Down to earth with fine, worldly wines

It was a full house inside the Paepcke Park tent Friday morning of the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, and wine expert Mark Oldman stepped up to the stage dressed in full-blown safari gear.

Oldman cued animal noises over the loudspeaker and looked out at his audience through binoculars. He sabered a $300 magnum bottle of Bollinger Champagne with a jungle-styled machete and poured the world’s first-ever multi-continent wine into a decanter shaped like an octopus.

It’s not your typical wine seminar, but Oldman isn’t your typical wine expert.

Coined by The New York Times as “one of the wine world’s great showmen,” Oldman is an entrepreneur and award-winning author of three books on wine. He appears at many major food and wine festivals across the country, and his seminars are always a hot ticket.

That’s because Oldman is not only an expert in the industry, he’s a changemaker, empowering people to experiment, approach and enjoy wine exactly the ways in which they want. And notably, he doesn’t take himself too seriously — a scarce trait in the world of wine.

“I try to provide the best information but, different than a lot of experts, I try to do it in a lighthearted and fun and entertaining way,” Oldman said in an interview prior to F&W weekend. “There's an element of wine culture that does take itself too seriously, and I think I'm one of the few people who really knows his or her stuff on wine, but then doesn't take himself too seriously — that's the way I think to learn about wine, that's my modus operandi.”

Oldman’s M.O. was evident Friday morning during his seminar, titled “World’s Best Special Occasion Wines.” He unpacked a selection of some of the rarest, most iconic wines from around the world and did so by taking his audience on an “Out of Aspen”-themed safari, creatively pairing each of the eight bottles to an animal based on the animal and wine having shared characteristics — for which Oldman so cleverly came up with.

“We’re doing the world’s first wine safari this morning to start off the Aspen Classic,” Oldman said to the crowd. “This has never been done before.”

Everyone cheered, and the journey began.

Unity at its finest

This year marks Oldman’s 17th consecutive appearance at Food & Wine. And, noting that it’s the 40th anniversary, he said he’s honored to have been around for nearly half of the festival’s lifespan. It’s an event the wine expert never takes for granted, he said.

“It’s a wonderful platform, the Classic in Aspen,” Oldman said prior to the weekend. “It always challenges me to be as creative as possible, and from the way it’s organized to the volunteers to the sophistication of the audiences, I pull out all the stops.”

Oldman said he basically starts planning his seminars for Food & Wine a year in advance, explaining that right after the festive weekend ends each year, he’s already thinking about what he’ll do next.

This year, Oldman is presenting “World’s Best Special Occasion Wines,” during the 10 a.m. slot both Friday and today and another seminar that’s also commencing both days at 3 p.m., titled “The New Australia: Great Winemakers Down Under in Search of Elegance and Grace.”

Oldman took a creative approach in planning his Australian seminar, as well, incorporating Australian slangand vocab into his presentation of seven “smashable” wines — which Oldman said is an affectionate term Aussies use to describe a lighter and more elegant, “gulpable” wine. In other words, “you can knock it back,” he said.

“Australian wine, probably 20 years ago, was stereotyped as all giant fruit-bombs — you know, big Shiraz that grows hair on your chest and that Crocodile Dundee would have with his wild game — but there's been such an emphasis and such expertise in the Australian winemaking community on what they call smashable wine,” Oldman said. “I see it every time I go down under, so I wanted to bring that to the Aspen audiences, also knowing that there's quite a sizable Aussie community in Aspen and in Colorado.”

For “World’s Best Special Occasion Wines,” Oldman said he searched for months and months to choose the eight featured wines. Among them is a $1,000 bottle of Penfolds Grange — Australia’s “flag bearer” wine brand that’s been around since the late 1950s — and a $1,500 bottle of Beaulieu “Rarity” Cabernet Sauvignon, which Oldman said has only been released six times since the 1960s. It’s perhaps the rarest wine ever presented at the F&W Classic in Aspen, he said.

Oldman’s seminar also marked the debut of Pangaea, a new, multi-continent wine that blends Bordeaux-style grapes from top plots in five different countries around the world. The innovative wine is a joint venture between renowned oenologist Michel Rolland and winemaker Travis Braithwaite — who came out to Aspen this weekend specifically for Oldman’s presentation.

“It’s safe to say that this is one of the most illustrious assemblages of wine ever presented at a consumer wine tasting,” Oldman said. “We’ve got an unthinkable selection.”

And despite the steep prices and inaccessibility of the rare wines poured, none of that is the point for Oldman. It’s about helping people realize how a special bottle of wine can “mark time,” Oldman said, and bring people together on a deeper, communal level.

“Wine does so many things for people, wine gets you in touch and, you know, let’s not discount its ability to give you a good buzz,” Oldman said. “But I think wine also creates community and makes people forget their superficial, political differences, and I hope people realize that a special bottle of wine is kind of the ultimate way to do that.”

Showing eight examples from all over the world, and with one of them representing an amalgamation of five different countries in and of itself, Oldman said, “If that doesn't cry for unity, nothing does.”

Oldman’s wine journey

Oldman grew up knowing nothing about wine. Raised in “the wilds” of New Jersey, he said that if anything, he was drinking “embarrassing low-budget beer” in his late teenage years. It wouldn’t be until he was a college student attending Stanford University — where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s in English, as well as a juris doctor degree from Stanford Law School — that Oldman began his wine journey.

As an undergraduate student, Oldman founded the Stanford Wine Circle, a popular club that hosted tastings with California wine legends. He said the idea came to him because of the campus’ proximity to Napa Valley.

“And I thought, wouldn't it be fun to start kind of the country's first wine fraternity and sorority, where we would hear from legendary winemakers,” Oldman said. “I naively thought we would have to pay them, and instead, the top people from Napa and Sonoma and up from Santa Barbara were chomping at the bit to market to the next generation of wine drinkers, and you know, we all learned so much about wine that way.”

This ignited something in Oldman. He’d go on to dedicate his adult life to exploring the wine industry and is now opening up the gates to the world of wine for others — unleashing a first-rate industry with charisma and amusement.

In recent years, and in response to the pandemic, Oldman launched his Bevinars program, an ongoing series of virtual wine classes that focus on niche themes and feature winemakers from different regions across the globe. His virtual seminars have grown to attract an international audience, and Oldman said he’s working to expand his Bevinars project to include in-person live tastings in places around the country.

He explained that the F&W Classic in Aspen is a “great training ground” to see what really resonates with sophisticated audiences — and audiences of whom don’t necessarily have to be wine snobs or wine geeks, but people who have a thirst to learn more about wine, “who still feel like wine gets the better of them,” he said.

“I want people to realize that, you know, you don't necessarily have to trudge through boring seminars, you don't have to read boring, dusty treatises on wine,” Oldman said. “There are easier and more fun ways of learning about wine.”

He went on to explain how there’s a handful of people at the top of the industry who can relax about it and just want to increase their own sensual enjoyment of wine. He quoted the late Robert Mondavi — who Oldman hosted at the Stanford Wine Circle back in the day — reciting that the renowned winemaker once said: “On a hot summer day, I will put ice in my $150 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, and I can do it because it's more refreshing that way and I'm Robert Mondavi, dammit.”

“And that's the kind of attitude I want to get across to people — that you’re free to experiment and enjoy wine exactly the ways you want to, and if it's drinking wine with a straw or with a hollow licorice stick, which I did once in Aspen, so be it,” Oldman said. “The point is, we should all let our hair down about wine … and if you take more of an experimental, can’t fail attitude about wine, that's when the learning and the exploration really happens.”

Jacqueline Reynolds, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer