Challenge Your Wine Senses

Last Sunday, my wife, Sheri (@sherimoto), and I went to Calistoga, CA and participated in a truly fun and unique experience in wine country. Our friend, Marcy Gordon (@marcygordon), a fellow blogger, invited us to join her and a group of wine bloggers at Wine Sensory Experience.

As their website states, Wine Sensory Experience helps you develop sensory memories that you can store and recall later when tasting wine. Being able to accurately describe a wine and make good tasting notes is an important part of wine tasting. At least, it is for me, so this class was a really fun and enlightening experience.

We experienced 25 different aromas and tasted some chocolate with several unknown ingredients. We also found out first-hand how glass shape affects your wine experience. 20 of the aromas and 6 different chocolates were sniffed and tasted blind. T’Anne Butcher, the owner and our wine educator, used black wine glasses so we couldn’t see the contents.

Among our group of distinguished sniffers, John Corcoran (@DrncPno), managed to guess 17 different aromas and tastes, which is extremely good. Yours truly only managed to get 10 correct, mostly in the barrel aromas category. Even Sheri did better than me. Surprisingly, one of the aromas that I missed was bacon.  I attribute my poor showing to allergies and the fact that the bacon wasn’t cooked. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

After challenging our senses, we were able to taste some of the wonderful W.H. Smith wines that T’Anne’s parents Bill and Joan Smith produce at their Howell Mountain estate from fruit grown on their property and the Sonoma Coast. It was an opportunity to put our sensory experience to use.

Thanks to T’Anne and Marcy for such a fun and memorable event. I recommend this to anyone wanting to improve their wine tasting experience.