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Top Wine Vacations
Janice Kleinschmidt October 23, 2008
Great vines, good times
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Merchant, president and CEO of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, was on a morning walk at Château Pichon-Longueville, a second-growth grand cru property in Bordeaux, getting a personal tour of the vineyards and learning about the self-propagating vines and chemical pheromones used to attract male butterflies for natural pest control. It was just one highlight of a Bordeaux Prestige tour in May that included VIP visits to all five first-growth grand cru chateaux (Lafite-Rothschild, Margaux, Latour, Haut-Brion, and Mouton Rothschild). “I went to the Kilimanjaro of Bordeaux,” Merchant says.
See our slideshow of Top Wine Vacations.
Her group of eight had exclusive “run of the house” at Château Pichon, where her individual accommodations were as large as an entire floor of her home in Ohio. “I felt like a princess,” Merchant says. “The service was incredible… Every night we had a four-course meal with corresponding wines.”
It was her second trip with French Wine Explorers, a Maryland-based luxury tour operator. Four years ago, she took the company’s Champagne and Loire wine regions tour. In between, she traveled to wine country in New Zealand and Australia; and she continues visiting the Napa/Sonoma wine country in California (an annual pilgrimage she has made since 1994). Conducting wine education and tasting events, studying to become a wine professional and maintaining a collection of 300 to 400 bottles of wine at any given time, Merchant recalls reading—shortly before departing for France—that Bordeaux’s ’05 vintage was particularly noteworthy.
“We had an outstanding ’05 experience,” she reports. However, one of her favorite moments was when Dewey Markham Jr., author of 1855: A History of the Bordeaux Classification, joined her tour group for dinner.
That’s the sort of memory the owner of French Wine Explorers wants to impart on her clients. “We like to offer experiences that are really exceptional,” says Pascale Bernase. She recently introduced a luxury barge cruise that includes tasting the 33 grand crus of Burgundy. What’s so distinctive about the cruise, she says, is that owners and winemakers from such prestigious houses as Romanée-Conti and La Tâche host the dinners. Jean-Pierre Cropsal of Maison Joseph Drouhin leads the 2009 cruise (to be held July 19-25).
A wine-centric trip to Chile and Argentina grabs the popular vote at California-based Pinnacle Wine Tours. “I went there personally to research it,” says Pinnacle owner Shafiq Hasan. He began offering wine-based tours after being approached at a trade show by a wine group member from Florida. Now he’s looking at developing golf-and-wine tours, having found success with a regional daylong “Nine and Wine” concept that involves nine holes of golf, a break for wine tasting, another nine holes and then a full wine tasting.
See our slideshow of Top Wine Vacations.
While New World wines from South America and Australia gain ground on the Old World wines of Europe in the bibles of oenology (i.e., Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast), X.O. Travel Consultants is venturing further afield. “Many of our clients are longtime travelers who go over and over again to different regions,” says president James Horwitz. “At some point, they’ve been to all the places.” That’s why in 2009 his New York-based firm is offering wine excursions to Morocco and Croatia.
The fact of the matter is there’s a plenty good amount of vineyards in both of these places,” Horwitz says. “Morocco doesn’t export much to the U.S., so a lot of people haven’t heard about [their wine]. But if you are in France, there are a lot of Moroccan restaurants that all have Moroccan and Tunisian wines. They’re quite good. We’re not talking Château Lafite or anything like that. They’re very nice, basically food wines.”
As for Croatia, Horwitz conjures up the name of a famous Napa winemaker: Mike Grgich, who grew up in Croatia and ended up making the Californian white wine that won the pivotal Judgment of Paris. “About 12 years ago, he went back and started a winery,” Horwitz says. “Of course, he brings his up-to-date, New World knowledge and technique to a wine business that was pretty regional.”
Wine aficionados aren’t obliged to take week-long tours to indulge their passions. It’s possible to rent a car in Napa and make stops at whichever winery grabs your fancy. This exercise is arguably more enriching in a place like France, however, where when driving through a region like Burgundy or parts of Provence, it’s almost impossible not to end up at a winery. The latter is home to such bucolic delights as the Chateau Sainte Roseline and Chateau de Berne, where tastings and brief vineyard visits are de rigueur.
With the luxury of time, however, wine tours are still the way to go. And wherever they are, small groups (under 10 people, say) typically receive the best VIP treatment. “The really top wineries don’t want large groups traipsing through,” Horwitz says. “And clients want to go to the best places.”
Besides, he adds, “It’s all about drinking wine and eating and socializing. This is not like stamp collecting. You want a nice small group of people so you’re not sitting at a long table where you can’t talk to the person at the other end.”
See our slideshow of Top Wine Vacations.
