[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:02] Welcome to this episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint Podcast with your host Brad Johnson. Brad’s the VP of Advisor Development at Advisor’s Excel, the largest independent insurance brokerage company in the US. He’s also a regular contributor to Investment News, The Wall Street Journal and other industry publications.

[00:00:23] Brad: Welcome to the Elite Advisor Blueprint, the podcast for world class financial advisors. My name is Brad Johnson and I’m the VP of Advisor Development at Advisor’s Excel and it’s my goal to distill the best ideas and advice from top dollar leaders and to apply it to the world of independent financial advising.

During this conversation we had a first ever in the show and I’ve got to say it was a bucket list moment as included tasting a couple of great wines, with one of the foremost wine experts in the world, DLynn Proctor. For those unfamiliar he is currently the wine making ambassador for Penfolds Americas.

Yes, that Penfolds, the famous Australian winery that produces one of the most iconic bottles in the world, Penfolds Grange. DLynn has been recognized as Wine Enthusiasts magazine’s 40 under 40 tastemakers and has been featured in publications like Wine Spectator, The Tasting Panel, The New York times and the Huffington Post.

How our paths originally crossed was the fact that he was also featured in one of my favorite documentaries of all time, the internationally acclaimed Somm, directed by our mutual friend Jason Wise. You’ll hear plenty about the movie during our conversation but do yourself a favor, if you love wine or just an incredible story, go watch this movie. My guest says it will blow your mind like it did mine the first time I watched it. Check out the show notes for a link. Here are just a few of the topics DLynn and I covered.

We get into wine tasting 101 for financial advisors. Basically how to order and taste wine without the fear of looking like a fool in front of your clients. For me and I’m guessing you all can relate it seems the more I learn about wine the more I realize how much I actually don’t know. Thankfully DLynn knows how to simplify the complex. He provides some fun commentary for overcoming the intimidating and often times confusing world of wine.

[00:02:04] Brad: Next, DLynn shares his top tips for hosting incredible wine events. You’ll learn how to blow your clients away with an expert wine vocabulary, some outside of the box wine tasting games and actually knowing how to properly grid, AKA taste a wine. For you advisors out there who host wine events for your clients or have always wanted to, this part of the conversation is definitely going to give you some fresh ideas for tailoring a unique event for the ultra high net worth. From there, as DLynn is one of the best dressed dudes I’ve ever met I couldn’t help but ask him why it matters and what it has done for his persona in the wine business.

He shares some incredible insights here on not only how you’ll be perceived by others but how this can impact you internally as well and how that translates to financial services. Lastly I wasn’t even planning on getting into this, I’ll blame it on the wine but DLynn and I share a story of how a random request for Keystone Light of all things at the French Laundry led to an incredible lesson where they created the ultimate client experience for us. For those of you who don’t believe they’d actually serve you Keystone Light at one of the finest restaurants in the world, I posted pictures from that evening to prove it. It’s in the show notes, go check it out. Okay, before we get to the show, this episode inspires you to host your own wine events we’ve put together a document that I like to call ‘hosting your own wine events 101 for financial advisors.’

Think of it like a to-do list/checklist/timeline on everything required to host a great wine tasting. Literally anything. It’s available for download right at the top of the show notes at BradleyJohnson.com/31. You can also find links to everything else we’ve mentioned there too; books, people discussed, random photos from our night at the French Laundry and everything else from the show. That’s it. As always, thanks for listening and without any further delay, my conversation with DLynn Proctor.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:04:00] Brad: Welcome to this episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint Podcast. This could be the most excited I’ve ever been for a Blueprint interview as I have DLynn Proctor, wine expert and technical title, wine making ambassador for Penfolds of the Americas. Welcome to the show DLynn. Glad to have you man.

[00:04:22] DLynn: Thanks a lot Brad. Really appreciate it. Been looking forward to this as well.

[00:04:27] Brad: Well, the setting isn’t quite as amazing as it was last time when we were roaming around… I think we were in Sonoma and Napa, I don’t remember where we were in California but sampling some nice wine. The good news is first on the show we’re going to sample some wine here today as well. So, being a podcast for financial advisors, a lot of our clients drink a lot of wine, a lot of them host a lot of wine events for their clients and you happen to be one of the foremost experts in the world as far as wine in general.

I just want to dig right in. We’re going to sample some wine but I figured before we get started, I find some people don’t even know what a Sommelier is. If I’m even saying Sommelier right, I don’t know. Can you dig into what is a sommelier, what is the court of master sommeliers, that you’ve advanced the ranks up to the very elite and just give us some kind of an overview of an industry some people don’t even know exists out there.

[00:05:22] DLynn: Absolutely Brad. First and foremost what is a sommelier? When it comes to pronunciation the English would say every single syllable som-mme-li-er, the French just kind of glazely say “su-mm-elier” and in the US we are a very young country when it comes to food and wine so we say “Somminer.” It’s just a lot of words that come out on the American side but pronunciation if you say Summelier or as we’ve colloquialized it over the last ten years, we just say somm. A somm doesn’t have to be a wine expert but what a somm is, what a sommelier is a wine steward. Look, at the end of the day, every single sommelier no matter what your capacity is in the business you chose in the field of hospitality, look, we’re all servers at the end of the day.

When you think of what a steward is, a steward is a server. A steward is an individual who looks after things and or people, looks after provisions, looks after… Back in the day, in Latin terms a somm before became a word sommelier was in charge of looking after the provisions for higher individuals in the Royal court whether it was a king or whether it was someone at high status. A somm would look after that individual by tasting the fermented goods, tasting the distilled goods, tasting the breads, tasting the food provisions. This way, the higher official in court or the king would know whether or not someone  lower than him or someone in the territory or the kingdom that that king reigned over, whether him or her were trying to poison him.

[00:07:22] DLynn: When you think about the job of a somm, a steward, the steward’s job was to taste any of the provisions. First to make sure the king or the high noble official didn’t get poisoned, didn’t die. When you think about somms, we’re the guinea pigs for death, if that makes sense. It’s really cool when you see the old school somms in restaurants go through this beautiful presentation with the wine and they always pour themselves, not this much but about four to seven milliliters or about an ounce of wine just to smell it, just to taste it, just to nose and make sure the wine is sound before it goes to the guests at the table whether male or female. Whether him or her. It’s always the individual at the table that we always like to taste first after we nose his glass would be the host or hostess.

Of course the individual who ordered the bottle of wine will repeat that order back to them, we pour taste for them after we taste it to make sure it’s sound and of course remember the guest of honor maybe male or female at the table who gets the next pour. That’s what a server is, that’s what a somm is. We’re stewards, we’re wine servers in restaurants. Now look, we have many, many, many different capacities. We be here for another three hours talking about all of the avenues that a wine steward can go down in the professional world of hospitality and business.

When you traditionally think of what a sommelier is, it is a lady or gentleman who is on the fore that’s kind of our colloquial term or before, on the fore in a restaurant, lunch in, dinner out and making sure that each and every guest, whether it be at the bar, in the dining room, in the PDR, it’s a slang, private dining room is looked after, making sure the guests have wine in their glass, making sure bottles are decanted if need be, bottles are cold and ready to go, champagne, white wine for the guests at the table. That’s what somm is my friend.

[00:09:32] Brad: You know what you’re talking about. Here’s my mispronunciation count number one already and we are about five minutes into the conversation. Think of how many I can rack up. Based on that background is that the little medallion I’ve seen some somms wear in some high end restaurants. Is that part of the history because that would have been sampling before the guest sample.

[00:09:53] DLynn: That is part of the history depending on what old school French kind of slang you speak. It’s always been called a [inaudible] but we hear the more today, more the up to date were called “Tastevin”. Yes, those were used as early as 1,000 years ago in France, all throughout France because remember there was no electricity. All there were were candles to light their way through the cellars and taste through the barrels, and taste through the vats and what was being fermented or what was aging had already been fermented or what was aging being ready to bottle. Even bottles that had been like lying on their side, we used this terminology called “serlot”, lying on their side that was ready for the veteran or the owner or the proprietor or the wine maker to sample.

Basically you hold the tastevin in your hand. I wish you would have told me, I’d grab mine, it might take five or ten minutes to find but I actually do have one that was given to me by… He since passed away 15 years ago but a very esteemed gentleman, by the name I believe Lee Graighly James, but that’s another story. It was really used to look at the clarity of the wine, mostly burgundy, but used throughout France and of course all throughout Europe, Austria, Germany, Italy absolutely. It was actually the first tasting vessel that you could use to look at the clarity of the wine, kind of buyer seller look at all the sides and the angles in the wine and you have a sip and you hand it to the consumer and have them sip as well. Tastevin’s are really cool. I still got a friend by the name of Aldo Sohm who runs his own restaurant. Of course the autonomous place called the Somm Wine Bar. That’s literally 15 feet away from le bernardin where he is still the wine director of the [inaudible]. He still wears his daily and I think it’s very cool.

[00:11:54] Brad: That’s interesting. That’s actually where I saw it the first time my wife and I went to New York. Interesting. This is the longest I’ve heard, not only one glass but two glasses of wine sitting beside me and not sampled one. Here’s what I’d like  to do. I’m the king of this, I love wine, I’ve collected wine for probably the last four or five years. My wife and I love it, primarily cabernet but what you find is the more you learn about wine, the more you learn you absolutely have no clue about the world of wine. What I would like …

[00:12:28] DLynn: Please don’t ask me the question about Romania right now. I’m rusty.

[00:12:31] Brad: Yeah, you haven’t studied the note cards lately. Here’s what I’d like to do. My goal is here how can we bring as much value to a bunch of independent financial advisors out there? A lot of them have high net worth clients that enjoy wine, they host nice parties and wine is a very… It can be intimidating. You look at these wine lists, at these nice restaurants, it’s like man I’m scared to say half of them because I’m going to mispronounce them in front of my clients. Where I’d like to start is just since we have two great Penfolds we’re going to give a shout out to your crew at Penfolds. You selected these, I’ll let you tell everybody what they are, I’ll hold them up for the camera so everybody can see.

We’ve got two bottles here, the Bin 28, Bin 407. I’d like you to just walk through wine tasting 101. Why do you even start with swirling the glass at the restaurant? Everybody sees it,  half people don’t even know why you do it. I’ll let you take over from here. If I’m a financial advisor how do I taste a glass of wine and look educated about it?

[00:13:31] DLynn: You got it Brad. Look, the first thing about tasting wine is it’s, the wine is what it is and we make it a lot more things than it should be, could be or we don’t give it enough due in a lot of instances. Once you put the wine in the glass, the wine is now in an area where it starts to deteriorate. Now, that doesn’t mean that chapter one will develop chapter two, three, four, five, six. The wine is going to open up but once you remove the cork, notice I did not remove the cork. I used this wonderful device here called the coravin but once you remove the cork from the bottle, the wine then starts to die.

Now you’re probably saying, “Well that doesn’t make sense.” You remove the cork because you want to get that wine decanted and open and you actually want to awaken that wine and get all those phenols and all those esters and all these beautiful things about the wine kind of reacting with all the molecules in the air and opening up. All those things are absolutely true. Wine will develop once air hits it but think about what I just said. The wine will develop. That wine is starting to die. We just experience these wonderful chapters in the death of the wine because oxygen has come in contact with this wonderful juice.

The first thing you need to do is you need to get this wine into the glass whether you’re opening the wine for one of your clients or opening wine for yourself as you’re doing now pouring this wine, which one are you pouring 407 or the 28?

[00:15:10] Brad: 28

[00:15:10] DLynn: Pen 28, there we are, the Penfolds Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz 2014. The first thing I always do is I always look at the clarity of the wine. I hold this wine over a white background because of course white background works best when you’re looking at the clarity of the wine and you just really want to look at the wine, make sure the wine is not too cloudy. If you’re pouring the wine like we are from the 2014 vintage, the wine should look young and vibrant and clear and it should have a wonderful almost electric or fiducia kind of rim around the edge because it’s wine that’s just been open and it’s ready to drink.

Now look, older wines from the late 80s, the late 70s is obviously post war, late 40s, 50s and 60s those wines are going to be a bit more dull, a bit more murky, they are going to have a cloudy consistency because the color is falling out of the wine and falling to the bottom of said bottle. This is a young wine, not happening here. So you’re just looking at the clarity of the wine when you do that. The second thing you want to do is you see people do this often, they hold the glass up and they say, “Wow, this wine has beautiful legs,” but what does that even mean? Unfortunately, in the modicum of the United States and our very young and novice style of drinking wine, we think if the wine has legs, it’s a good wine. That’s just kind of the fault around but all wine has legs and all wine is good to those who produced it but not all wine is as incredible as others, of course. What you’re actually looking at when you look at the legs of the wine is you’re looking at a glycerin.The amount of alcohol and or sugar. Now, look there’s sugar in all wine even though wines can be fermented bone dry.

[00:17:13] DLynn: Now, just to regular note Brad and allow me to come back to that later. Our wines are bone dry but the wines still have legs. What does that mean? Well, legs just tell you roughly if you will, how much alcohol the wine may or may not contain and if there is any residual sugar. Now because I did give you a hint there actually, there is no sugar in any of our wines are dry leg wines, of course or dry white wines. We do make fortified wines where some of them happen to have residual sugar. That’s another story. But the beauty about this is the floor, these wonderful legs, I’m not sure if the screen captures this beauty but the slower these legs tend to fall, will kind of let you know a couple of things. Now, you have to be very, very versed in this, but often we get wrong as well.

The slower the legs tend to fall down the glass, you tend to perceive well this great variety, this wine either came from a warmer climate more than likely may have a thicker skin and more than likely may contain residual sugar, but this is just the first of four/five points that we’re identifying in the wines. We’ve got another at least 30 and you can go all the way up to 55 points you can actually use to identify what’s in the glass. We haven’t even nosed or tasted the wine yet.

Once we make a generalization about whether or not this could be a thick or thin skin grape, whether or not it could have come from a warm climate, whether or not the alcohol could be elevated or it could be residual sugar, then you get a wonderful nose of the wine. Are you getting red fruits, blue fruits, black fruits, are the fruits under ripe, are they just ripe, are they ripe, are they over ripe or are they dried almost like stewed or dried fruits?

[00:19:16] DLynn: Now, what you’re doing is you’re just going deeper down the rabbit hole. You’ve got a long way to go but you’re just making yourself go deeper down the rabbit hole trying to figure out all these characteristics of the wine that hopefully make lead you to a place of reason or style or country of course. Once we smell fruit and determine the type of fruit it may or may not be, we look for non fruit characteristics like flowers and different types of spices and notes, how much earth is in the wine, how much organic activity is taking place or inorganic activity. Now Brad, are you familiar with organic versus inorganic?

[00:19:59] Brad: You better enlighten me.

[00:20:00] DLynn: That’s what I plan to do. So anything that is organic, what does organic mean to you? Organic means this thing or this organism or this, whatever we’re talking about is living. It is a living thing, so I’m not sure what your garden looks like at your home, but everything outside your house, to the front, to the back, to the side in your backyard, that’s organic.

Whether you’ve got flowers or you’ve got basal planted or thyme or barley or rosemary or cabbage or squash, that’s all organic, the dirt, the potting soil, the earth, the mushrooms. It’s living matter, so that’s organic and yes believe it or not you do find that in wine. Now everything that is inorganic is what? Rocks, limestones, slate, chalk. That is inorganic matter, inorganic material meaning it has never lived.

It’s inorganic, it has no life being in it. Now mostly the inorganic stuff it’s what’s been here 350, 400, 600, 100 million years. It’s been here a long time depending on how old the earth is that’s not my field, billion years old plus, I’m not sure but these inorganic things what we talk about in wine are things like gravel that you find in border, in a lot of places around the world or limestone and chocolate you find in champagne and spree in places in Suplee and Burgundy and India’s rock in volcanic soil that you find in the beautiful Napa Valley or tera rasta that you find in Australia.

[00:21:43] Brad: I want to throw this out there because I’ll just be the idiot on this podcast and then everybody can learn from my mistakes. I remember very early on I think it was my first trip to Napa, Sarah and I went out and I made the mistake of asking because you smell and you can smell a fruit. I remember smelling like a cherry nose on the line we were testing and I made the mistake of asking, “Are there cherries in this?”

Like rookie 101 wine taster. Let’s just go into, so I don’t want to be a fool in front of my clients. I think that’s where a lot of financial advisors live. They enjoy wine, they love it but like you said going down the rabbit hole, the further you go down the more you’re like, “I have no clue about the depths of this rabbit hole I’m going down.” If we were going to, here is what most of our clients would do.

They’d pour nice wine hopefully that they selected off a list. They’d smell it and taste it and how do you that in front of clients in a nice sophisticated way that I don’t want to be disingenuous, I don’t want to say you fake like you know it but just how do I taste wine when I don’t really know how to taste wine in front of the clients and not make a fool of myself that’s probably the best question.

[00:22:49] DLynn: Well, you just need to learn the basics and just jot down notes before you go in to do whatever setting you may or may not be going into. The beauty about it is that you are tasting a red wine more than likely. You’re going to get some sort of red fruits, some sort of blue fruits and or some sort of black fruit. If you were tasting white wine well think about and I’m generalizing here just top lining.

If you’re tasting white wine well more than likely you may get some type of lemon lime and think about stone fruit pomace fruit or pomaceous fruit the pomace anything with a pomace has a seed. Apples, pears and seeded fruit a pomace seed fruit, stone fruit. Think about apricots and peaches or citric fruit think about lemon, lime think about orange those are the citric fruits.

Think about tropical fruits and tree fruits whether pineapple or banana et cetera. White wine has it’s categories, red wine has it’s categories and look if your novice and you’re going in you are at a tasting room or you are at a cool wine bar with five of your top clients and all have and all have high net worth, and you want to go in and just do a little, “Hey guys, let’s go do a little tasting today after we leave the office and we had a long day of meetings.”

Go to the tasting room, pour yourself a little taste and primarily, I’m top lining if you have a thicker skin grape variety like sharaz, that we have in our glass now more than likely you’re going to get some red fruits and some black fruits and just look I get some light grass berry. I get some ripe black cherry, some ripe black berry wonderful notes of like mocha and toasted oak and look you sound like you know what you’re talking about, it’s the delivery, it’s the confidence.

If you’re drinking the white wine let’s just pick on the most popular white grape variety in the, chardonay. Look I get some lemons some lime a little bit of that stone fruit like just ripe apricot a beautiful creamy milk guess what, you sound like a pro.  Now if you have a white wine and you’re saying I get black cherry…

[00:24:56] DLynn: Well, maybe a bit off base or you can say you get lime on this maybe a bit off base. It’s about knowing the color of wine you have. If it’s the red wine it’s usually going to be in three or four different shades. I mean would you ever guess that this is pinot water just looking at the glass?

[00:25:16] Brad: No.

[00:25:16] DLynn: No. Looking at the glass you could guess a million things but you would never say pinot. You would say, “Oh, it could cabernet it could be Zinfandel it could be Syrah it could be Merlot it could be Malbec but at least we know the commonality of those grape varieties I just named. They got some type of vein of black fruit in them, black cherry…

[00:25:37] Brad: Put on those that haven’t had pinot before just because it’s such a lighter skinned grape, it’s very transparent when you look at it through the glass right?

[00:25:44] DLynn: Absolutely and you can say no sort of like pomegranate and strawberry just ripe cherry, maybe some cola influence depending on where the wine has come from. These are all the things that it does take time to learn even for the novice. The novice just needs to jot down some notes a few different grape varieties and just taste these wines.

Go out and buy these ones to yourself and they don’t need to be expensive at but spend $15 on a wonderful Beaujolais or $30 on a wonderful Beaujolais crew which has an appellation attached to it a specific village in Beaujolais and spend 25 bucks on a great begonia just village level begonia from Burgundy. Spend 15 bucks on the great Zijendale from California.

Spend 30 bucks on great Shiraz from Australia and just these taste wines to yourself and try to take notes. Count it to yourself, form a lexicon in your brain of what these wines taste like so that when you go out and you are with clients you can say, “Hey, I’ve got a beautiful pinot wine and I’d like you guys to taste this it’s got lots of cherry and on the right pomegranate and it’s got a long finishing.” You sound like you’ve been doing this for years but the novices also have to do the work.

[00:27:04] Brad: Yeah, or just take the easy path and fly you in for a private wine tasting for clients right?

[00:27:09] DLynn: Absolutely.

[00:27:10] Brad: Just buy enough Penfolds where it makes sense and done deal.

[00:27:17] DLynn: Absolutely.

[00:27:15] Brad: I won’t forgive myself if we do this, so for those out there that have not seen the movie SOMM or SOMM into the bottle or there is an upcoming SOMM 3 that we might get some hands on here in a little bit if we get enough wine in here right. One of the things that I fell in love with the very first SOMM movie was and I’m going to butcher this is it the profile there is like six things or something that you tick off when you’re tasting a wine to identify what it is what is that called? I’m sure I’m butchering it.

[00:27:41] DLynn: Six different categories but there are many many sub categories within each of those. What we call it, is  the grid, we grid of wine, tasting grid.

[00:27:50] Brad: Thank you, okay, so I have loved wine for a long time but I stumbled across this movie SOMM on Netflix, one of my buddies watched it and he’s like you’ve got to check this out. When I realized the level of wine experts there are in the world where the first time I saw the clip I think it was you, Brian, Ian, some of the guys from the movie.

Yeah, Dustin basically getting to nose and a little sip and then going down this grid and just straight nailing the wine. If you don’t mind just because for those that haven’t seen SOMM we’re going to put it in the show notes all of you should go out and see it if you enjoy wine. Would you mind grading one of these and just so they can see how that flows and you’re just almost poetic with how you do it. I hope I’m not putting you on the spot but…

[00:28:37] DLynn: I appreciate it Brad but let me say this first. Look it seems like I don’t know witchcraft or some type of wizardly or whatever it is, when look it’s muscle memory for us. We’ve done it so much, we’ve built a lexicon in our brain it’s and we’ve done it so much that it is second nature to us. I mean look you are an athlete then you think about thoughts to play baseball or whatever it is.

You learn to keep your elbow lined up with your ear and your eye and you learn your stance and you do it so much. You’re looking at pitches whether it’s a batting cage or pitchers throwing at variants of speed. It’s muscle memory, it’s hand to eye, muscle memory, muscle memory, muscle memory. It’s the same muscle memory for us.

There is a lot of glasses that we can actually pick up and say, “That’s more than likely Syrah or Shiraz, nine times out of ten just based on the color and one on getting on the nose it’s probably Australian.” Look and people were like, “Wow, how did you just do that?” Well it’s muscle memory I’ve got to be honest with you it really is muscle memory. Griding the wine yeah, that’s a fun thing to do I’ll absolutely do it.

Now this is a bit unfair because I actually know what the wine is but I’ll do a very truncated version probably a minute and a half just to give all the viewers and the guests the feel of what it is. Yes, here we are as you can see in the screen I’ve got a beautiful red wine that is star bright with a florescent hot pink red edge flowing to a deep ruby core.