WineMasters Documentary and Class
Starting in 2018, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Klaas de Jong and his team at WineMasters.TV — initially as a host of the Italy documentary series and more recently teaching WineMasters Class.
The documentaries are cinematic deep-dives into the world’s greatest wine regions, seen through the lens of a single wine producing family and narrated by Masters of Wine. It was an honor to be asked to cover Italy–the country closest to my heart since I started in wine–along with Richard Hemming MW and Burton Anderson. Klaas and the team did an incredible job bringing you straight into the vineyards and cellars with the families, showing all the labor and dedication behind the famous labels. WineMasters Class has an explicitly educational focus, with structured but playful sessions featuring experiments, food pairing challenges and blind tasting for people who want to deepen their understanding of wine, led by MWs and top sommeliers.
I have very fond memories of the process. The documentary was shot on location on the Amalfi Coast. Though it was actually a rather chilly April and racing motorcyclists threatened at every minute to ruin our audio, the breathtaking cliffside villa and the crew’s indefatigable good spirits made it a delightful sojourn. WineMasters Class was shot in Klaas’ native Friesland in the northern Netherlands. Intense studio days with both my incredible co-hosts Paz Levinson and Fredrik Lindfors were kept lively by the wackiness of the experiments (I’m just happy nobody got injured), long discussions of food and wine pairing and many tasty Frisian treats.
The platform has just been completely relaunched — every episode now has its own landing page with background on the topic and the people in it, and everything is subtitled in ten languages, including Japanese and Chinese. You can find my presenter page here, the documentaries here, and WineMasters Class here.