The fourth wine tasting

Wine tasting four was a strictly work affair with my new work colleagues and their partners. The theme was back to random, which meant they could bring what they wanted and especially what they liked. None of the wines were from the same country and included Australia, Spain, South Africa, Bulgaria, Argentina, Chilé, Italy and Germany. The grapes were also totally different. I would say it was a good mix and the wines were really of a high quality. The blind tasting made it interesting in that regard, with so many different smells and tastes, as oppose to Wine tasting 2, when all the wines were fairly similar, from France and Italy.

4 days left

I'm getting really excited about the first wine tasting I've organised for Saturday night. We'll be eight people and I'll be getting the bulk of the wine tonight. It should give me enough time to prepare them, and read up a little on each one. I've already received one bottle, and covered it, because the tasting will be a blind tasting, and no one will know what they're drinking, obviously only that it is either red, or white. There'll be a lot of guessing on the night, I think.

Blind Tasting

It seems as if it is all set for the first wine tasting on the 29th of November. For now I am keeping it small, just 8 people, but I think 10 people should be perfect. Here's the idea.

Each person who will attend, buys one bottle of wine, either white or red, and gives it to me a week before the event. The reason for this is to give me time to prepare all the bottles, because the wine tasting will be a blind tasting. This means, you won't see any labels, or know anything about the wine, beforehand, or during the event. We'll start with the white wines first, then move onto the reds. Each person will also have some paper and a pen, where they will write their thoughts on each wine they tasted. They will also need to guess the country, the variety, the estate/farm and of course the year. Each wine will also receive their rating out of 5.

This we do for all the wines, until right at the end, when we reveal the labels. It'll be interesting to see if the "owners" could guess the right wine they bought, when they drink it in a blind tasting.

At the end of the night, each person goes home with a list of wines they may never have tasted, as well as their thought on the wine, which will help them a bit, when buying wine the next time.

First wine tasting

It looks like the first wine tasting will be scheduled for the last weekend in November here in Gothenburg. I want to start with a closed group of 10 friends first, just to see how it goes, then I'll publish the results here, and move on to the next one, which looks set to happen before the end of the year. I'm really excited.

I'll publish the format and the rules in this coming week, so you can try it with some of your friends.

In the beginning

Where to begin? I'm from South Africa, or more specifically, I lived in Cape Town, for 9 years, before moving to Gothenburg in Sweden. I really like drinking and talking about wine. There's so much to learn.

When I moved to Sweden, I realised that the apartments in Sweden is not the ideal place to store wine, and that not a lot of my friends here, have wine stored away, as they do in South Africa. Most people tend to just go to the liquor store and buy what they need, then drink it either the same night, or the same weekend. You don't often find really old wines in people's homes. It's basically the last vintage or the one before that.

What Sweden does have though, is one of the biggest selections in the world to choose from. Their liquor store is called System bolaget and is state owned. They have wine from every country that produces wine. South Africans mostly drink South African wine, and the choice is basically grape variety and wine farm. Not here. Here you add country into the equations as well. So the choices are huge. A bit too much choice if you ask me. Sometimes I feel like a kid in a candy store, not knowing where to start and what to buy.

One thing I do miss is wine tastings. Here you have no chance to taste the wine before you buy it. You have to go on what others have said and their recommendations. With that in mind, I have decided to start a wine tasting group, with my friends, so we can taste more wines than we regularly do, and have a wider range of wines we "know", before we buy. But more on that later.