The Art of Wine Appreciation with ONE HOPE's Jake Pt. 2

Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly.

Metaphorically, you're on the top of the hill, right? Of all the Napa wineries, you guys are on top.

We're definitely amongst.

So you graduated from Berkeley with a degree in what in business. You're located in Napa. Metaphorically, you're on the top of the hill, right? Of all the Napa wineries, you guys are on top.

We're definitely amongst the greatest wine brands and families that have ever graced this country. We really admire a lot of brands around us. And yeah, we're in the Rutherford region. It's.

And we're amongst some of the most iconic brands and some great terroir. But we're also right at the middle of the 30 mile corridor that is the Napa Valley.

Starting at the very south in Carneros and stretching to the very north in Calistoga and Rutherford is this tiny little Ada that sits right in the middle of it. And a number of very famous brands started in Rutherford, including Camus and you know, we've got Cake Bread right across the street.

The famous Katokalan Vineyard is just to our south. We're at the top of the food chain as far as locations goes and we've built out a really special and unique community and property there.

You've got 95 plus point ratings and over 100 metals. Can you highlight a few of them that you're really proud of?

Yeah, there's a lot I would like to highlight. Some of them are in barrel right now. I think we have a few wines that are as close to perfect wine as we've done in our history.

I just tasted through our 22s that are in early release, you know, and usually you'll tell people to hold onto them for 12, 24 months at least before they open them, but these things are drinking amazing out of the bottle. And just seeing, you know, I've had vintages, our 2014 through 2018 estate vintages off our Rutherford property are amazing.

Those are under the brand Estate 8 and they're only accessible by allocation because we just don't make enough of them, you know, our Oakville Cabernet and our Russian River Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are crowd favorites at the winery. Our Vintner Red blend that's gotten a 96 point rating as well as our Vintner Cab that's got a 93 point rating.

And those are affordable, you know, 25 to $30 price point wines as well as far as white wines. And one of our most Special wines is our Fume Blanc that we also do off of our property with our Sauvignon Blanc grapes.

And pay homage to the neighbors to the south of us. The Robert Mondavi brand and winery and his family story. Those are some of my favorite.

I rattled off a bunch, but Russian River Pinot, Russian Richard, our Oakville Cabernets, the state Cabernets we do off the property. And that Fume Blanc, along with our Vintner collection Cabernet and red blend that are easy to get.

And I recommend buying, you know, a six pack or a case of those to hold in the cellar at any time or in your cupboard if you don't have a cellar.

You know, when you're growing up on this. Did you. Have you developed your palate? Because you said you've tasted some of these wines and you say this is it, thumbs up.

Have you developed that taste or were you just born with it, where you can taste good from bad?

My palate's good. I'm advanced in wine. I have a really good nose for wine, better than my tasting palate.

And your nose is about, I think, arguably as important as your tongue and the tasting wine. Smelling wine informs your taste a lot.

There's different parts of the wine tasting experience from how well you taste sugar and fruit on the tip of your tongue, to tannin in your cheeks, to acidity in your throat and alcohol in your chest.

But what develops the most and as you get more advanced is being able to kind of feel the wine and the texture of the wine and the weight of the wine on the mid palate. I would say the mid palate is the part that's progressed the most since the early years for me.

And so, yeah, I think I'm a good person to tell you if a wine's extraordinary, really good, good enough or not, I won't drink it. And those are kind of my buckets, you know, And I think being able to identify if that's a wine that should go to market.

So you mentioned price there. Just out of curiosity, how much of that plays into the quote, unquote, taste of the wine?

A lot of people, when they pay a lot for a wine, the perceived value, they have a good chance of them perceiving it to be really good wine too.

There's also the potential that it doesn't deliver for what how much it was, you know, and so I think a 40 to $75 price point affordable luxury wine to luxury gets a little bit more room. And a really good one of those stands out and people will say it's excellent. And they're really. What they're saying is it's excellent for the price.

So I think a lot of our brains go to relative value and like, how good is it? And then how good is it relative to the price?

At the same time, if you're in the wine industry, you know that a big portion of that is tied to it being a great wine and there being demand for it. But a big portion of it's tied to the supply and demand curve. How much of it is there to sell?

And if it's really small production, you can afford to put it at a really high price and you don't have to sell it. Turn it over really fast. And there's not a lot of it. So supply and demand has a lot to do with it.

Packaging and brand equity, building that over time. That's the magic that also has a lot to do with it and then taste and how it's presented.

You know, when you drink a wine out of a perfect glass in a beautiful tasting room surrounded by vines, it does tend to taste better, just like wine tends to taste better when you're with people you like.

In the vineyard where the sunlight shines.
We're pouring hope with every vine A glass of joy so, so true Raising love in all we do Every bottle shared Tonight brings the world a little light One hope Wine wine dream we're changing lives with every we rise and thrive Pouring love sharing the dream Together we're stronger than it seems One whole wine One heart a cause divine Making the world better One glass at a.

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

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