Tag Archive - tasting

A rum experience at 6 am

August 21, 2010 in wine culture with 0 Comments

When anyone says “I just don’t have the palate for wine” or “I can’t taste all those ‘things’ other people talk about in wine” I try to point out that we pretty much all have exactly the same ability to taste, but we all have different experiences, vocabulary and confidence.

vanilla pod in milk
Image by VannaGocaraRupa via Flickr

It isn’t that they CAN’T taste wines, they simply are not used to analysing what they are experiencing, often because they haven’t really bothered before.

It is a matter of education, not in the sense of classes and diplomas, but just taking the time to taste, and most importantly, SMELL things.

The importance of smell to the enjoyment of wine starts early.

I was reminded of this only yesterday morning. On our arrival at the airport (at 6 am after an overnight flight), a fellow passenger managed to smash a 1.5 litre bottle of dark rum he had bought Duty Free (probably for the best!).

I barely paid attention, though noticed ‘a’ smell.

My wife complained about the “smell of alcohol”

But my daughter (only 5, and rather hyper after the flight) said, “What was that Daddy? I think it was a bottle of vanilla. I used some with grandma and that’s what it smelled like. Why did he have a bottle of vanilla, Daddy”

She’s absolutely right. It DID smell of vanilla more than anything else (that she’s used to smelling).

When was the last time you took a second to ‘smell’ vanilla? I’m off to do it right now!

Let’s encourage kids to smell and discuss food, ingredients …  even wine … then hopefully we will all enjoy experiencing things more, even alcohol spillages at airports.

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The Wine Show Merry-go-round

October 23, 2009 in wine conversation with 0 Comments

It is a really busy time, and a great time to taste wine.

Today, and for this weekend, I will be at The Wine Show in the Business Design Centre in London showing off some of the wines I represent in the UK on the Wines from Spain stand (come over to say hello), but also speaking to other exhibitors about what they are doing to reach wine consumers, and about their innovations.

Then it is the turn of the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference taking place in Lisbon from the 30th of October to the 1st of November 2009. There are already 117 confirmed participant bloggers from across Europe but also further afield. I am particularly excited to know that we have so many friends from the US and Canada coming too as I have yet to attend the US version of this event. Plenty of great wine and food will be consumed alongside the more serious conference discussion programme.

Then it is back to the UK to take part in The Wine Gang Christmas Fair on November 7th, 2009. There will be literally hundreds of wines there for you to taste PLUS I’ll be helping to showcase some great food and wine bloggers, recording what we get up to on the day and the impressions of the wines.

After that I skip off to Rioja a few times for the Wine Future conference and then a further couple of trips with wine lovers later in November and December.

Somewhere in there I hope to bring you updates on some of the exciting wine developments I’ve been learning about in packaging, research and even games! (more soon)

This blog is not updated every day, but if you want to stay up-to-date (and until I manage to bring it all back into one place) you can follow me on twitter and on the various sites linked above. I hope that somewhere along the way I can taste some of these wines with you in person.

Stay in touch! I may need your help to remind me where I am at any moment.

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Coffee & Wine

August 5, 2009 in wine culture with 7 Comments

Expect to see a fair bit about coffee and wine over the next few weeks as I’ve “discovered” that there are a lot of similarities between the two and maybe learning about coffee will give me a different perspective on wine.

Rather than a post this time, here is an AudioBoo I posted earlier.

Listen!

If you are interested in some of the things I’m planning (even if I have not told you what these might be), leave me a comment here.

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Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Interactive wine tasting

July 30, 2009 in wine education with 11 Comments

TwitCam Wine Tasting

TwitCam Wine Tasting

I was playing with a new service on twitter call TwitCam that allows you to create a video broadcast and then let people know, and chat, via Twitter.

It was fun broadcasting a wine tasting LIVE.

My first video was meant only as a response to a question, but it encouraged some feedback from others who tried to interact, so I thought I would do another and ask for interaction. I decided to run a wine tasting, not as a “presentation” (as most wine videos are), but as an interactive event, getting guesses on the wine from participants – a double blind tasting*.

The results can now be seen on the archived video here (or click on the image). I am not embedding it here as it starts playing automatically, which can get annoying.

We are only just starting to explore the possibilities of  bringing together different services such as twitter, blogging, video and audio. This is what can make communication and learning fun. Not just for wine, but in many fields. It is not a lecture, but a way to reach out to a lot more people around the globe and make friends.

If you participated or left comments later, thank you so much! I had great fun. So much so I’m planning on doing it again next week.

See you Thursday, 6th of August at 16:00 UK time (please check what that would be for you).

* a tasting where one person has to guess the wine based only from another person’s notes – who themselves doesn’t know what the wine is. Except I did. Hard to hide it from yourself really.

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Wine tasting, the professional way

June 29, 2009 in wine education with 3 Comments

I thought you might find this both interesting and amusing.

I took part in a tasting of 75 wines with Charles Metcalfe (aka @thewinesinger) last week. During the day I took some video on my new iPhone 3GS (yes, playing around). I’ll publish the serious interviews soon, but this is Charles tasting wine 60 (or more) of over 75.

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