Understanding Wine - The Final Class

Tonight's class began with blind tasting four wines and a quiz.

The first question was a toughie - is it a red or a white wine?  Super hard question!  Hehehe.  Some other questions included:
- Is it a varietal (one grape type) or a blend?
- Identify the grape.  Chas made it a bit easier by giving us a few grapes to choose from.
- Is it oaked or unoaked?
- Where is it from?  That was one damn hard question.  No one can ever really guess.  But based on chance, we should always guess it is South Australian as they are responsible for 50% of all Australian wine production.
- What vintage is it?  This one did require a bit of analysis of the wine's colour and taste.

Anyway, I fared ok.  17 out of 24!!!  But our table was cheating and discussing answers between us.

The second session was a free for all.  We were meant to bring in any wine we pleased and present them for tasting.  Obviously one bottle of wine can't be tasted by 30 or so people, so we each went up in threes or fours to judge one of the random bottles.

Of the eight bottles up for tasting tonight, three were deemed faulty.  Wow, that's a pretty high strike rate.  It just goes to show that plenty of us are buying and drinking bad wine.  Chas reminds us that you should never be embarrassed about sending a bottle of wine back in a restaurant.  The restaurant doesn't make a loss because the wines are bought on consignment and the winery collects any unsold bottles after a period of time.  But don't make an idiot of yourself, says Chas.  You can't claim a wine to be affected by cork-taint if it had a screw top!

We all snacked on cheese and chocolate and we even got a spiffy little certificate at the end.  Here's to more drinking!!  Cheers!