First Wine Blog


Current Experience With Wine

So far in life, I have a fairly minimal amount of experience with wine. Until fairly recently, a lot of my peers and I treated alcohol as just a means to get drunk, so nobody really cared about how things tasted. With that mindset, it feels pretty taboo to drink along with a meal or just drink to enjoy the taste. That view also wasn't helped by the fact that most of the wine I had tried until recently was either a cheap Barefoot Fruitscato or came from a bag. I think I only started to come around to wine when I wanted to have a drink with some character to go with some steak. I had a friend who brewed his own mead, so I drank some of that with the steak. While the mead probably wasn't the ideal pairing for steak, the combination was still very enjoyable and opened me up to the idea that pairing certain foods and alcohols can be tasty.

I am very new to wine vocabulary and spent nearly all my life not giving any thought to describing wine I've had, but I do know for sure that I am not a fan of drier wines. I tried one recently with some friends, all of whom hated it. Ironically it's flavors seemed really easy to describe despite being easily my least favorite wine to date. It was very earthy and astringent and left an unpleasant aftertaste and a dry feeling in your mouth.

I am hoping to learn two main things from this class: the general vocabulary of wine (so I know what's going on when people talk about it), and the ability to really pick apart the taste of wine (to be able to appreciate it more and in the hope that it will help me be able to distinguish tastes in other foods too). 



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