Discover your wine style, one glass at a time
Friends,
Let us take a moment of silence to mark the end of a glorious two weeks of vacation. It was a brief staycation, cut short by my employer’s requirement that I actually return to work. Total buzzkill. This time off will be sorely missed. But it’s time to get back to saving the world, one translation at a time [translator’s note: this may be a gross exaggeration].
Before reading on, be sure to read part 1 on rosé winemaking!!
If you’ve been to a liquor store in the last few months, you may have noticed a surge in rosés on display. Rosé is—for some reason—only a seasonal wine. It shows up on shelves in April and disappears by the end of the summer. This is why it is imperative to stock up if you find one you like. These wines are only made in limited quantities, so once a vintage is out of stock, that’s it. You probably won’t see it again until the spring of next year. That said, depending on how much you drink, you probably shouldn’t get a whole case—these wines are for immediate consumption and are not typically meant to be aged.
As promised, here are my Summer 2016 rosé recommendations!
The perfect sailboat wine
Friends,
I’m back! It’s been forever since my last post, and not for lack of things to write about, and definitely not for lack of wine, but rather lack of time. Work has been crazy. Also, I had a midterm this week, so I was in study mode in the days leading up to it (for those who don’t know, I am taking the Beer course at Algonquin, just to round out my sommelier training—more on that in posts to come). Also, as I have mentioned before, we are renovating our house, and last week we were finally able to move out of the guest room in the basement and back into our bedroom on the main floor. But moving an entire bedroom from one floor to another is harder than it sounds. Have you ever tried moving a king-size mattress? It is a) heavy and b) awkward. Also, the fact that I am pretty useless in the upper-body strength department doesn’t help. So useless, in fact, that my husband affectionately calls me T-Rex.
Some of you may recall that I went to the California Wine Fair last Friday which, as it turns out, was a somewhat disappointing experience.
For one thing, my wine count went down from the 42 wines tasted at the Taste Ontario event to somewhere between 30-35. And since I always seem to be in some sort of internally-driven competition, this felt like a loss of some sort, even though the competition was against myself and myself alone (which would make me a winner as well, no?).
This was partly due to the fact that at 5 p.m., 2 hours after my arrival, the lights flickered on and off, indicating the end of the trade tasting. At this point the pourers began promptly removing bottles from the table, and the panic among tasters was palpable. What? That’s it? It’s over already? But we were just getting started!
Today was a great wine day. I went to my first trade tasting! After getting back from Taste Ontario 2016, my initial thoughts were:
a) How sweet is it that I am now considered part of the trade!?
b) I really need business cards.
While I was there, I took lots of notes about the wines I tasted, but I also took lots of notes about my first impressions of a trade tasting, from the outsider/newbie’s perspective. I felt a bit like an undercover spy, or an imposter. Luckily, after a few sips of wine I overcame that feeling. Continue reading
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