Our Newfound Love Interest...

For our five year wedding annniversary, Noah and I spent the night in Redmond, WA and visited wine country in Woodinville. He and I have never had the luxury of visiting a winery, or wine bar. We were excited for a new adventure. We never realized how much it would intrigue our minds and tastebuds!

At our first stop, we spent one on one time with a wine educator at Columbia Valley Winery. She reassured us that no question was a dumb question, and that you could possibly taste ANYTHING in a wine, sonot to hestitate to state the flavor we might find ourselves discovering. She taught us how to gauge coloring, and how to properly swirl our wineglass, and smell the scent it releases. We both are struggling to know and identify individual fruit, woods and tannins in the wine. But our wine educator said it is a talent that develops over time and experience. She said she savors every smell and flavor when she is eating, trying to close her eyes and remember how each cherry or loganberry tastes and smells. She said she finds herself buying odd spices and fruits at natural markets, so she can better identify them in tastings. We had no idea it took so much experience and research!

She then taught us the proper way to "taste" wine, and not just drink it. It's an acquired talent that allows you to taste and smell the wine at the same time. We tasted 6 different wines and left feeling like we'd spent the whole afternoon in school! It was amazing!

We then continued on to the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery across the street. In this location, they actually bottle wine. We took the winery tour and learned the intricate cycle that is needed to create a quality wine.

So while you may understand and know wine, here's some facts I learned that intrigue me:

First, I never took into consideration what the year of a bottle of wine meant. Yes, I understood it meant that was the year the grapes were harvested and the wine was made. Beyond that, I assumed it what just a way of seeing how long the wine had aged. Instead, I learned that if you know your wineries, and their location, you can judge some wines based on the weather of that particular year. For example, to make a sweet dessert wine, the grapes must be harvested while frozen. The weather must drop below 14 degrees. The grapes then must be hand picked in the wee hours of the night, and processed immediately. That is why sweet dessert wines come in smaller bottles, and during certain years are more expensive, or nearly non-existant. The earth must provide ideal weather conditions to produce a good bottle of wine for the year!

Second, I learned that if you open a bottle of wine, and it tastes gross...there's a good possibility that wine is BAD. I recall a few years ago Noah and I opening a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, thinking we would try a red wine for the first time. Noah described the flavor as mildewy shower curtain, but we gagged down our wine, not wanting to waste a bottle simply because it was too bold for us. Now we know that bottle was probably corked, and should have been thrown away. It's possible for a bottle to grow bacteria on the base of the cork, infecting the wine and ruining it. This happens more frequently than you'd think, about every one in twelve bottles is corked. That is often why many Reisling are bottled with twist caps (not because it's a cheap bottle of wine!) and why some wineries are switching to the rubbery corks.

Third, we learned that most wine is not 100% what the label claims it to be. If the bottle says merlot, there could be 60% merlot, and 40% another type (or multiple types) of wine. This is because when they are making wine, they have it in huge vats. As the wine maker goes through and tastes the batches, he may intermix the different types of wines in order to create the flavor he wants. Some wineries will state the percentages in the print on the bottle, but often they will not.

There is so much more that Noah and I desire to educate ourselves in the future. We've fallen in love with wine, and have found it to be an art we want to pursue. That is why we've decided to start this blog. For ever bottle of wine we explore, we wanted a way to record what we tasted, how we liked it, and how it went with the meal we served it with. This way, as we drink more and more types of wine, we'll have a way to track the styles we like, and learn to fine tune our ability to pick out a suitable wine.

So here...our journey begins!