Today I am launching myself on a new voyage of exploration!
The world of wine has been beckoning to me for some years now... From my first taste of Blue Nun as a teenager in the 70's, to the herd of little black plastic bulls from the numerous bottles of Torres Sangre de Toro that accumulated on the window sill of the kitchen in the first North Vancouver home I shared with my husband Paul, the many bottles of Donini Trebianno we shared with friends ( because it was cheap, came in big bottles and was very palatable...) to tasting really good wine once I started working at a Relais & Chateaux in 1991, it has been a delicious voyage of discovery for me. Wine has always fascinated me. The more I learn, the more I want to know. Sharing my discoveries has been the best part, whether with guests at the restaurant where I worked or with friends at wine pairing dinners where we choose wines to pair with the courses we each prepare.
Over the years I have had the good fortune to travel to a few wine producing regions and taste wines at the source, giving those wines a sense of place and new meaning. Two years ago, in the course of taking the French Wine Scholar program, learning about the regions and tasting the wines while seeing the visual images in the online portion of the program as well as during the class, I realized how important these visual images are to developing a better understanding of the wines. Short of being able to visit the region in person, watching film clips, learrning about the terrior, history and winemaking of a specific region while tasting the wines, could virtually transport you there and give you the sense of place to identify the wines by. Pairing with foods of the region at the same time completes the picture, as wines are often best when paired with their regional foods.
Thus the idea for the Wine Club was born, and for two winters a small group of tasters met for a few weeks in the winter to explore different wine varieties, regions and food pairings, learning a little about the world of wine along the way. After a trip to Tuscany in the spring of 2012, I realized the importance of focussing on a single region at a time. Tours of two Antinori Estates and Barone Ricasoli provided me with a unique opportunity to learn first hand about the history and wine production of the iconic wines produced there. The Wine Club has given me a platform to share these discoveries and the incentive to continue my explorations of the wine world.
In this blog I will share what we discover about the wines and regions we journey to, in the virtual world we see through the videos we watch and the sensory world through the wines we taste. I hope you come along with us!
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