Circus in a bottle

::: Beauzeaux red wine, 2004 Vintage California • Blend of 8 different grape varietals • USA Today Best Bargain • $11.99 at Giant :::

My favorite kinds of wines are zinfandel-blends, so that is what I wanted to drink to kick off the blog. Excellent choice, I have to say. In my opinion, this is the perfect kind of red wine for a red wine beginner; it's lighter and sweeter than what most beginners may think of when they think of red wine. Plus, you may be drawn to it the grocery isle, because of the attractive label: it features a juggling clown, and under the name it is spelled phonetically (i.e. bo-zo), for those of us that don't immediately pick up on the playful name/image. And the wine, too, was very playful. Although the different grapes gave it some depth, it was very easy to drink; I had it with some bread and cheese (brie, chevre and Dubliner), and it complimented the cheeses very well. It was medium-bodied.... very fruity, but acidic and very peppery as well: felt like it was dancing in my mouth! Essentially, circus in a bottle.

Me in a bottle

Why wine? Because it's not just a drink; each bottle has its own personality: medium-bodied or heavy, sweet or spicy, smooth or complex. As Maya in the movie Sideways put it, wine is a "living thing ... if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity." I like wine.

I first started drinking wine during my French semester abroad sophomore year in college. My host family would offer a glass of wine with dinner almost everyday. I didn't like beer, and mixed drinks were always expensive, so I would order wine when I was out; plus it seemed appropriate — I was in France, after all! I guess I started getting used to wine. (People don't usually like wine right away... it grows on you if you give it a chance, usually several chances.) At some point I tried champagne, though, and that I liked. I traveled to Reims in the Champagne region to tour the Taittinger cave... I really enjoyed learning about the grapes, the fermentation and the storage, and at the end of the tour the tasting was sooo good. I have to admit when I got back to the U.S. I got a little snooty about champagne: I would correct people and say they were drinking sparkling wine, not champagne, unless it was actually from Champagne. Champagne is still my alcoholic beverage of choice: it's classy, celebratory and the happiest buzz ever!

Anyway, it was junior year at my publishing internship that I began to really enjoy all kinds of wine; thanks to my boss Bob, I wouldn't just drink wine, I would take it in. Bob decided one day that we would do Friday wine hour at Weaver Street Market, a local grocery store... he wanted me and Melissa, his assistant editor to learn to "appreciate" wine. We would try a different kind of red wine every week — he felt like white wine was for amateurs. We tried Spanish, Chilean, Italian, Australian, French, Californian and local NC wines; we tried merlots, pinot noirs, grenaches and blends. Each time Bob would take his first sip and kind of smack it on his tongue. He would take a couple of more sips and say things like "chocolate, pepper, a lot of berries" or "a lot of earth, a little tannin." Sometimes he would ask me and Melissa to say what we tasted before he gave his opinion to see if we were catching on... most of the time I would say "citrus," because you can't really go wrong with citrus! I was afraid of sounding silly and saying I tasted the wrong thing, but I was hooked. And I definitely started to have more of a sense of which wines were lighter or more full-bodied, which wines were sweeter, which were more earthy, which were smoother, which were more complex.

After I turned 21, I further pursued wine drinking. West End Wine Bar in Chapel Hill became my favorite bar, and I'd enjoy getting a bottle to share with friends. I went to a couple of official tastings, I read about wine occasionally, I started ordering wine with dinner, I started cooking more and pairing my food with wine.

I think I still have a long way ahead of me in understanding wine, so I consider myself a novice. This blog should help me stay on top of my wine drinking and thinking, though, and I hope you'll join me on my journey. Maybe as you keep reading, you'll find that you, too, get excited when you hear the "pop" of the cork!