Nancy and I started this blog to be a place where wine lovers can meet without worrying about their knowledge level or expertise. A place to share our and your experiences enjoying wine. We are relatively new at seriously looking at the wines we drink and are not experts by any means. However, we would like to assist others further their knowledge of wine while we further ours. We hope the less experienced wine drinkers will learn from their interactions with this site and the more knowledgable will teach all of us as we continue on our journey of wine enjoyment. Wine tasting and education has been a lot of fun for us and we want everyone else to share in that fun and share their stories, too. And remember, your taste is never wrong. What I like you may dislike and what you like I may dislike. The fun part is discovering where our tastes match and where they differ. Sometimes when Nancy and I taste a wine and talk about it you would swear we are talking about two different wines and other times we both get about the same taste and nose.
We first became somewhat seriously interested in wine about the year 2000. That is when we graduated from buying wine because it had an interesting label to wine that tasted good. We decided we needed to learn more and took a wine tasting class offered by a local college. From that class we learned to analyze the wine by the nose, color, flavor, finish and other characteristics. We were also exposed to varietals we had never tasted or maybe even heard of. The instructors were the owners of a local wine store and we started attending the Thursday night wine tastings they held. We have been attending those tastings regularly since then.
One early tasting I remember very well. It was a tasting of the 1999 Bordeaux vintage. It was the first time we had tasted wines from Bordeaux and those young wines were very tannic but also very good. Unfortunately we did not have the experience to know we should age those wines and drank them over the next year or so. Otherwise, we would probably have them to drink now and they would really be excellent. We still aren’t experts at determining which wines to age but we are learning as we go along.
This blog will cover our experiences as we continue wine tasting in the years ahead. We usually go to a wine tasting weekly at a local wine shop named Fine Wines of Stockton. George and Gail Herron are the owners and very good friends. Both are very knowledgable and George goes to France every year to taste the newest Bordeaux vintage and decide which wines to import while Gail is an expert on Spanish wines. The tastings always follow a theme such as California Chardonnay against the rest of the world or Bordeaux or Spanish or Portuguese wines. We also have a friend, Dave who comes over on most Monday nights for dinner. We alternate weeks as to who supplies the wine. It is usually a red wine as Dave is not real enthused about whites. It is a casual dinner and we don’t try real hard to pair the wine with the food, it’s more about the wine. We will occasionally hold dinner parties where we will try to pair the wine and food. Sometimes successfully and sometimes, oh well.
We also do other charity wine tastings locally and travel to different wine areas of the country to taste at the wineries in those areas. We have been up to the Willamette valley in Oregon, Columbia and the Yakima valley in Washington, Santa Ynez and Santa Barbara valleys and of course Napa, Sonoma and our local Lodi area. We have also done a lot of exploring in the Placerville, Fairplay and Eldorado county appellations here in California. We would be real interested in hearing from people in the other states of the USA and of course anywhere else around the world.
We will be writing about our tastings and giving our impressions of the wines we taste on our Thursday wine tastings, Monday dinners with Dave and any other tastings we may attend. We will also write about wines we have at dinner when traveling or visiting friends. We hope you will contribute to this blog with your views on the wines we have tasted or a wine you think others may find interesting.
Enjoy wine;
Peter and Nancy
