The last three months were an eternity – I’ve been waiting for my Masterclass, and now it’s launched, I’m elated to share the trailer with you.
As it states in a press release on December 11, MasterClass is the online education platform that enables anyone to learn from the best in the world. I am honored and especially happy to be the first online wine program for MasterClass.
I join some amazing instructors in MasterClass including such luminaries as:
- Gordon Ramsay (cooking)
- Thomas Keller (cooking)
- Martin Scorsese (filmmaking)
- Ron Howard (directing)
- Helen Mirren (acting)
- Samuel L. Jackson (acting)
- Armin van Buuren (dance music)
- Christina Aguilera (music)
- David Mamet (dramatic writing)
- Judy Blume (writing)
- Malcolm Gladwell (writing)
- Annie Leibovitz (photography)
- Frank Gehry (architecture)
- Diane von Furstenberg (how to build a fashion brand)
- Marc Jacobs (fashion design)
- Serena Williams (tennis)
- Stephen Curry (shooting, ball-handling, and scoring)
- Garry Kasparov (chess)
- Daniel Negreanu (poker)
- Bob Woodward (investigative journalism).
The last MasterClass instructor, Bob Woodward, is one of my all-time heroes from my days as a young investigative journalist.
Me and Rebecca Yeldman, the director of my Masterclass, during the party to celebrate the end of the filming in September.
The class was filmed in Tuscany in the first week of September with an impressive team of about 50 people and six cameras. It was a Hollywood production in every sense of the term, resulting in incredibly high production value of the videos.
Very little was scripted. Director Rebecca Yeldman and her team prompted me on various subjects and I just spoke my mind. It was a dynamic and fun experience. I guess all those years of videos for JamesSuckling.com (we have about 1,000 now) prepared me for it!
And it felt great to be on camera talking about wine, a subject so dear to my heart, along with my beautiful wife Marie and my son Jack, among others.
There were many great and funny moments. I remember when we were filming the lunch segment of the MasterClass, something went wrong with the oven to roast the sea bass. I was getting completely stressed thinking the fish would be raw when it was served and we would have to do some real acting to pretend it was delicious on camera. However, the film crew patiently waited for the fish to cook an extra 20 or 30 minutes, and in the end, it was perfect and yummy. That’s why I have such a huge grin on camera in the segment when I carry out the fish on a plate!
I also enjoyed the many dinners we spent with some of the film crew, assistants and directors at home and in nearby restaurants. I always brought fun bottles of Italian wine from Petrolo Galatrona 2013 to Montevetrano 2010. We were more than making a film or MasterClass in Italy. We were all living it!
Marie and director Rebecca Yeldman squeezed between two giant steady cam cameras in the kitchen during the lunch segment.
What I most hope is that my MasterClass makes viewers enthusiastic about wine, especially drinking it. This may sound simplistic, but sometimes it gets lost in the wider message about wine.
We need more people to drink great wines around the world, especially Asia where I now live. We need people to open bottles and enjoy wine with friends and family. We need to spend more time on wine appreciation, which is the name of my MasterClass course, and a little bit less on education.
Don’t get me wrong, wine education is great. I spent a lot of time learning about wine from my Master of Wine studies in the late 1980s in London, as well as during current day visits with winemakers and conversations with the wine trade and wine lovers. Wine education gives anyone a deeper understanding and joy in wine.
But we need to promote appreciation of wine first, foremost and always. I meet so many people interested in wine in Asia, for example, who are afraid to try it because they think they don’t know enough about the subject. I tell them to simply open a bottle of wine and try it.
Invest in a corkscrew, like I say in my MasterClass, and enjoy wine. The James Suckling Wine Appreciation MasterClass is designed to help anyone do that.
