Learning How to Drink - Understanding Wine

Prior to my first visit to the Barossa Valley in 2006 I was a casual wine drinker and certainly not someone who knew the difference between a shiraz or a riesling.  My run-ins with wine were mainly at university balls (where I'm sure we were given crap), random glasses at weddings and the occasional stab-in-the-dark-I'll-drink-that-one in a bar or restaurant.  Cocktails and mixers were my thing.

Well since that first fateful wine tour to the Barossa, I've become much more interested in drinking the fermented grape juice.  Having enjoyed many wines on three separate trips (and counting) to the Barossa, I've learnt to distinguish what I did and didn't like but I was yearning for more.  I was yearning for the ability to tell why I preferred some wines over others - to identify flavours and other characteristics in the wine.  I always thought it was a bit wanky when wine tasters would use terms like marshmallow, tobacco, chocolate to describe wine.  I'm now going to become one of those wankers!  

When Spu and I went to the National Wine Centre, I had picked up a pamphlet which listed several appreciation courses.  I actually had come across these courses in the middle of last year when I had another long stint in Rad-City but was unable to make the cut off date.  I totally forgot about them!  So happy to have collected the pamphlet, I promptly enrolled myself in their 'Understanding Wine' course.  I'll have a weekly two hour session over the next six weeks and even if I don't end up learn anything, I'll at least have sampled many, many wines :D  

Tonight was the first lesson and we were given some purposely doctored wines so we could taste the difference between sweet, acidic, bitter and tannin flavours.  Bitter was seriously gross and like drinking tonic water (or in my case, I also thought it tasted kinda like a bitter grapefruit).

We also got to smell some purposely doctored 'faulty' wines.  I'll be honest, out of the five faulty wines, my inexperienced nose would have accepted three of them fit for consumption.  Eeek.  It kinda reinforces my suspicion that I killed a few olfactory receptors doing chemistry experiments in uni.  I could definitely smell the burnt matchstick smell of excess sulphur dioxide, a commonly used preservative.  It was like someone lit a match, blew it out and immediately threw it into the back of my throat.  I could also smell the 'Bret' spoiled wine.  It smelled like someone's old Band-Aid.  Disgusting.

At the end of the night, we also got to sample two reds and two whites and put our tutorial to good use.  Looking forward to next week's lesson!