Mark Oldman/Courtesy photo
For the 19th year running — not that anyone’s keeping score — wine expert Mark Oldman returns to the 2025 Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, where his seminars have become the stuff of legend.
This year, Oldman raises the stakes — again — with not one but two buzzworthy seminars, called “GO BIG: Superstar Magnums & Beyond and California Royalty — California’s Top Winemakers.” There are two chances to attend each seminar.
“It’s the highlight of my year,” he said of his unique connection to Aspen Food & Wine. “I do a lot of food and wine festivals, but Aspen’s in a category of its own.
“I’ve always thought big. I mean, if you’re going to do something, let’s do it with a resourcefulness and an energy and an enthusiasm that almost goes beyond imagination,” he added. “It’s almost a game I play with myself. What would it look like if it was just merely excellent? Then, what would it look like if I added this and then I did this?”
With almost two decades of experimentation, Oldman is confident he can sense what satisfies the audience. Plus, he knows that “Aspen audiences are the best.” Although he can’t put his finger on exactly the cause for his success, he knows there is a process going on in the back of his mind that takes notes, and he is continually refining his techniques.
Setting the bar high with superior seminars, he might be the only speaker to have four spots of highly anticipated seminars at the event.
“I just want to give people their money’s worth,” he said. “I’m constantly looking for ways to mark time through great experiences and then swag that backs that up.”
He’s the author of three successful books: “How to Drink Like a Billionaire,” “Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine,” and “Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine.” Yet, he admits he has a special place in his heart for live events being “immediately more fulfilling.”
In his upcoming seminar, “GO BIG: Superstar Magnums & Beyond,” he focuses on — the beyond. He is “personally in awe of big bottles.”
“One of my great passions is getting top wineries to part with their big bottles,” he said. He attributes this feeling to both aesthetic and quality reasons. Wine ages in slower bottles. He notes, “They also just look really cool.”
Fine restaurants, notably steakhouses, often display opened big bottles, which like Aspen itself, is an “agent of awe and generosity and plentitude and fun.”
Oldman will showcase a breathtaking array of large-format bottles:
- Magnum: The equivalent of two standard 750-milliliter bottles.
- Jeroboam: Typically, four bottles in one, nicknamed “Jero.”
- Methuselah: Eight times a standard wine bottle.
- Salmanazar: 12 bottles in one.
- Melchior: 18 bottles of wine.
With his expertise, he managed to convince one of the top pinot noir winemakers to part with a Melchior.
“It’s what no one’s ever seen before,” Oldman said of the Melchior — a 24 standard bottle that has to be tapped like a keg. He estimates the likely cost as $120 per bottle multiplied by 24 equals $24,000.
This extreme pursuit of large formats is not without its challenges for producers. He explains winemakers have shared with him that it’s often too risky to put more than six liters in one bottle, in case a bottle gets destroyed through shipping or another adverse event.
He humorously adds, “The 18-liter might be getting flown out on a special jet. Basically, it needs its own secret service.”
Oldman’s other seminar, “California Royalty: California’s Top Winemakers,” is apropos considering he learned about wine in California while attending Stanford University in Palo Alto in his younger years. Before that, he muses he was content drinking Moosehead beer.
“It was 1990, and I was a junior at Stanford. I had just returned from a study abroad program at the University of Oxford,” he said.
Back then, he considered himself a New Jersey-raised guy who knew nothing about wine, until he discovered Oxford’s wine club. It is reminiscent of the club in Rob Lowe’s movie, “Oxford Blues.” Oldman saw the members take wine seriously, and he started to learn more too.
When he got back to Stanford, he thought it would be fun to create a non-competitive wine club — California style. It was intended to be more casual than a club for career advancement.
“I thought it would be fun to learn about wine, so I invited the top winemakers from Napa, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara,” he said.
Still an undergraduate, when Oldman reached out, he hoped it wouldn’t be out of his price range. To his complete surprise, famed winemaker Robert Mondavi, among others, offered to speak to the university wine club free of charge. Motivated by this opportunity, Oldman found himself “getting into wine” in a much bigger way.
He created “California Royalty: California’s Top Winemakers” as a homage to his Stanford wine circle ties and because they are some of the great wines of the world.
He adds that two of the eight wines he chose for this California seminar selection are created by female winemakers, which “still isn’t common enough.”
There’s another element of the seminar: “They are all the filet mignon of wine, but some are microscopically produced,” Oldman said, meaning they are nearly impossible to find.
For him, the Food & Wine Classic remains a platform for his boundless generosity in wine education.
As for his future Food & Wine plans?
“So long as I’m around and can be vertical,” he said, “I’m going to do it.”
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