A good week for free Wine !

My wine cellar ( ok, my kitchen closet ) was bare. I had been drinking fortified wines for the last couple of months and I had drunk all of them in preparation for my WSET -Unit 6 exam. I was out of wine.

Then this last week happened. Sunday, I volunteered for the California Home Winemakers Competition and in appreciation I got 6 unopened wines ( from the 2nd / backup bottles of each entry ), 6 wines that had been opened and poured, and for volunteering on Sunday as well, I got 3 additional unopened bottles.

So i drove home on Tuesday with 15 bottles of wine in my trunk, including: a Ruby Red Grapefruit wine, an apple wine, and other mostly red wines, generally zin, cabernet, and syrah.

After the competition we got to taste some of the winners. This was a real trip. I tasted lemon wines, golden raspberry wines, tomato wines ( actually quite good ), a totally awesome black raspberry wine, a bell pepper wine, among many others. I was looking specifically for the fruit wines because I was pretty sure I wouldn't run into them that often again at the Safeway store and I needed to be familiar with them for my experience for the AWS Wine Judge Certification program.

I admit that some of the wines that i brought home, I tasted once and poured out. Not that the wine was bad, just that it wasn't that interesting enough for me to invest my time in it beyond becoming familiar with the taste and characteristics. That is one of the pleasures of 'free' wine - you don't feel bad if it goes in the sink and down the drain.

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Then yesterday I had a great time at a tasting of "Wines of Navarra". I had volunteered to help out with the people who were staging the event. The Oxbow Wine Merchant in Napa was the local sponsor and the "Wines of Spain" and especially the region of Navarra supplied the wines and the literature about them.

This was a fun event and as well as the public tasting, there was also an on-line virtual tasting and a simultaneous "tweet up" about the event where tasters were encouraged to let others know about the tasting and if there were any wines they liked.

We had over 125 people tasting 10 different wines and there were 2-4 pourers keeping busy all of the time. i was totally surprised that I could remember where a particular taster was in the order even if he/she was gone for several minutes before returning to taste the next wine. i suppose that people who do this more often get good at it. For me it was a surprise - but at same time it reminded me of 30 years ago when I was an air traffic controller and had to keep aircraft locations in my head.

It is a lot of fun to actually work with the public and be a pourer. I don't have the full skill set to actually keep up the patter and actually sell the wines as I am pouring them, plus we were much too busy to even try but maybe that will come in time. Note: We were not actually selling the wines, it was purely educational and we didn't actually have any wines available to sell, but when I talk about 'selling' I mean giving the taster the full story about the wine, a handle by which to remember it, something he/she can take home and then remember that wine later on.

After the event was over, the best part came. The pourers were offered the opportunity to take some of the wines home. In fact because it had been such a busy and popular event we were given several bottle to take home.

So now my wine closet is full again. Such is the life of a wine student.

john