The Wine Trip Research Playbook: A Sommelier's Guide to curating the perfect wine getaway

Wine Access Unfiltered

The host shares her comprehensive research playbook for planning wine-centric trips, specifically focusing on an upcoming trip to Sicily. Sh

Key takeaways

• Use AI to aggregate restaurant and hotel screenshots from Instagram/TikTok into organized, actionable lists.
• Find budget-friendly hotels by researching neighborhoods near luxury landmarks like Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton.

Main topics

• Wine trip research strategies
• Burgundy wine tasting

Notable quotes

AI has really changed the amounts of time I save on the packing front.

Conclusion

A practical guide for travelers looking to optimize their itineraries

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Hello and welcome to the Wine Access Unfiltered podcast. You know, it was just a little over a year ago that my then future mother-in-law came to me and said, hey, I'm going to Sicily. Do you have any recommendations on how I should pack, what I should do? This is like my first time to Europe in 20 years. And I said, as a matter of fact, I do. And so I shared all of my tips and tricks with her. And then I made a whole podcast episode. out of it. It released back in June. I'll link it below. And since then, a lot has happened. I've gone on a lot more trips. And as it turns out, this weekend, I'm heading to Sicily myself. I've actually never been there and I'm very excited. It's been on my list for a long time. I'm sure it's been on a lot of your lists as well, since I'm sure many of you like me are huge White Lotus fans. So I'm very excited to be exploring the region. But it got me thinking after that episode that it might be interesting for me to, one, sort of revisit what some of those tips and tricks are, update them for you guys, because I've traveled. somewhere in the vicinity of another 100,000 miles or so in the last year, which is insane and maybe for another conversation. But also it occurred to me that what might be also valuable is kind of giving you a little insight into what my research process is like. Because over the last few weeks, as I've prepped for this particular trip, I've done a lot of research, even though this is a trip, this is a press trip, it's Speaker 2 (1:39) a Speaker 1 (1:39) media trip that... had a lot of planning done. There's not a lot of opportunity. There's still a lot that I'm doing on my own to make sure that I'm really set up for this. So I think even if you're in a situation where someone is curating it for you, if you're going on a cruise, like whatever it may be, there's still a lot that you can do on your own to make sure that you're set up. So we're going to talk about my research for both. planned and sort of unplanned trips, how I approach selecting hotels, restaurants, and of course, wineries. And then, like I said, we're going to circle back to some of the tips and tricks that I've gained along the way, because I do have some updates on that front. And I will tell you that AI has really changed the game, I know, for a lot of us. But Certainly for me on the packing front, I have some great, great tips in that department on how AI has completely changed how I pack and how I leverage that to make it more of a time saver. So stay tuned for that later in the episode. Right now, what I want to do is two things. Number one, I obviously want to talk about the wine that we're all hopefully drinking. Our podcast, Wine Club Wine, today is not from Sicily. We are in the Burr months. So we're in September, October, November. So I thought it was appropriate. To drink our Burgundy. So this is the Maison Chantilly Bourgogne Rouge. It does conveniently say Pinot Noir on the front of it, which as we've talked about many times before, when we're talking about red Burgundy, it very often does not actually say Pinot Noir on the label. You're just sort of expected to know that. So I love that they've sort of taken. maybe some feedback from us here in the States and said, you know, maybe we should actually just put Pinot Noir on the label. So there it is. So if you're wondering why that is, I think that was just like a helpful thing that they're doing for this particular bottle. But I think this is a great way if you are sort of unfamiliar with Burgundy as a wine, both red or white, this is a great entry point. I think there's a lot of real ease to this wine. And for me, as we're sitting here in the Burr months, I think it's a wine that just makes you feel like fall. The weather is starting to change. We are starting to get a little cozier. The sweaters are starting to come out. I'm personally very excited. And this is a perfect wine for that. So let's talk a little bit about Burgundy because it's going to, I'm going to touch on this in a second because I'm bringing back just for this episode, the what's going on in the wine world segment. So we're going to talk about harvest and Burgundy has certainly had their fair share. of not so wonderful harvests in the past few years. 2024 was kind of looked at as a very challenging vintage and certainly some places got hit harder than others. In this case, we're actually talking about a wine that... is coming from a lot of different places, meaning that they're sourcing fruit from kind of all over Burgundy. That's noted by this name on here, this Bourgogne Pinot Noir. When you see that and you see that it's not coming from a specific appellation, they're usually sourcing from several different vineyards or vineyard sites to complete this wine. So that's what you have here, even though this is 100 % Pinot Noir. Interestingly, I think this is just kind of a fun fact. So the winery itself is in Bousseron, which is actually an appellation more known for the other grape variety that you hardly ever hear about in Burgundy, but it does exist. And that is Aligote. So A-L-I-G-O-T-E. We've talked about the fact that when you see red Burgundy or white Burgundy, if it's white, it's a Chardonnay. If it's red, it's a Pinot Noir. There is an exception to that rule, and that is Aligote. It is a white grape. It's a lovely white grape, but it's very famous in the region of Muzeran where this winery actually sits. I thought that was kind of a fun fact. We are talking about vines that are about 35 years old in clay and limestone soil. So even when you're talking about sort of more entry-level Burgundy like we're talking about here, we're still talking about vine age that is very, very significant. And that, to me... is one of the things that makes Burgundy so distinct from the rest of the world. I mean, they really, really value Vineage here in a way that maybe somewhere like the Russian River does not. And I will say, if you stick your nose in the glass... It's so incredibly generous with the fruit, but there's so much savory in here. And it actually kind of smells like fall. This is part of why I wanted to drink this for this episode is I felt like it's a great packing wine. I don't know if you guys drink wine when you pack and get ready for trips, but sometimes I just need like a little something to take the hedge off, both when I'm planning, when I'm packing. And this is a great wine for that because it doesn't really require much. If you do want something though. this is girl dinner. This is your cheese board, your charcuterie, your Costco rotisserie chicken. It's just like a very easy drinkable wine. On the nose, like I said, lots of savory things in here, which is very, very normal for Burgundy. And for Pinot Noir coming from cooler climates like Burgundy, we're talking about a grape that can really lean into savory things like mushroom, a little bit more of that earthy kind of thing going on, something that feels even a little salty at times. That very much is Burgundy at its core. And I said it was sort of a great entry-level wine, both in price and in flavor, because I think it's a wine that most people can kind of get on board with and find things that they like about it when you taste it. Speaker 1 (7:13) You'll notice all that savory stuff is really coming back to the front of the mouth. And what's nice is that there's a lot of very deep flavor, but it doesn't feel heavy. It's the kind of wine that you can just kind of sit with and drink. And that's the beauty of Burgundy. Burgundy is rarely ever going to be a heavy wine. Pinot Noir is a thin-skinned grape. It wants to make a light wine. And Burgundy really appreciates and values the grape itself. They want that terroir to show through. So they're not really doing much. in the winemaking process to mask that, meaning they're not doing heavy extractions. They're not doing big oak treatments on the wine. They might be doing a little whole cluster fermentation to give you a little bit more of that spice box that exists within some of those stems and seeds. But for the most part, they're really letting the terroir and the grape do its thing. And that's what's translating into the glass right now. So I hope you're all enjoying that. I will also just note that this was a week-long cold soap native yeast and aging split between seasoned oak and steel. So you get a little bit of winemaking in there, but not a whole lot. Super, super interesting. Okay, so let's talk about what is happening in the wine world. My goodness, it's been so long since I've done this segment. I feel like maybe I need a little refresher course myself, but there has been. a lot of news as of late and I just returned home from Champagne which you've been following me on Instagram you know that I was there with Moet and Shandon. It was a harvest experience or what was supposed to be a harvest experience except that I showed up in the first few days of September to find that there were no grapes. left on the vine. Everything had been harvested. Champagne was wildly early for their harvest this year. And that was the big news coming out of Champagne harvest. Normally, we're used to seeing a grape harvest in Champagne late August, early September, you know, kind of taking its time. That was not the case this year. It was the earliest harvest on record for the region of Champagne. So we saw Picking as early as August 10th to 15th, previous record was August 17th. And then in addition to that, the other big takeaway is they were down about 40 % in grape yields. So unfortunately, they had a bout of bad frost earlier this spring. That coupled with the fact that they had these really intense heat spikes throughout the summer, that, you know, I think kind of going back to... why it's so important to go to these wine regions to visit when you hear these things and you see it firsthand, it all starts to make sense. So I'll kind of back up and tell you, they have these bad frosts during the spring, which is when the vines start to set their fruit. So if you've grown anything before, you know, those early days are really, really important. And in those early months in the spring, when the vines come out of their dormancy and they start to produce flowers and then grapes, or at least buds, that's a really, really vital time for that. So when frost hits a region like that, it can really damage the fruit. And that's what happened. So frost came and hit, damaged the fruit. They lost about, I don't know, 20, 30 % at that point, which really already lessened the yields that they were anticipating getting. And then you head into the summer months. And in the summer months, you have less berries already. But then you have this heavy, heavy amount of sunlight, amount of heat, and that's going to concentrate the berries, right? The berries are on the vine. They're getting ripe. They're increasing in their sugar. And what happens when they... sugar increases, the amount of juice that's in there, the amount of water that's in there starts to decrease, which means you have very concentrated berries, less juice, and as a result, a lot lower yields than you might normally expect. So you're talking about a problem or I guess a yield issue that's resulting from two kind of separate places, one with that bud break and the frost that hit it, and then two... with that corresponding heat spell that they experience in the summertime. And so these are really important things to know. And when I was there, it was really interesting talking to the winemakers because the winemakers there were very forthcoming about what they experienced this year. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Champagne really is known for having difficult, inconsistent harvests. You see that with their non-vintage champagne, with kind of every aspect of how champagne is made. Most of the champagne we see out in the wild is not vintage, meaning there is no date like there is here on this Burgundy, right? This Burgundy says from 2024. That means all of the grapes here in this bottle are from the 2024 vintage. When we have champagne... A lot of those champagnes don't have that number. It has no number at all. And we know those to be non-vintage champagnes, which means that they're blending across vintages. And this is done specifically to accommodate for the fact that they have inconsistencies from vintage to vintage. So they blend across and that keeps a sort of consistent way of doing things. Now, every now and then, of course, you get a beautiful vintage, a wonderful vintage that a winemaker... uh, wants to actually use and, uh, use alone. And so that's where you get vintage champagnes from, but I did find it really interesting. Um, they were like, yeah. This is just kind of like how it is. A lot of mention of climate change and, you know, the last 10 years of just really kind of erratic weather patterns. So lots of talk about that and lots of talk about how they're changing in terms of farming, in terms of planting and looking at the future to make accommodations and allowances. And speaking of accommodations and allowances, you might have heard another