wine 101

The Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday the entire Chef Pro 1 class attended Wine 101.  As my friend D said, "it was like a cocktail party, except the hosts made us clean the glassware."  Chef Pro I has three different class times.  Some of us have met each other working Sunday Brunches or if we attended a different class time one week, but this was the first time all of us first-semester students were together.

The objective of the class was to teach us the basics about wine (which ones are whites, which ones are reds), along with learning how to identify the different flavors in the wine, which will eventually lead to us learning how to pair wine with food.  We tasted 23 wines...and yes, we spit most of them out because we weren't allowed to crash at the culinary school that night.

Chef would pour 2 to 3 wines at a time.  Before we could taste we had to look at the wine.  We talked about the color, the clarity, the depth.  Next, we swirled and smelled.  We had to smell with our mouth closed several times, then smell with our mouth open.  It may sound weird, but there is a difference.  It's amazing the different smells you can get from wine - everything from pleasing aromas to darn right nasty smells.  And finally, we took a sip and slurped and clucked and spit.  We chatted about the different flavors we experienced and our responses varied greatly.  And some of those darn right nasty smelling wines sometimes tasted better than expected...so weird.

Most of my classmates are college-aged and some aren't 21 yet, so their experience with wine has been limited.  For some, this was their first time to taste wine.  As I said, the class was Wine 101.  I'm not anything close to being a wine expert, but I have consumed quite a bit of wine over the years.  My husband and I went to Napa this summer and tasted amazing wines.  Wine is the preferred beverage in my social circle - we have wine parties when we are snowed in and the kids can't go to school (we give the kids juice boxes...the wine is for the mommies), we bring wine camping, ladies night out is often at a wine bar, everyone I know always has a bottle or two (or more) in their house.  My point is this - I've tasted some mighty fine wines and the wines we tasted at Wine 101 were not fine...blech!!!  Chef explained that most of the class doesn't really have a palette for wine just yet, so the school doesn't spend the big bucks on the really nice wines for CP1.  I'm not saying that good tasting wine has to be expensive...not at all.  Most of the wine I drink is in the $15 - $20 range (well, except for the really tasty stuff we bought in Napa).  But it would have been fun to compare a $5 bottle (and there were LOTS of $5 bottles in the tasting) to at least one pricier wine to see if we could taste a difference.

Although we spit most of the wines out, the class did get a little louder and a little sillier as the night progressed.  But everyone made it home safely and despite the cheap wine, the class really was a lot of fun.

Salud!