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!