, the big vats,

to French oak.

It changed tradition.

It kind of caused a very big problem.

Wasn't necessarily a war with, you know, with weapons,

but it was a war with words for sure.

It smells incredibly elegant,

really, really soft, incredibly floral.

It really has a lot of Burgundian traits to it.

A big crisis hit Barolo.

We're talking about mid '70s, late '70s.

Most of the young people would leave the countryside

to work in the Fiat factories that make cars in Torino

because being a farmer

was like really the last job on earth.

Just wine wasn't a business back then.

That's when my dad in '76

took his car, went to Burgundy for the first time

and just starting, you know,

our curiosity visiting wineries,

and then he got in touch with some winemakers

who worked in different wineries.

Those guys were famous making amazing wines.

They were very expensive. They were all rich and superstars.

Here they were starving. They were poor.

So my dad came home with all these crazy ideas,

went to his dad and said,

"Dad, why don't we try this?"

And the answer was, "No way, you can't try."

[chuckles] You can't not think about the relationship

between Elio and his dad here.

The move towards using new French oak on this wine

caused a massive fissure between him and his father,

which never really repaired itself.

[Silvia Altare] My grandpa would've told you,

"Oh, buy a bottle of Barolo but drink it in 25 years."

Thank you. Maybe I want to drink it tomorrow.

[Cauble] When you put a wine like Barolo in new oak,

it's going to soften the tannins.

It's going to make it easier to drink

and more approachable when it's young.

[Silvia Altare] My dad started buying barrels,

but to make space in the cellar for barrels,

he had to buy a chainsaw as well

to cut the big botti in pieces

because there was no space,

so he was cutting in pieces

these botti that one of his ancestors had built,

you know, those botti were a hundred years old.

Grandpa would not accept that,

so that was the big-- big break between them.

You know, in the 1970s and the 1980s

people hated each other over it.

It was either you were on the left or the right.

It was, like, you were using new oak?

Your neighbors wouldn't talk to you.

I mean, it's-- it's a pretty big deal.

Once he put new oak on his wine,

the wines sold,

and they're more expensive.

Wine's very soft,

but it does have this kind of orange peel, fennel,

and kind of tar component,

which is classic in Nebbiolo.

The wine's delicious.

[Silvia Altare] Twenty-five years ago

it was a huge fight.

Today some of my best friends

are son or daughters of traditionalists.

I talk to them. I don't have a problem with that.

Well, my dad wouldn't talk to them.

Cancel that. [laughs]

[Dame] Wine is constantly changing.

It's living. It's breathing.

And as a result

how can you have an appreciation

for a single great variety

when it's made in so many different styles

and so many different places

and so many different vintages

and all the things that go into

whether you like Pinot Noir,

Cabernet, or Chardonnay

or Sauvignon Blanc.

That's a great question.

I think the hardest thing

for me to stomach about the whole game

is the whole idea of points.

I'll meet people that,

"Oh, you know, I only collect wines above 90 points."

"From who? Uh, you know, which demigod do you follow?"

Taste is so different.

You can't all look at the same piece of art

and all want to put it in your house.

How we look at points-- this is a super polarizing topic.

Essentially points are to tell you what to think

if you don't have an opinion yourself.

Well, the rating system was first created

to help consumers.

It really was.

Because before that

the people who wrote about wine

were actually hired by the wine marketers

to write about wines.

So suddenly you had these independent people coming out

with these mailing lists,

and one of those guys was Robert Parker in Wine Advocate.

And he started putting points on the system.

Personally, I hate points.

I revere and respect Robert Parker.

I revere and respect the Wine Spectator

because what they do

is get more people to drink wine.

That's ultimately what I want.

At the end of the day it's a really lazy way to describe a wine.

It attempts to put two numbers next to something

that has been produced by so many passionate people.

I don't even remember the last time I thought about points.

I mean, it's not relevant to sommeliers

to think about, like, a hundred points.

I think that most of us would be like, "Ew,

if a sales rep starts quoting points..."

[Parr] I mean, if you buy a bottle of current vintage Barolo,

which got a 99 points,

and you go home and open it,

there will be no enjoyment from it.

You know, it's-- yeah, it got a high score,

and you open it.

Yeah, if you waited 10 years,

absolutely, it'll be better,

but it doesn't say "99 points, wait for 10 years."

If I gave one of these critics

25 wines

that they had given scores to,

what do you think the odds are

giving the same score back to back?

I don't know.

Answer that yourself.

Points in Wine Spectator and Robert Parker

were a huge part of my beginning.

I didn't know the world of wine,

and I didn't know a lot of people,

but I could read a publication,

and what I got out of Spectator

and what I got out of Robert Parker,

these critics, were "Here are wines,

great wines of the world that you should try."

This wine got a hundred points.

I'm like, "Okay, what's this wine all about?"

From a sales perspective,

it offers confidence to people,

perhaps, to create short lists of wines

and that it benchmarks us against other great wines

of the world.

[Cauble] Max Schubert was the winemaker

at Penfolds starting late 1940s,

and his creation of Grange

totally changed the way the world looks at Australia.

What Max Schubert wanted to do

was make a world-class Bordeaux style wine

in Australia, and he went to Bordeaux.

He studied the great domaines of Bordeaux,

and he figured out exactly what they did,

studied their template to a T.

Only problem was there wasn't a lot of Cabernet in Australia,

so he adjusted that template with the Syrah grape.

You have to think about at the time

the world was basically drinking fortified wine down in Australia.

That was the fashion of the day.

So to make not only a dry table wine

but to make a wine that would stand the test of time

30, 40, 50 years later

was revolutionary thinking for his day.

Think of the blend of Cabernet with Syrah or with Shiraz.

It's a quintessential Australian blend,

and Bin 60A out of the Vintage 1962

is deemed to be the crème de la crème

of that offer ever.

[man] Now, this one is incredibly venerated...

the rarity of this wine.

I mean, 5,000 bottles of this wine

were made in 1962,

and I'd probably say less than a dozen

exist to this day.

It has received many global accolades.

Harvey Steiman, Editor of Wine Spectator,

gave it a hundred points.

Considered the greatest Australian wine ever made.

It's been given perfect scores by many people.

The Bin 60A came in at number 7

of the greatest wines ever made on this planet.

Most critics, most wine people,

would say that this is your bucket list wine.

You have to try this before you die.

This bottle hasn't moved from the winery

since it was bottled in 1964.

The cork has thankfully done its job.

Absolute heaven.

Yeah, the wine's in fantastic shape.

Very, very sundried black plum and blackberry

and almost stewed lamb kind of characteristic.

[Gago] Now, I say of wines that get perfect scores in their youth,

really they're still on probation.

You know, is it a hundred going that way,

or a hundred going that way? You wouldn't know.

But when a wine that's 30, 40, 50, 60 years of age

gets a hundred points,

that wine can't hide behind alcohol,

extract, or oak.

It's basically naked in front of you.

It's unplanned.

Regardless of what you feel about point scores,

if you are a high-end winery

and you have a big case production

and you get over 95 points on your wine,

you're not going to be unhappy about that.

Do point scores matter? Point scores may matter for some.

We like our point scores.

We take our point scores with stride.

We appreciate them. We're not going to give them back,

but that's not the first thing we tout at all.

But if we're asked,

then I'll say, "Yeah, that vintage of Grange got 100 points.

"Yeah, that vintage of Grange got 99.

Yeah, that vintage of Bin 60A got 100 points."

Of course I'll say it if they ask,

but I'll say it,

and then I'll move back into the vineyards,

they style, the history, the why.

That's what's most important.

[Grieco] Forget the money that you paid for the bottle,

forget who the hell made it, and even for a moment

forget the history and all the shit that I love so much.

It goes with food.

The opportunity for a sommelier to pair wine with food--

it's indisputable that it can heighten

and change an experience.

A lot of food and wine pairing is bullshit.

A lot of food and wine pairing is over-thought.

To say food and wine pairing is bullshit?

Okay. I mean, that's like saying peanut butter and jelly is bullshit.

There's a reason why that works.

Right? A reason why we like that.

If you just had peanut butter, you'd do this...

[smacking roof of mouth] Right?

Or that jelly has acidity in it. It cuts it.

[slurps]

[swishes]

So my favorite food and wine pairings are simple.

Muscadet and oysters.

A glass of Chianti and a piece of lamb.

Sausage and some Gewürztraminer.

It's almost cliché, but a lot of people heard it,

but what grows together, goes together.

Plants and food that grows in an area

and grapes that grow in the area,

the wine and the food tends to match up

almost every time.

People in France will say

Sauternes and foie gras go really well together.

You would think that the savoriness of the foie gras

and the sweetness of the Sauternes might be a conflict,

but actually that's the richness.

They just both kind of come together

and really make the experience much more harmonious.

To me a food and wine pairing is like a relationship

between two human beings.

It's like a marriage,

hopefully, with no divorce.

Traditionally Brussels sprouts, asparagus, cauliflower,

all of those green, leafy vegetables are really hard to pair.

[McClintic] Rosé can pair really, really well

with awkward vegetables. How many times you had a salad on the table,

you're like, "Dude, my wine tastes terrible"?

"I got vinaigrette in my mouth

and this wine tastes sour. It's awful."

If you are stuck in a wine pairing

and don't know what to do,

don't forget champagne.

Champagne is an enormous food friendly style of wine.

You can even go through the entire meal with that.

There's something to be said for trial and error--

example, Syrah and Indian food.

You know, usually with spicy food,

the last thing you want is a spicy wine.

You just think it would be overkill,

but for whatever reason, Syrah and Indian food is incredible.

Yeah, you've got some good ones out there--

Spam and Gewürztraminer.

[Puckette] Red bean chili and sparkling wine.

[man] Peanut butter ice cream and Beaujolais.

Popcorn and chardonnay is pretty cool.

Chardonnay doesn't pair well

with a lot of things because of oak.

Oak tends to conflict with pairing,

but when you have buttery things,

popcorn, it works.

Save the milk.

Like a decent Marsala

and chocolate chip cookies,

like nut-free chocolate chip cookies,

and then when you add the Marsala,

it tastes like there's nuts in your cookies now.

The consumer still believes

that red wine doesn't go with fish.

Simple as that seems,

like some of the best pairings I've had lately

have been light red wines with fish, so...

Oh, I'm hungry.

Every dish has an opening for wine.

Hot dog with normal toppings,

so we're talking about bun,

we're talking about relish,

we're talking about ketchup,

maybe a little bit of mustard, maybe raw onion.

I would say probably the most fun one here

might be a Beaujolais.

You don't have a wine that is too scholarly

or too pontificating.

And it's a hot dog, for God sake.

You know? We all love hot dogs,

and Beaujolais is not fussy either,

so they should be together.

[Parr] The most underrated region in the world

is Beaujolais.

I'd probably have to say Beaujolais.

Beaujolais, I think,

delivers the best quality and drinking experience

for red wine, dollar for dollar.

Some of the most pleasurable wines

that I come across.

Beaujolais would be at the top of the list.

There are two types of wines.

There are intellectual wines,

and there are just delicious wines.

This wine is certainly intellectual.

It's got crazy finesse.

There's a lot going on in this wine.

It's super complex.

It just also happens to be insanely delicious.

I can't keep my hands off it.

It's like catnip for sommeliers.

Sommelier can be the best and the worst.

They are very important

if they make the bridge

between the producer

and the drinker.

Producer is Jean-Louis Dutraive.

It's a hundred percent Gamay.

I don't always have the exact same taste as my guests,

and oftentimes that's a lot of the case

with a lot of sommeliers, is that their taste

is totally different from the tastes of the guest.

The inside joke in the wine production business now

is that everybody should be producing

Trousseau Gris in California

because the somms think it's so great.

I think the things that people hate about sommeliers

is that we're so opinionated

about one particular style of wine

or how wine should be.

He's got so much knowledge,

and his tastes have changed remarkably.

Since the moment he started his journey into the wine business...

till the moment that he's a sommelier.

- [camera shutters clicking] - [no audible dialogue]

You can bet that the guy's going home

and drinking some crazy oxidized natural wine.

This happens to be a crazy natural wine producer.

He uses barely any sulfur in the winemaking process,

hardly extracts at all. He doesn't do anything.

He lets it sit in the tank, slightly submerged.

This crazy new red variety made by a guy in eggs

that are lined with wood

that are buried in the forest out back,

and only the girls can touch 'em kind of a thing.

And he's able to achieve this

with complete minimal intervention.

It's absolutely insane how he does this.

But these beautiful floral and spicy herbaceous notes...

You know so much.

What?

On the other side,

you've got this person who picks something

that you've never heard of

from a region that you don't even know exists,

that tastes like what you really want,

and it exposes you to an entire new world

that you never knew existed.

I mean, you taste a lot of wine,

and this wine has crazy X factor,

so we're talking about the southern part of Burgundy,

just below Pinot Noir Mecca,

and you're going to pay $30 a bottle

for a bottle like this

whereas Burgundy

can run you into triple digits.

And if you had this with just about anything,

even seafood, you want red wine with fish,

this is your ultimate play right here.

Over time any wine drinker-- it's not just the sommeliers--

people who drink wine a lot,

you want to drink the truth of what

is coming from the earth.

And that means tasting the dirt of where it comes from.

And at the end of the day most wines that are fruit forward,

you can't taste what's behind that.

It's like there's all this makeup

in front of seeing the truth

of what's in the glass.

[Dame] I don't think they can help themselves.

I don't believe sommeliers can help themselves

from the constant thirst for knowledge,

and we do love to share it.

And I think that's-- that's the part of the equation you left out.

We love to learn, and we love to share it.

Sometimes a little bit too much.

[McClintic] If you're going to talk about sommeliers,

you've got to talk about the old-school guys.

And if you're going to talk about the old-school guys,

you've got to talk about Fred Dame.

Fred Dame is perhaps the most important sommelier

in-- which means anything in America.

[Cauble] I mean, I think wine service in America

would not be anywhere close to where it is without Fred.

So the idea of a sommelier--

think of the white gloves.

You think of, you know, the tastevin buttoned up,

and you picture a butler.

And then there's Fred,

who's either in a wine dinner

at some major market,

or he's hunting in the middle of nowhere.

Have you ever seen the movie Star Wars?

I kind of think of Fred Dame

as the character of Yoda.

Why are we sitting in the middle of a duck pond?

'Cause it's beautiful.

And you talk about sommeliers

in the world of wine and the vintages.

Great.

But look at the experience.

It's about the experience.

[chuckles] Fred Dame has probably opened more great wine

for people than anyone.

[McClintic] You have a guy who's been on the floor that long.

Fred has got more stories in his back pocket

than you could possibly imagine.

I used to work at a restaurant called the Sardine Factory,

Monterey, California.

And one of the owners is Ted Balestreri.

The other's Bert Cutino.

We're all good friends with Leon Panetta,

who was the head of the CIA at the time.

Of course the hunt for Bin Laden was on.

And when I was the cellar master there,

we bought a bottle of 1870 Lafite.

[Parr] 1870 Lafite is priceless,

among the rarest wines on the planet,

if not the rarest wine.

[Dame] So it's been sitting in the cellar,

and every year they have a New Year's Eve party,

and Leon comes to the party.

So he's always asking about the 1870 Lafite.

So they're sitting there one night.

It's probably the end of the night.

They've drunk a lot of wine, had a good time,

and Ted goes, "Tell you what, Leon.

"You get Osama bin Laden,

I'll open that bottle for you."

And everybody had a good laugh.

And a couple months go by,

and his wife Silvia calls Ted and goes,

"You ought to be watching the 6:00 news

and tell Fred to get his corkscrew out."

So we had a dinner. It was very special.

I didn't know where it was going to be till the last minute

because it involved a lot of people

way up in the security world,

but we opened that 1870 Lafite.

But how do you serve 50 people

out of a single bottle of wine?

So I got a pipette,

and I got CIA shot glasses.

with the logo on them.

The Secret Service guys are like,

"You know, guys, I only got one.

"If I drop this, we're screwed.

Can you give me a couple feet here?"

So we decanted it out, I pipetted it,

and we all tried 1870 Lafite.

Just intense and powerful,

sweet fruit,

and 1870 was one of the most celebrated Bordeauxs of all time.

[Dame] If you just drunk the wine by itself,

you sat there and had tears in your eyes,

but when you consider

what bin Laden did

and all the things that occurred,

it was spectacular.

You can take the most expensive bottle of wine you have

and-- in your collection--

get a great connoisseur,

a great sommelier,

and two guys off the street,

set it down and pull that cork,

and everybody's enjoying it

in a little different way.

That's the secret of it.

The complexity and the layers

are there for those who want it,

but they're not essential to the enjoyment

of wine.

Wine is very much like life.

You know, life is these series of fleeting moments,

and then it's done,

and-- and that's-- you know,

sometimes you just gotta open the bottle of wine and drink it.

You've got this bottle of wine.

It's in a restaurant. It's been ordered.

It's going to come to a table.

And with it in that 25.4 ounces of liquid

are all these stories.

The people, the place, the soil,

when it was harvested.

How much work you put into it,

what you went through, how much you made,

how much it cost, none of that matters.

It all comes down to that one bottle

that's in front of two people.

[Parr] One of the most important things about wine

is where it ends up

and who opens it and when they open it,

who do they open it with.

And the experience they have,

you know, the sex they have, the fight they have,

the dinner they have, the memory they have.

And it should really create joy in your life.

Because your perception is what makes it special,

and people forget that.

Just imagine how many of those bottles are just going out there

for all these people to just, you know, have their way with.

Once you pop a cork

and you put it in that glass,

only one thing matters--

is it delicious?