How to select wines for your first beginners' wine tasting

As you may have read in my 7 steps to organizing a fabulous wine tasting -to view click here , it's easy to impress your friends with a few tricks and a little preparation.
You don't need to be a wine expert to show off. Trust me, my friends usually rave about my wine tastings for days and I can tell you I still have a LOT to learn.

So here are a few more tricks to make sure that you too are able to enjoy a great wine tasting.

1. The most important thing you do is select simple wines.


No need to go directly for a Romanée Conti just yet. You may settle for a 5 to 15$ bottle which I'm sure you'll appreciate.
What I suggest you should do, is buy one-varietal wines. It's hard enough to try to understand what the characteristics of Merlot are, so don't bother and buy an intricate assemblage wine ; you'd be completely lost (and worst of all, your guests would be lost too!).

2. Try to go for an all white or an all red tasting.


This will ease up a lot your task. First of all, you will only have so much aromas that you may find in these wines. For example, if you select only white wines, don't even bother to find strawberry or mushroom and stay focused on the typical white wine aromas like orange, lemon, pineapple, honey, nut, litchi, rose or pear.

3. Find stereotypical wines

What I mean by that is that should really try to find wines that display the typical aromas you would usually find in their varietal.
For instance, I would start out with a Chenin wine (not the most famous varietal, as it mostly grows in the Loire Valley in France). Chenin is a white wine that has the characteristic of showing very vivid acidity. So you would know, when tasting one that you would be most likely to end of sensing aromas of orange or citrus.
If your guests (or yourself!) have really never tried wine tasting before, it would probably come in handy to have flavors that are easy to recognize.

4. Buy a little bit of bread or neutral food, for people to chew on when they feel their mouth is starting to get numb.

Also I may add, that it could be useful if one of your guests has not have time to eat before. Once I organized a tasting in a rush and didn't have time to have a decent lunch. Well, I can let you guess that although it was very fun (for me at least), I ended up trying to convince my friends that red wine was actually white wine with tomato juice inside. Yeah, surprisingly enough the people I had invited to that specific tasting never really wanted to try it again ...

If you manage to get all this straight, there is no reason why your wine tasting shouldn't be a great success!

As an example here are the wines I tasted for a beginners wine tasting last week (red and white).

Chenin, Domaine de la taille aux loups, 2008
Vouvray

Pinot Noir, Les bons Ores, 2005
Chorey les Beaunes

Syrah, Domaine Gros, 2007
Minervois

Grenache, Syrah, Domaine de la Citadelle, 2003
Cotes du Lubéron

How to drink wine, recognize aromas ... and impress your friends !

It was a few years ago, in a fancy restaurant in Paris. The sommelier delicately poured a crimson colored wine in my glass. The moment was tantalizing. The beauty of terroir. I leaned forward to taste the wine and tell him it was great. Everyone was looking. Waiting. Expecting me to sigh with ecstasy. So I did, of course.


But it was corked.
And I thought it was just a very heavy smell of mushroom. Or someone's bad cologne. Or my nose. Hell, I didn't have a clue.

Now I'm pretty sure this could happen to anyone who doesn't have any experience in wine tasting. And it's ok. It happens. It would just be a shame for you to spend 200$ on cork juice for your wedding day.
That's why I decided to deliver my experience of and show you with a little "how to" post, precisely HOW TO drink wine, recognize aromas... and impress your friends !

1. The first and most important thing you need to do is train your nostrils.
Nowadays our noses have just about all their core functions. They are meant to smell, whiff, sniff, snivel, inhale, and mostly identify. But that last action takes practice. You need to learn what a food or flower smells like and memorize this scent. It should be a game really. Each time you go out in a garden or stand in your kitchen (or someone elses !) just try to deeply inhale and sniff everything you can get your hands on.
Ok so you may look a little dumb if your friend stumbles upon you with your nose stuck in a jar of mushroom.
But remember one thing, it is for the greater good: you may have lost your dignity, but next time you drink a 10 year-old Burgundy, you'll know there's truffle in there.


2. The second thing you should consider is, well, cheating.
Fumbling around your friends kitchen may be fun once or twice, but what will happen if people start thinking your a kleptomaniac, or a utensil fetishist? There must be another solution.
Well, there is my friends, and I, in my immense generosity, will promptly deliver it to you. It is a well kept secret. The secret to learning quickly how to recognize different scents without loosing all your friends.
Here is my secret weapon to shine in society and impress my friends with my super smelling skills (I know it sounds very sexy):
Le Nez du Vin, by Jean Lenoir.
A kit of 54 aromas captured in little flasks (the basic fragrances you can find in wine)so that you can train your nostrils until they die. I do not work for Mr Lenoir, nor do I have shares in his business, but I still really recommend anyone who wants to learn how to taste wine to buy it.






3. Drink and taste as much as you can.
But mostly don't just drink, take the time to reflect and think about what you are drinking. Why do you like it ? or not ? What aromas are predominant. Do you smell fruits, flowers ?



So next time you sit in a fancy restaurant, and the sommelier comes up to you and asks you to taste, don't be scared, if the wine is corked, you're allowed to say so. Just think about your little flask and try hard to remember if it corresponds to the same smell. Before you know it, it'll come naturally and you won't even have to think about your magic kit !

Bourgogne mon amour

Today I went to Fouquet's for lunch.

To tell you the truth although it's a real institution in the world of French Brasserie, I had never actually eaten at Fouquet's before.
A diet coke for 15 euros; I can live without that.

Independent Wine Makers Fair

Twice a year the Independent Wine Makers Fair (Salon des Vignerons Indépendants) takes place in Paris.

It's quite an event, and the occasion for amateur wine connoisseurs like me to discover small estates that are hardly sold on the mainstream wine market.

I went there with a couple of friends to experience the frenzy of tasting wines from 9am to 5 pm in a gigantic garage-like hall that held approximately 1000 wine makers.

We started out spitting our wine, but by 2pm we had completely forgotten all about our spitting cups. So I'm not sure my judgment on the last wines we tasted is totally accurate...

In fact, I realized the following morning that I had bought 3 times as much wine past that time.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is because we got lucky and found the best estates towards the end.