Although seasoned wine tasters, WOW members were stunned. The tasting included only four wines, easy for experienced tasters, but the workshop was held in the wonderful ambience of the Bella Forma shop, titled “Wines as Persons,” and it brought smiles, joy, curiosity, enjoyment and exhilaration. This concept is the project of WOW member Martina Bek and her partner Vjekoslav Stojišić, which the WOW girls immediately “adopted.”
Martina and Vjeko completed levels 1-3 of education at the WSET Wine Academy Croatia, where Stojišić also teaches. The knowledge of a systematic approach to wine tasting perfected at WSET was skilfully and with humour, ingeniously and above all with charm combined with marketing and branding skills which are Martina’s job and great love.
The concept has been tested, for the first time at the 3rd Food and Wine Festival in the Arena Zagreb in 2015, but the focus then was on international brands. This time, the duo decided to present indigenous Croatian sorts and combine them with – people. The wines tasted were: Enjingi Graševina late harvest 2007, Grgić Pošip 2015, Tomaz Terrano Barbarossa 2013, Miloš Plavac 2012.
The question of preferring going to the movies with Terrano or a dinner with Pošip: dancing with Plavac Mali or a trip with Graševina – although interesting, was superfluous, as al the wines were excellent. It was most interesting and stimulating to think about it and then hear how WOW girls envision each of the presented wines in the human form compared to how the workshop leaders saw them. The mechanics of the personification of wine was borrowed from the brand personification method which is part of most marketing brand books. The imagination was enticed and discussion fired up by pondering what kind of persons would our most potent varieties be as humans. It was a true wine playroom, just like the authors imagined it: serious learning combined with loose imagination.
As the workshop was interactive, all the ladies in the audience were quite proactive. Described persons/wines received an entire new dimension and offered their vision of personality of individual labels. Hence Graševina, it was concluded, reminds of a gentleman connected to nature – such as a landlord, landowner who rides and gardens, but it could also be personified in the form of a very well scented lady who’s lived her life and has nothing more to prove or an ecologically sound youthful middle aged man who loves exercising in nature.
What the WOW girls envisioned for Terrano, Plavac and Pošip, remains for you to find out when you meet them. Let’s just say: it was very interesting. Vjeko is an orator and connoisseur par excellence, Martina is charming and imaginative, and the WOW girls weren’t bad either. With a positive atmosphere, the inspirational interior of the Bella Forma shop and artisan wines, the get together lasted nearly two hours. May it happen again!
