Ep. 2520 From Critic to Sommelier: Mastering Italian Wine with VIA Benchmark Wines | wine2wine Vinitaly Business Forum

I think there's a really important place, first of all, for tasting wines blind, and I've been doing that for many, many years. And I think that that is the really the first thing that you need to do is establish on its own, is this wine a good wine? Because as a writer, I'm not gonna write about it unless I really like the wine and I think it's worth exploring. But once I have found a wine that I like, that's when I wanna find out what is the narrative behind that wine. Who are the people behind this wine? And that to me is really what Italy excels at. Welcome to the wine to wine in Italy business forum twenty twenty five Chicago edition, where global wine professionals share insights, strategies, and inspiration from this year's conference. Let's dive into today's session and explore the ideas shaping the future of wine. First of all, I would like to introduce myself. I'm Alessio Planeta. I'm a wine producer from South Of Italy and a big fan of the Vinitali Academy because we followed them since the beginning. Thanks to the energy of Stevie's team, the role of this academy. As Italian, when I talk think about Italian wine, we always like to say how important and beautiful is the diversity of Italian wines. 400 varieties. I don't know how many appellation. Every every month we have a new appellation. A lot of complexity. That is beautiful when you are in a wine dinner, but then you need to train people. You need to people that start to know, recognize, remember, drive through the complexity of Italian wine. That is the richness of our wine, but it also needs some people that train and then talk about this around the world. This is why when the project of the International Academy start, we were very happy because, in the wine world, we was waiting for recognition of an Italian, association that is not Italian because it's really international, but they are focused and specialized about Italian wines. And now they became ambassadors everywhere in the world, and, we know how important it is for Italian wine, the international markets. So, of course, Italian wine have to speak English, have to speak other language, have to go around the world. So this is why we are very happy to support them as Consoci Doxychilia, as, our association that is called ISVA. And as in person in Planeta, whenever we can, we host these people because they travel around Italy and they see every area of Italy. So this is why, today I'm happy to sit here and shut up. I will not talk because I'm here with two very big experts, Stephanie, that, we know each other since a lot of time. She was in Sicily a few days ago. So I travel, you know, Italy, any corner of Sicily. If I've seen, two times in Sicily in the last, months, you give an idea how many hours I will know. And, Torrance, same, they are, super expert of of Italian wine, and, they will, drive you to this, blind testing that, of course, I don't know which which other wines. I will try to discover the wine with you. Thanks very much, and, Mir. Thank you. Thank you, Valastair. Thank you. Okay. So the goal of this session is to try to understand how context affects the way that you perceive and enjoy wine or whether it does. And so we're gonna ask you to taste the wines three times. First, we're gonna try to taste it in a blind scenario where you have no idea what the wines are and you are just evaluating it without any context. Is this a good wine? Is it balanced? And within that, Torrance is gonna talk about the Via Academy method for tasting the wines blind and identifying the wines blind because we've both been through this whole thing. So that's the first time. And then we're gonna go through each wine, and we're gonna reveal them. And we're gonna talk about, from my perspective as a wine writer, what is the narrative that I'm looking at for wines like this, and why would I be writing about a wine like this? And then Torrance is gonna talk about his perspective as a sommelier and how he would communicate about this wine to a restaurant guest. And we're gonna ask you then to retaste these wines as you're listening to this and see if it changes at all your perception and your perspective and maybe increases your enjoyment of the wine or not. We'll find out. So to start with, start tasting the wines. I know some of you don't have all of them, but give it a start. And Torrance is gonna talk a little bit about the Via method and kind of the technical blind tasting side of wine. Thank you, Stephanie. Yes. So my name is Torrance O'Hare. I'm a the, wine expert as well as a wine director here in Chicago. Blind tasting is one of my favorite topics to teach. I have spent a lot of time working with people both as far as public class facing classes and professional consultation in blind tasting training. And I think the Via Method does open up some additional skills that are valuable in general. Blind tasting, when I teach it most critically, is not just a parlor trick. You know, everyone loves to sort of present it as this idea of, you know, oh, well, if you guess correctly, you get to be king of the nerds for the day because you were right. Realistically, the skill of blind tasting and why it's so critical in the understanding of wine overall is it allows you to really hone in on the concepts that differentiate that wine from other in its class, from other in its style. And being able to communicate and sort of isolate those differences as something that you can utilize, especially from the restaurant perspective, in restaurant programs, in food pairings, in sales opportunities. Communication of wine is so critical because realistically, at the risk of being a little reductivist, aside from making the actual wine and drinking the wine, every stage of that wine's life is an act act of communication. You're effectively simply trying to get that wine to be understood by somebody, whether it's a wholesale buyer, whether it's a customer in a store. Every act of this is just a way to communicate what's going on in that wine. So blind tasting is a critical exercise in allowing you to focus in on what makes that wine different. When I teach blind tasting, I often go back to sort of rule number one, especially when it comes to anything professional. You're never allowed to say that a white wine tastes like apple or a red wine tastes like cherry. Because all white wines taste like apple and all red wines taste like cherry. The lesson is that by focusing on the differences rather than those similarities you can actually find something useful in those comparisons. Because again, when you're reading that wine list and going down the red wine descriptors and wine one has notes of cherry and chocolate and wine two has notes of spiced cherry and dark chocolate and wine three has notes of tart cherry and cocoa. At the end of the day, like why would you pick one over the other? They're all the same thing. So the exercise of blind tasting not only is not just about sort of developing your skills of poetics. It's about being able to effectively find something more useful and interesting to talk about. And in doing so you're finding better means to use that wine as a sales opportunity as a pairing opportunity simply as a wine that you or a guest might enjoy better. One of my favorite quotes from a university professor of mine is if the only way you can communicate an idea is through writing a term paper, then you don't understand that idea very well. The idea of being able to pick up a multitude of skills in the same field, So it's not just being able to do you know one thing. It's not just being able to so to speak write the term paper on the wine. It's being able to distill that wine into something that yes, you can analyze it, but you can also in two lines table side explain to somebody what this is and why they would like it in a way that's actually useful and interesting. So the via method is really useful to that. I've studied multiple methods