Whenever you have the chance to compare and contrast multiple bottles at the same time, you stand to learn more than if you were just focused on one bottle. Wine tastings and events are great ways to gain exposure to many wines in one sitting, without having to foot the bill for all of the bottles yourself. Search for wine tastings in your area at LocalWineEvents.com.
Another fun educational endeavor is to start a tasting group among friends (or better yet, make new friends by starting a wine tasting group). If you take the time to organize it, you’ll be surprised at how many people pop out of the woodwork, eager to join you. In fact, you’ll probably have to turn some folks down, so it doesn’t get out of control. Wine has social pull, I’m telling you. Here’s how to do it.
1. Decide how big your group will be. Up to ten people can comfortably taste a single bottle (each gets about a two-ounce pour and you have a bit of extra wine for user error). Six to ten people is perfect for a wine tasting group—enough for some good banter and energy, but not so many that it turns into a rager.
2. Meet regularly. Once a month is a good starting point.
3. Assign themes. You can use homework six-packs (see page 183) as a guide to exploring different regions and grapes, or you can come up with your own. The idea is to taste a group of wines that have something in common (be they all from New Zealand or all made from the riesling grape). That way, you train your brain to find associations. If you taste like this on a regular basis, you’ll be blown away by how fast you learn. Six bottles is the magic number—it’s enough wine to educate and entertain, but not so much that it’s overwhelming. Many retailers also give discounts when you buy six bottles at a time.
4. Share the cost. One of the best things about a tasting group is that you don’t have to pay for all the wine! There are a lot of ways to split the bill; the easiest is to rotate the shopping each month. When one person is held accountable, it’s less complicated, and it ensures you get the right combination of wines. You’ll want to decide on a target dollar amount (for example, two hundred dollars per six-pack). This will deter anyone from being too miserly or going totally overboard with spending. If you’re going to use the homework six-packs, I’d advise you to take the list into a good wine retailer, let them know how much you want to spend, and ask them to help you find the best examples of those types of wines.
5. Establish the feel ahead of time. Some tasting groups operate very formally, with library-like silence while tasting and taking notes. Others just set the wine out as a centerpiece for conversation. I’d shoot for something in between. Taking some notes before you share encourages people to form their own opinions—without being swayed by more vocal members of the group. If your group decides to take notes, it should be part of the host’s duty to have pens and paper ready.
6. Concealing and revealing the wines adds to the fun. Trying putting all the bottles in paper bags to add a blind-tasting element to the evening. It’s also exciting to reveal prices after everyone has given their take on the wines. This can be especially entertaining if you throw in at least one low-priced wine and one expensive wine. I love seeing people go gaga over a bottle and then learning it costs only six dollars.
Homework has never been this fun. The following six-packs serve as a basis for exploring a grape or region, or for contrasting certain wines. If you can’t find a particular wine on the list, ask for help. Knowledgeable wine shop staff can help you find an appropriate substitute. When tasting, try to compare what you experience in the different bottles—and go back and re-taste as much as you like. It might seem like a party in a box, but this is one of the best ways to train your brain on wine.
Less commitment than forming a tasting group, a wine tasting party is another terrific excuse to simultaneously imbibe and educate. Here are three ideas for fun wine-focused fetes, sans the snobbery.
The Idea
A pairing party with a challenge: Which of your guests can best match a wine of their choice with a delectable meat loaf recipe? Everyone votes but only one lucky guest will go home with the prize.
Meat loaf haters, suspend your general skepticism; this recipe is so good, and different, that it inspired a wine tasting party. Just try it. Truth be told, it isn’t my mama’s recipe. Ota, the creator of the recipes, is my husband’s father’s mother’s mother. Each generation has tweaked the formula a bit, and the result isn’t so much a loaf as a gourmet batch of personal-sized meat muffins. Yum.
Party Planning
Send six to eight guests an invitation to the Match My Mama’s Meat Loaf Wine Challenge. Let them know you’ll be featuring a distinguished recipe, and you’d like them to bring two (yes, two) bottles of a wine they want to submit in the pairing contest. You can explain to them that one of the bottles is for the actual contest; the additional bottles of wine will be given as the grand prize to whoever brings the winning bottle.
At the party, make sure you place each contest bottle in a numbered paper bag, so there’s no bias in the voting. After everyone has had a chance to try each wine, take a vote on which bottle paired best with the meat loaf. Reveal the winner, and let him go home with his hefty prize (and hopefully some leftovers!).
The Idea
This party is a laid-back regional pairing experiment focused on the wines of Southern Italy and the country’s iconic culinary staple—pizza.
I love the combination of beer and pizza, but there are plenty of delicious wines that work too. Some of the best options come from the same place pizza does—Southern Italy. The wines of Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily were once considered plonk, but there has recently been a resurgence in quality from these regions. More and more scrumptious wines with personality are emerging from Southern Italy, and the even better news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune to try them.
Party Planning
This is a casual party you could easily throw together for five to fifty people. You’ll need to buy one bottle of each wine listed here for every ten people. Pour a taste of each at a time and mix and match with a variety of high-quality, handcrafted pizzas. For extra fun, you can have everyone vote on their favorite combination of wine and pie.
Montepulciano d’Abruzzo
I adore the combination of rustic earthiness and big fruit in these wines. They are unapologetically characterful and usually extreme values. They are made from the montepulciano grape and are from Abruzzo, near the heel on the “boot” of Italy.
Nero d’Avola
The hot, dry island of Sicily is often Italy’s most productive wine region, turning out scores of bulk red, white, and sweet wine. Nero d’Avola, full of personality, is one of the island’s best wines for the money.
Taurasi
The aglianico grape is the base for this wine, which is probably the most well known and respected of all the Southern Italian reds. It is a deeply colored, almost black wine. It almost tastes black, too, with flavors of tar, bitter chocolate, leather, and sun-scorched fruit.
Negroamaro
Rugged but juicy, negroamaro, the grape name, literally means “black bitter” in Italian. These chewy, dense, and tannic wines come alive with rich foods like sausage pizza.
Primitivo
Because of its Italian stamp of rustic earthiness, you may not at first recognize it, but primitivo is actually the same grape as California’s zinfandel. The telltale überripe fruit should be your best clue.
The Idea
A night of surprising pairings: extravagant wines with simple, down-home cooking.
In my life, I’ve been lucky enough to call a handful of beautiful and eccentric places home: South Florida, Dallas, San Francisco, Sonoma, Nashville, and Chicago. Every place has its own slant on the epicurean world, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my adventure in the South, it’s that even though the food might not look all that sophisticated, Southerners take it very seriously.
The juxtaposition of this party is what makes it so fun: humble, classic Southern cooking paired with highbrow wine. You might not normally think of white Burgundy or Champagne when you think of fried chicken, but trust me . . . it is amazing. Hopefully, you and your guests will walk away realizing that sometimes the most unexpected pairings are the most thrilling! Yeehaw.
Party Planning
Invite six to ten guests to the party. Buy one bottle of each of the following wines listed. Pour a taste (about two ounces, or a third of a glass) of each wine with the suggested food pairing.
Pairing One
Champagne (the real French stuff) paired with french fries, tater tots, plain kettle chip potato chips, hush puppies, fried chicken, or catfish.
Why it works: Champagne, dry and tart, acts like a squeeze of lemon juice on any of the above fried foods—the effervescence brightens flavors and provides a refreshing juxtaposition to the fat and salt.
Pairing Two
White Burgundy (try a wine from Meursault, Pouilly-Fuissé, or Viré-Clessé) paired with fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, or corn on the cob.
Why it works: White Burgundy is 100 percent chardonnay, and chardonnay from any of these southern villages tastes especially sun-kissed. The ripe, slightly nutty, and buttery flavors of the wine complement the richness of the suggested pairings, but their tangy acidity cuts through the fat, providing a refreshing contrast.
Pairing Three
California Zinfandel paired with pulled pork sandwiches and coleslaw relish, hamburgers, or barbecue baby back ribs.
Why it works: Juicy and full-bodied, high-alcohol zinfandels have flavors of blackberry jam, raisins, prunes, and pepper. The wine’s big, bold, fruit-driven presence stands up to larger-than-life flavors like barbecue.
South African pinotage paired with hot dogs, corn dogs, Lit’l Smokies, ham, or pigs in a blanket.
Why it works: Pinotage is wild. South Africans created their signature grape by crossbreeding two varieties—pinot noir and cinsault—in an effort to make a more resilient and hearty wine that still had the grace and aromatics of pinot noir. The result, although popular there, doesn’t taste much like the goal. Instead, most pinotage is an odd mix of spicy, smoky flavors and a loud, unapologetic aroma of raw meat, sometimes also combined with bananas and other tropical fruit. It’s carnal, which makes it a perfect partner to meaty, smoky Southern foods.
Like field trips for your tongue, visiting wineries can be an incredible way to learn. Getting an intimate, firsthand perspective on how a winery operates is invaluable, and usually pretty romantic. (If you’ve never walked a row of vines with a winemaker, or taken in the yeasty perfume of a room of fermenting wine, you are in for a real treat!) I always learn something when I visit a new winery; I’m certain you will too.
One fun wine bonus we haven’t even touched on yet—all of the best wine regions just happen to be in the most beautiful corners of the earth, with great weather for most of the year. (Clever little grapes.) Wine-focused travel is the way to go, so start your bucket list now. Here’s my best advice (and some other great resources) for planning your trip. For even more detail and specific recommended itineraries to select wine regions, visit my website, melaniewagnerwine.com.
Learning a bit about a region before you dive in will help you make the most of your trip. Print a map, investigate interesting places, and create a plan before you get there. Here are some of the best regionally specific websites with loads of info on wine tourism.
Sure, every winery and wine region has its own feel, but, collectively, people who make wine are an extremely hospitable sort. Like a bunch of old Italian grandmas, they take care of you, and you can tell they enjoy doing it. You’ll find some wineries are open to the public, which means you can drop in unannounced, and some are open by reservation only. In either case, making reservations tells a winery that you’ve made them a priority, and they always appreciate that. Even given their proclivity to roll out the red carpet, you can set yourself up for the warmest welcome possible by letting them know you’re coming.
That having been said, don’t set such a tight schedule of reservations for yourself that you can’t enjoy each visit. Oftentimes, you’ll find tours can last a little longer than planned, and if you’re having a great time, you may want to linger; wine country is no place for rushing around. You also want to leave space in your schedule for a little adventure. Maybe you spot a great antique shop or an ice-cream parlor or a few wineries that aren’t on the map (oh, they’re there). Leave plenty of time in between appointments for exploring. I think three reservations in one day is doable and sets a nice pace. Additionally, the vibe will be less Disney-ish if you can avoid weekends, and if you look for wineries a little off the beaten path. Steer clear of wineries that advertise on billboards.
“Early” is a loose term when it comes to wine tourism. Most wineries open for tours and tastings around ten or eleven a.m. Getting your day started when theirs does ensures a few things:
(b) You’ll up your shot at VIP status.
A winery is much more likely to open special bottles at the beginning of the day, when they know more people will be coming through to taste. Showing up ten minutes before they close will only guarantee you the dregs.
(c) You’ll have time to fit in a lunch break,
especially important as it relates to the next bit of advice . . .
The combination is intoxicating: crunchy gravel underfoot, gorgeous rolling vineyards as far as the eye can see, kind people, fresh air, warm sunshine, colorful flora and fauna everywhere (wine country dogs are the best!), and the magnetic allure of the farmer-chic lifestyle. Add a fountain or two and free-flowing wine to the picture and you’ve got yourself a recipe for getting really, really tipsy. Make sure you drink lots of water, take breaks, and eat often. Assign a designated driver for the day, hire a car, or transport yourself with a bike to avoid any potential combination of drinking and driving. Remember that it’s OK to spit every now and then, too (See “Spit or Swallow?” page 73). No one will be insulted if you don’t finish every wine, or any wine for that matter.
In the olden days, visiting wineries was free. Now, most charge a fee for tasting and/or tours. In the United States, that charge usually ranges from five to fifteen dollars, but many wineries allow you to apply it directly to the purchase of wine. Which leads me to my next thought . . . While you’re there, buy wine! Wine makes a great souvenir. Every time you open a bottle you can relive your fabulous trip. (It also makes a nice consolation prize for anyone who didn’t make it to wine country with you.)
6. Be Prepared to Take Your Purchase on the Road
And don’t forget, if you’re buying wine and taking it with you—as opposed to having the winery ship it to you later—make sure you don’t leave it in a hot car. When I’m planning a warm-weather wine pilgrimage, I bring along a cooler and ice to store my booty.
Did You Know? Some wineries have very small production wines that they sell only at the winery. These are usually passion projects for the winemaker and can be good values.
Wine clubs put shopping on autopilot with a trusted source. (Plus it’s a treat to come home to a surprise box of wine.) Most wineries have a wine club, as do certain wine merchants and organizations. With many of them, you can decide on the price point you are comfortable with, and choose how often you’d like shipments.
Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant: This iconic Berkeley, California, importer ships hand-selected wines from France and Italy for a once-a month shipment. His two- or four-bottle options make a terrific gift for the European wine lover. Kermitlynch.com
Acme Fine Wines: If you are into finding out about California’s hottest undiscovered gems before anyone else, look no further than this incredible Napa-centric shop. The staff has their finger on the pulse of what’s next in Napa, and there are a variety of options for club membership. Acmefinewines.com
Food & Wine magazine: There are several options for pricing and frequency with this top wine club. An added bonus: the wines come with recipe pairings. Fwwineclub.com
In addition to all the tasting you’ll be doing, it’s informative—and fun—to keep reading about wine. Whether it’s an industry magazine, a blog, or one of the following fascinating wine books, you’re certain to pick up some new piece of knowledge every time you dive into the prose of these respected sources.
For Detailed Information and Reference
For Less Reference, More Romance