My Journey to Italia

My First Wine Tasting

September 20, 2006

On Wednesday our Food and Wine Class had our first excursion to a winery. It was a pretty good time. The whole thing only took three hours but the bus ride was only 20 minutes into the beautiful Tuscan countryside. Our bus was a Mercedes too! Very stylish, it was a shiny light green color. Anyhow, we rolled into Dievole winery, pilled out of the bus and made our way inside to meet our tour guide. We started with a white wine, called Bianco di Malvasia, with bread and olive oil. Usually I don’t like wine, but I actually liked this one, it was very good actually. Our teacher was with us the whole time, a group of about 40 people, and along with the tour guide explained to us how to taste wine, which is what we were there to do.

First, hold the glass by the bottom of the stem, three fingers under the base, two on top, so as to not change the temperature of the wine in the glass our dirty the glass with finger prints. Next, hold your glass up and look at the wine. It should be clear, with nothing floating in it. Then you swirl the wine around in your glass, stop doing so and hold it up again. You should be able to see drips on the inside of the glass. The more drips and the smaller the more alcoholic the wine is. Then you swirl again, stop, stick your nose (literally) in the glass and take a deep strong whiff. Depending on the wine you should be able to smell other kinds of foods, like nuts and fruits. That’s because the wine triggers the sensors in your brain that associates smells with foods. (Weird huh?) Then you take a sip, swish it around in your mouth to clear your palette, and then finally take a real sip. If your mouth feels dry the wine has more tannins in it, swish it in front of your teeth and you can really feel the dryness. Also, depending on the wine you should eat your food before, after or during the tasting.

Whew.

We then went down in the wine cellars and saw the vineyards while we learned more about the wine making process. We tried five kinds of wine; four were red and also ate salami, cheese and dark chocolate. By the end a lot of people, we included, were pretty tipsy! I didn’t like being tipsy on a school field trip. I even dropped all the change out of my purse, turned it over to stop the change from falling out and dropped all my bills on the ground! So dumb! The wine was good though! Beautiful little vineyard too.

posted by Madeline Faye @ 4:56 PM