Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

The Ultimate Wine Series

Kathie and I (and Sue across the street) recently signed up for a series of wine seminars up in Bethesda, MD being given by Mark Phillips of WineTasting.org. It’s three hours every Thursday for four weeks. What drew us to it was their philosophy of practicality. They sum it up pretty well on their home page but in essence, they’re all about making wine fun and practical for people instead of intimidating… in other words, there’s no “undercurrents of currant with hints of asparagus and a cigar-box finish” style of dialog, except when making fun of wine critics! The audience is small, maybe 30 people, and the series is being filmed for a DVD release later this year (a similar series with the same speaker was aired on PBS last year and got great reviews).

The first seminar, last week, was all about tasting wine. Through the course of the evening we sampled 12 different wines and learned about the proper way to taste wine — as opposed to drinking wine — as well as how to classify things like appearance, aroma, feeling, flavor, finish, body, and style (old world vs. new world, and sometimes international). It was a very fun and enlightening evening. The next two seminars are about “Enjoying Wine”, mainly covering practical info like how to store wine and how long to keep it before opening it, how to store an unfinished bottle of wine and for how long, how to order wine in a restaurant, etc. The final class is about matching wine with food.