Wine up the snoz burns

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Today, I learned the importance of paying close attention to what you are doing when sniffing wine. I was a bit distracted listening to someone talk with my nose in the glass and proceeded to get a nostril-full of Sauvignon Blanc. Not very fun, but highly amusing to my slightly intoxicated wine-tasting buddies.
Tonight was our last wine tasting class :( It was almost sad near the end when I was helping pack up. I’ve really enjoyed the class. We’ve tried 75 different wines in 8 weeks! No power point lecture today. Instead, we started with a 20 question multiple choice final exam. The course isn’t graded, so we didn’t need to stress out too badly about it, but it actually was really hard!!! (For shame Cliff—actually finding out if we retained all your chemistry, math and German ranking sweetness scales—for shame.) It was fun though to realize how much I actually did learn, and I ended up doing ok on the test…naturally :)
Next we did a blind tasting of eight different wines using a Universal California 20-point wine evaluation scorecard. We were supposed to score the wines 0,1 or 2 in terms of colour, body, boquet, acidity, and several other categories. Then we added up the score. A rank of 12 on the scale is determined commercial, and since all of these wines were commercials wines, we should at least have come up with numbers that high, but Cliff said that there’s no real right answer. I’m not sure if I was doing it right, since I came up with anywhere between 7 and 17, but I suppose it was a bit difficult to rank them as “normal” or “off” if we didn’t know exactly what the wine we were tasting was supposed to be. Cliff also provided us with a “wine-bank” list of ten or twelve different wines on the scorecard, and we were supposed to try and see if we could match eight of them up with their bottles. We tasted four whites and four reds. Two paperbag wrapped bottles of each were on eight tables and we rotated around tasting them all. It was actually very cool because we had to keep open minds about the wines we were tasting; we didn’t initially have a clue what to expect, since we couldn’t see the bottle. So I found out without any pre-concieved notions or bias that I am a fan of at least one Shiraz and a Moscato.
I think everyone had an awesome time taking the wine-tasting class, and I have a feeling that it will continue to be very popular in future years. (Many of the faculty/staff expressed interest in returning for more fun next year). Perhaps it will even be offered for credit! Too bad all of us seniors won’t be here, but it did kind of act as a nice class bonding experience for our last semester here. Good end to a good class.