AROUND THE WORLD

Let Somm Premium Wine Experiences do the work for you, and enjoy handpicked wines that best represent their international regions of origin.

A COMPREHENSIVE process lies behind the selection of wines offered by Somm Premium Wine Experiences. First, the online wine retailer’s team heads to an iconic international wine region to visit scores of wineries. There, they taste each winery’s key wines and choose the standouts to bring back to Australia. On return, the team again tastes these 60-odd wines – this time blind – and whittles them down to just six bottles to create the ultimate regional tasting pack. It’s a lengthy process, but co-founder and managing director Amos Young says it is critical in order to select the six wines that best reflect their region, focusing on the classic grape varieties and styles.

“When you’re at these wineries and trying the wines with these great vistas and people, you can get caught up in the moment,” Amos says. “When we taste them blind, we make sure we pick the best wine and not the best experience.” Somm Premium Wine Experiences focuses in this way on premium international wines, also providing detail online about the featured regions for a wine education. Subscribers get priority access to each release, or people can cherry-pick the regions they want to explore. In many cases, the team uncovers hard-to-find back-vintages, as seen in the Sicily and California packs. “Finding true representations of regional wines requires unearthing carefully cellared wines that are now at the age the winemakers intended them to be enjoyed,” Amos says. “A lot of the world’s great wine is meant to be cellared, but we want to shortcut that process. Then people can decide if they want to put more of them in their cellar.”

The new Rhone Valley pack is about to release, with six wines that span from the 2017 vintage right to 2001. “We want to broaden people’s appreciation and showcase why these regions are so revered.”