Week 1

Wine has always been that shirt in the back of the closet that always seems to be a great shirt, but never turns out to be all that great by the end of the day. You try it a couple times each year, but it just never turns out to work all that well. I don't try wine all that often, I do enjoy smelling different wines when those around my are having it with a meal, but the aspect of tasting it has never sat that well with me.

My experience with wine is slim, I've visited vineyards, have siblings that work at them, friends that are extremely knowledgeable, but my lack of knowledge in wine prevents me from fully understanding all of it's complexities and depth. I look forward to learning more about it and what the complete wine experience is about. My typical experiences are around dinner time when I'm offered a small glass, one that I usually turn down.

I can't wait to slosh and make bird sounds when I try my first wine during this course though. I never knew that there were so many different techniques to tasting wine. The front, left, right, and back of my pallet will all finally have a chance to properly taste wine the way it was made to be tasted. Now, if I could only figure out where I left my wine spit bucket....

Moving forward I hope to learn how to properly identify the various aspect and characteristics that wine hold. I currently don't quite understand what makes a full body wine a full body wine, or what a flinty wine tastes like. I had my first lesson on wines when visiting Thomas Jefferson's wine cellar and the history of his classification system on wines, now I'll be able to understand what the tour guides were really speaking about and how impactful Mr. Jefferson's analysis was.