When Jeffery Lindenmuth took the stage on the first morning of the 2024 New York Wine Experience, the executive editor of Wine Spectator looked out on a crowd of more than 1,000 people—but they might as well have been family.
“When I arrived at the hotel last night, I was riding the elevator with a few of our guests all going up to our rooms, and they mentioned they were from Chicago, and they’ve been attending many years,” he told the crowd. “We talked about the program a little bit. I said, ‘Well, you guys have a pleasant weekend.’ And as they exited the elevator, one of them shook my hand and said, ‘It’s good to be home.’ I know so many of us feel the same. So I say to all of you who join us year after year to meet old friends and enjoy these great wines: Welcome home to the New York Wine Experience!”
The 43rd annual Wine Experience, held this year at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square from Oct. 17–19, is the world’s premier wine event, gathering wine lovers, winemakers, sommeliers, restaurateurs, chefs and retailers together to celebrate wine and friendship. It’s also a family reunion of sorts, bringing together a community bound by their love of wine and the ties it engenders.
The weekend featured two evening Grand Tastings of 265 wines, two packed days of tasting seminars and presentations from wine stars, lunches hosted by Italian and Sonoma vintners, and a Champagne and whisky reception catered by some of New York’s greatest restaurants. Over the course of the weekend, more than 4,000 attendees got to sample some of the world’s best wines: a total of 348 wines were poured from 21,480 bottles into 60,270 glasses.
But beyond the thrill of tasting and learning about the world’s most iconic wines, the Wine Experience is a chance to see old friends and make new ones, to reunite with your wine family. It’s a chance to come home.
The Grandest of Tastings
The reunion began Thursday night with the first of two Grand Tastings. Across two floors of the hotel, guests were able to explore offerings from around the world, with 265 wineries each pouring a wine that has been rated 90 points or higher by a Wine Spectator editor. Winery owners and winemakers were on hand so attendees could meet the people behind the bottles.
“This is my first time, but it won’t be my last,” said Lois Berlin, an education consultant from Washington D.C. “What a great opportunity to taste wines I don’t normally drink and expand my palate.”
For the vintners, the event was the chance to both connect with some of their most loyal customers and also to meet their fellow winemakers from across the globe. “It’s such an honor for us to be here, mamma mia!,” said Cesare Benvenuto Pio, winemaker at Piedmont’s Pio Cesare. “No one puts on a wine event like this.”
Many of the invited wineries are family-owned, and it was striking how many of the vintners were the second generation to appear at the Wine Experience. Shannon Staglin of Staglin Family Vineyards in Napa poured alongside her father Garen. Barbara Banke of Jackson Family Wines tasted wines alongside her son Chris Jackson. Catherine Kistler was pouring for the first time, representing her family’s Occidental Winery, founded by Steve Kistler. Arturo Pallanti of Chianti Classico’s Castello di Ama represented his family while his parents were back home in Tuscany tending the fermentations of the latest vintage.
Every Wine Tells a Story
That theme of generations extended into the two days of seminars, which included speeches from wine stars; a special interview with Angelo Gaja by Wine Spectator editor and publisher Marvin R. Shanken; vertical and retrospective tastings from Viña Cobos, Château Léoville Las Cases and Lokoya; a tour of single-vineyard Rhône wines by Philippe Guigal, a wine-and-food pairing showdown with Eric Ripert, José Andrés, Emeril Lagasse and Danny Meyer; and tastings of Wine Spectator’s 2023 Value Wine of the Year and Top 10 Wines of 2023.
The audience also witnessed the first induction into the Wine Spectator Video Contest Hall of Fame, as Steve Jacobson won the contest for a record third year in a row, with his musical take on Hamilton: “I Just Want a Zinfandel.”
One of the first seminars spotlighted four family wineries in Barolo. “You get to start your day with four glasses of Barolo,” said Barbara Sandrone, representing Luciano Sandrone, the winery her father founded. “That’s special. That’s a good Friday.”
Sandrone spoke about her dad, who passed away in 2023, and how he broke from the family business of carpentry to found his own winery, producing wines in a style all his own. Giuseppe Vaira of G.D. Vajra and Federica Boffa Pio of Pio Cesare explained how they had decided to continue their family businesses, despite the challenges of the wine industry.
Just before the Barolo seminar, wine star Hugh Davies told the tale of his parents, a young couple who moved from Southern California to Napa Valley in the 1960s and decided to produce wine at the semi-abandoned Schram Estate, creating Schramsberg, one of America’s benchmarks for sparkling wine.
Wine has been called bottled poetry, but it’s often an entire novel. Wine star and sportscaster Jim Nantz, who has produced his wine brand The Calling in California since 2012, remarked that his job has always been about storytelling and that is true for a lot of winemaking.
The seminars revealed that wine has many ways to tell a story: The story of how wine star Greg Brewer, who didn’t know Chardonnay was a grape when he first applied for a job in a tasting room, soon became a passionate winemaker in Santa Barbara County.
The story of a grape: Malbec in Argentina was an undervalued import from Bordeaux when winemaker Paul Hobbs arrived in Mendoza in the 1980s. But he and his collaborators at Viña Cobos found that in the right spots, with the right approach to farming, it could produce world-class wines.
The story of a place: In the case of E. Guigal, that place is the Côte-Rôtie, steep rocky cliffs crumbling above the Rhône River. The Guigal family has spent three generations cultivating those hillsides, finding the differences among the schist, iron and manganese soils that produce their coveted “La La” single-vineyard wines.
For Lokoya winemaker Chris Carpenter, the place is the mountainsides of Napa Valley, where he produces Cabernet Sauvignon that is remarkably different from the wines of the valley floor. For the famed Bordeaux second growth Château Léoville Las Cases, the place is L’Enclos, the vineyard up a gentle slope from the Gironde river that may be the most magnificent spot for Bordeaux wine.
The story of families: Albiera Antinori represented her family’s wine company on stage as the 26th generation in the wine industry and the first woman CEO. Erwan Faiveley discussed how he and his sister Eve are the seventh generation at their Burgundy domaine and how they continue to push it forward.
Carlo Mondavi of RAEN remembered how a childhood trip to wine regions in France and Italy with his grandfather, Robert Mondavi, inspired his passion for wine. And Jean-Charles Cazes explained how his great-grandfather, a baker in the French town of Pauillac, was able to buy a classified growth, Château Lynch-Bages, during the Great Depression and how each succeeding generation has worked to improve it.
“Wine is a family business,” said Catherine Kistler of Occidental. “Farming is a multigenerational project. It has been for thousands of years.”
Giving Back
Wine can inspire people to make a difference. One of the reasons Nantz founded The Calling with wine executive Peter Deutsch was to highlight his charitable project, the Nantz National Alzheimer Center, which he established with the help of Houston Medical Center after the disease took his father.
The Wine Experience is itself a charitable endeavor. The event would not be possible without the incredible generosity of vintners who donate all the wines of the weekend. All net proceeds from the event go to the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, which has raised more than $40 million for scholarships and grants to benefit those aspiring to careers in the hospitality and wine industries.
Foundation beneficiaries have included students at Napa Valley College, the University of California at Davis’ School of Viticulture & Enology, The Roots Foundation, Sonoma State University’s Wine Business Institute, Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, World Central Kitchen and the Culinary Institute of America, among others.
Wine Spectator also recognizes those in the industry who have given back to both wine and the world. In 2016, the co-proprietor of Domaine Clarence Dillon, Prince Robert de Luxembourg, learned that his son Frederik suffered from a rare PolG-related mitochondrial disease. “It turned life upside down,” Robert says.
With Frederik’s help, Robert and his wife Julie have created the PolG Foundation, with the mission to foster research to discover a cure for mitochondrial PolG-related disorders. This research will impact millions of patients suffering from mitochondrial-related diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autism and some forms of cancer, to name a few. Last year, the foundation awarded $3.5 million in grants in support of these goals.
On the last day of the Wine Experience, Wine Spectator awarded Robert the Distinguished Service Award, for his work at Domaine Clarence Dillon—which encompasses châteaus Haut-Brion, La Mission Haut-Brion and Quintus, plus the Clarendelle brand and a restaurant and wine shop in Paris—and for his charitable work at both the PolG Foundation and as a co-founder of Cité du Vin, a cultural center and museum of wine that debuted in Bordeaux in 2016.
Robert’s mother, Joan Dillon, Duchesse de Mouchy, received the award in 2005, making Robert the first second-generation winner of the DSA. Accepting the award, Robert said, “When you have a passion for wine, you have a passion for sharing, and you have a passion for having an open heart to the outside world.”
The Next Generation
After a packed schedule of seminars and the recognition of four new Grand Award winners in Wine Spectator’s 2024 Restaurant Awards program, the weekend ended with a reception serving multiple top sparkling wines from Champagne, California and Italy, as well as a selection of top whiskies picked by Whisky Advocate. Award-winning restaurants of New York City served small plates, and winemakers and wine lovers alike gathered to share their favorite memories of the past three days.
One common theme throughout the weekend was the need to attract younger consumers to wine. Philippe Guigal spoke of planting his family’s fourth La La vineyard, La Reynarde (which was previewed exclusively at the Wine Experience), as both a gift to his twin sons, Etienne and Charles, and a way to interest them in winemaking at a young age.
Wine can fill a weekend with joy, but it can also be a link between people. While accepting the 2023 Wine of the Year Award for his Brunello di Montalcino 2018, Argiano CEO and winemaker Bernardino Sani spoke about the importance of passing the love for wine and the way it binds us together to the next generation.
“My father taught me about drinking wine, about pairing wine and food, when I was young,” said Sani. “He taught me about the importance of wine in our culture, about the importance of wine when you share good moments with friends and family. We should teach the younger consumer that wine is about sharing good moments of life. It’s about friendship. It’s a great tool to travel. Even when you can’t travel, you can reach so many places just by drinking a great bottle of wine. And you keep the traditions alive, the history alive, the culture alive. So I think we have a mission now.”
The Wine Experience will return to New York City from Oct. 18–21, 2025.
—With reporting by Kenny Martin.