BU Wine Studies
Posted 04/22/2008 at 11:45 AM by Cathy
It doesn’t take much to make me happy.
Just put three glasses in front of me with three tastes of wine. Add a preformatted tasting sheet to take notes, and let me at them in peace and quiet.
At a Wine Studies course at Boston University, every Tuesday night, we taste anywhere from eight to twelve wines on average. We pour the first flight – three wines, usually – about 45 minutes into the class and that is one of my favorite times of the whole week.
Some nights it’s the color of the wines that strike me most. Other nights it’s my palate that gets the work-out. Tonight, for some reason, it was my nose that benefited most.
The first wine, a 2006 Montes Sauvignon Blanc from the Leyda Valley of Chile, smelled powdery to me, as though memories of a baby’s nursery bubbled over from the wine’s very mild effervescence. The 2007 Susana Balbo Torrontes “Crios” smelled musky but floral too, with lavender and roses blooming most prominently. Chocolate was the initial smell of the 2004 Mapema Malbec from Mendoza, followed by leather and raspberry.
Tasting small samples sequentially, especially when they’re united by a theme like geography or vintage or varietal, is one of those ways to expand your pleasure of wine because the differences, whether they’re subtle or pronounced, naturally present themselves.
Give a try, whether you’ve got four wines in front of you or even two. Look at each wine first, one after the other. Then smell them, one after the other. Then taste them. Notice what you notice. And enjoy.
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About the Author
Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.
Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.
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