Speaker1: Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike, let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is we continue our conversation with Michael Juergens and his wine adventure in the Himalayan hills of Bhutan. When all is said and done, what kind of wine are you looking to produce?
We want to make wines that are going to be poured at the world's finest restaurant and cost $150 bucks and up. So $150 and above. I was reading where you said that you're not going to make plonk? I had to look up the term plonk. Would you consider that a derogatory term? No. I don't think plonk is necessarily derogatory. It's more that it's know kind of inexpensive wine. I think it's pretty much a British and Australian term. But you know, if you were going to drink, you know, have a nice glass of plonk, you know, I just want an easy drink in, you know, $4 glass of red as opposed to something that's super complex. It requires a lot of attention. So in your quest to become a Master of Wine, there are only four hundred and nineteen worldwide in 30 different countries. Has anybody else done what you've done and gone to a country and started a wine industry from scratch? No, not to my knowledge. No matter of fact, I don't think that there are very many countries left on the planet where you could conceivably start a wine industry from scratch. Most places already have been around having for hundreds or thousands of years. One of the things that really appealed to me about this project, you know, the Himalayas is not convenient to Los Angeles, which is where I live, but the opportunity to really be given this palate, this beautiful landscape, this wonderful terroir with nothing and say here, decide what this should look like. You know, should we do ice wine? Should we do big reds? Should we do sparkling? Should we do hybrids? You know, what do you think is going to be the perfect wines for Bhutan that will express a sense of place, and that's a really cool opportunity to get to do. I don't. Not too many people have gotten to do that.
