James Suckling – Great Wines of the World, NY

I remember my first significant wine tasting event through conflicted lenses. On the whole, having the chance to taste hundreds of potentially world-class wines for free is an absolute gift. That being said, ask anyone in this business for any length of time and I promise you they will say tastings can be the most annoying part of the job. So it is a Yin and Yang of sorts… and that leads me to the theme of my takeaway from this year’s James Suckling Great Wines of the World Tasting, NYC… it is not always what you know, it is who you know.

In the coming weeks, we will try to bring you the highlights on offer ‘when they might be available’, but let’s not get too antsy, a majority of what was on offer was either back-vintage, or simply unavailable. This is not a criticism of the event or of the wineries, the point was to offer industry the chance to taste the best of the best.

We ran into Natalie Price again, after the pleasure of hosting her in a video tasting. This time she was pouring the absolute best that Kistler offers, 2019 Kistler Vineyard Chardonnay (in MAG) and the 2022 Cuvee Natalie Pinot Noir. They were both sublime.

I had the pleasure of meeting the winemaker of a new venture on Atlas Peak, Parable. The A18 Chardonnay 2022 and the Beckstoffer Bourn vineyard Cabernet 2022 are both worth seeking out… and I wish you the best of luck, I am hoping for the same.

While talking to the winemaker for Luca, Keely dropped what should have been a needle-scratch: “This Chardonnay tastes as good as the El Enemigo Chardonnay.” Which led to “thank you!!, that’s my cousin!” …amazing.

We chatted with both the owner and winemaker of Merus (Napa) about their upcoming vintages, while tasting the 2021 and 2017 (if you can get your hands on the 2017, you should). They are super-geeked about the 2022 and 2023 vintages and wildly optimistic about the 2024.

I had my first fan-boy moment in quite some time, about an hour in. I knew Dalla Valle had a table, it was circled in pen because they were pouring Maya… MAYA! I have been to Premiere Napa Valley three times and never tasted Maya. Back when there were only 7 100pt wines, Maya was one of them. So, yeah. We rolled up to the table and not only was Maya Dalla Valle pouring her namesake wine… Naoko Dalla Valle was also pouring. It is hard to oversell how important Naoko was to not only kicking the door open to the wine business for women, but for summiting the absolute peak of cult wines.

I probably tasted 180 wines, 42 made my list of ‘wow’, 16 made my list of ‘WOW’. There was a mess of other winery owners/winemakers, too many to list, but the real takeaway was that it wasn’t the wines that I knew… it was the people that I knew or met.

It was a pleasure to reconnect with owners/winemakers I have met over the years, and it was an even greater pleasure to meet new ones.