The Cult Wine Challenge

Aloha, I'm Jeremy Nickel and we're here to do a blind tasting of my peers in Oakville. Real excited to taste the 2019 vintage and to see if we're doing things properly at the Vineyard House. Aloha guys, today we are going to be doing our Cult Cabernet Sauvignon tasting. This is going to be a beautiful, prestigious event in which we have everyone with the finest palettes to see where Jeremy's wine takes place. As we're going to be trying all of these wines, it's a blind tasting. So it's going to be very important to see exactly where these palettes fall in line to see who's number one. Welcome to Maui, my name is Charlie Plummer, I'm the Global Director of Sales at the Vineyard House Estate. It's amazing for us in the industry, we get to try such amazing wines from around the globe, but not always in this type of setting. And today we're going to be blind tasting six of what we consider Cult Cabernet Sauvignon from the Oakville area in Napa Valley. The wines that are included in there are the ones that I respect and admire and have the most prestige in history and highest price points in Napa Valley or the world, so cheers everybody. One of the reasons we decided to do this is to really showcase the distinction of our wines as it sits to our peers in Western Oakville. The distinction really is the Holter Valley and the type of soil, the climate, the aspect, the slope, all of that comes into play today as our guests blind taste through the wines and really try to distinguish what they consider high quality and for the price points and the value of it. Thank you. Thank you first of all for taking time out of your day, some of you traveling from the different islands to come in, we're really appreciative of you taking a moment to really come and explore what we consider some of the top Cabernet Sauvignons, not just in Napa Valley, not just in Oakville, but probably around the world. So one of the reasons that we do these blind tastings is so that we can connect with other people in the industry. We've invited the most highly regarded accomplished sommeliers in Hawaii, or when we do it in other areas, that's our threshold is people who've been in the industry longest and have the most experience tasting amazing wines and being able to judge them. So it's a great opportunity to connect with people and to get to know one another and share our passion about wine and hospitality. Go through the wines, evaluate them, it's probably not your first time doing this, I'm sure everybody's had a chance to do it, if not we'll go through the tasting mat in a But before I do that, I do want to introduce Asha and Jeremy Nickel and just have them say a few words and welcome you into their home. Well, we're so excited to have you all here. We've been really looking forward to doing a cult tasting here at our house. And with this blind element, this is my first time doing something like this. So I'm really looking forward to it. And I feel so blessed that you're all here. So thank you. Hi, everybody. I'm Jeremy. I'm Asha's husband. It just started raining. So that's pretty cool. Again, thank you guys for being here for this. You know, it's a great opportunity to get to know each other. You know, I'm really excited about spending the rest of my life in Hawaii with my wife and raising our kids. So I'm hoping this is the first day of many years to come. You know, this is just something that I really enjoy doing with other passionate people in the industry. It also is a good gauge to see if we're on the right track as far as our winemaking goes. I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you and spending time with you guys in your homes. And you've been to ours. And this is going to be great. We're going to do this for about 20 minutes. And then we don't want to do this all day. So after we do the tasting, you're done. We'll give the sheets to Charlie, then we'll take a 15 minute interlude while they start writing down things. We'll reconvene and then go over and talk about the wines and have an amazing lunch by Chef Jojo. Here's some information about the wines that we'll have during lunch. Underneath that packet is the scoring sheet. And with your packet, you have a pen. Jeremy mentioned we'll run this for about 20 minutes. We do ask that you don't talk to your neighbors and try to compare notes simply because we do want your strict and unbiased and objective opinion on each one of the wines. Take some time going through them. I do know the order of the wine, so I'm not scoring, but I'm just going to sit in and taste anyway. So I'm not part of the judging panel today. But nobody else in this room except myself knows the orders of these wines. But what we're looking for from a scoring opportunity here is the maximum you can score a wine in any given category would be five points. So a total a wine that scores 25 points across the board would be considered a perfect wine. I've gone through. There's no flaws. On the lines, there shouldn't be any flaws or any issues with it. So your initial notes based on complexity and notes of the primary and tertiary notes on the wines, then certainly as you get into the palate portion of it, the body, the taste and the finish all be rated separately in this format. It's self-explanatory, but we are going to go wine one through six going left to right on your paper. You'll see them numbered in order. Again, if you have any questions, I'm going to set the timer. If there's any questions, please just raise your hand and I'll come and talk to you. For today, I'll be featuring a lot of our state beautiful vegetables and harvest for our salad and our first course, we're going to have a Parmesan Reggiano crisp for our next course. We're also going to be featuring Kona Kanpachi from our neighbor island. This beautiful sashimi grade fish is going to be sauteed to achieve a nice crispy skin. Risotto is going to be that base and we're going to be featuring the last harvest of our beautiful squash. As we come to our conclusion for our flavors, we wanted to feature two cabernets. So I did a cheese course of nice firm cheese, which is going to be gruyere and a nice soft cheese, which is going to be brie. Both of those together with some crostini and our state honey and also fresh fruit. I hope everybody enjoys. One of the things I love about Jeremy is that he is not afraid to take risks and to do do things that other people wouldn't do. Taking this blind tasting as an example, it's not just about this experience we get tasting wine, but it's about bringing people together and sharing our stories. And so doing things like this to experience wines of greatness and to put you in a place that that others wouldn't dare to go. So I went through and tabulated this. I had two people double checking my math on this as well, too. You can reference back to your things. If for some reason you feel that just take a quick look at your line. If you feel like your numbers are and I didn't put them in the right order, please let me know. I'll make the quick change. But I think I'm pretty confident I went through and double check with everybody on their on their rankings. So with an average price of just around eleven hundred dollars on this wine, this wine, this sixth place wine is the first flight by Screaming Eagle. Coming in fifth place, wine number two with an average score of seventeen point seven five. This wine retails. The price just went up to fifteen hundred dollars. This is Harlan. Harlan Estate was wine number two, wine number two, which came in fifth place. He's excited. I can see he's excited. All right. So with an average score of eighteen point four to come in fourth place is wine number six or number six with an average price of about a thousand dollars. This one is the promontory. All right. Now we're in the top three third place with an average score of eighteen point five, which is pretty good because the second place wine was an eighteen point five four. It was really close between those two. I made my math really hard. This is the Schrader Tocalan two thousand nineteen Schrader Tocalan. And this has a price of about five hundred dollars. And second place with an average score of eighteen point five. Now, look at this. So you've got eighteen five, eighteen four, eighteen four, two. I mean, one, two, one, one, two, three and four are all really close. I mean, they're they're really marginal, right? Eighteen point five, four and eighteen point five. That's crazy. All right. So wine number four with an average price of seven hundred dollars. So Futo, which means which means and you guys did this. Wine number five, Jeremy. You want to guess what this one, Jeremy? With an average price with average price of three hundred dollars. That's where we landed. So congratulations, Jeremy. Yeah, that's you're going to hug me, man. That's a that's a pretty good win. Congratulations. Every wine has their beauty. Every wine has their their distinction and characteristics. And all of us, most of us all chose different first place or second place wines, which I think is the the fun part about this. Right. Everybody in here has a really great palate. Everybody's professional. We've done these several times. But it always surprises yourself when you choose something like, wow, that's what that was. Oh, man. And you go back and revisit it. So you have wines in front of you. There's a little bit in the decanters. If you're out of the specific wine, please let me know. I'm happy to to retaste you on it. But I can't thank you enough for one, your time, for people that travel. Thank you for being here. It's a long distance and more importantly, just your enthusiasm and objectivity of doing this, because that's the most important part. It has to be completely objective. I scored it, but it is completely objective. So there's no rigging involved. You guys did the press, the score. You guys agreed that it was right. So I just want to say thank you again. And Jeremy, thanks for hosting everybody here.