Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Wait, What Are We Doing? Tasting Wine?

In May 2010, we were invited to travel to Spring Release in Walla Walla with a few friends who had made the trek before. Before then, we had drunk and enjoyed some wines, but never really put much thought into it besides the occasional "Yum!" The world of wine tasting often seems intimidating and/or pretentious to those who haven't ventured in and we were nervous that we would get laughed right out of the tasting rooms. On the contrary, we found the people of the Walla Walla wineries, pourers and vintners alike (often one and the same!), to be very welcoming and patient. And more importantly, we found discovering wine with friends to be an endeavor that we greatly enjoyed.

We brought home our bounty of newly purchased wine and kept our eyes open for more opportunities to taste and enjoy new wines and wineries. By the end of the year, Hunter found that wine could be combined with statistics and obsessive tracking at CellarTracker and the addiction was ON. We wanted to contribute to the CellarTracker community, so we took to Google and gave ourselves a crash course in wine tasting and scoring. We don't claim to be experts by any means, we just like to enjoy the wines and scoring and writing tasting notes is a fun way (for us!) to focus on what we like or don't like in a wine!

As we have begun to explore wine, we have continued to explore and expand our culinary horizons. Katy loves to try new recipes and can hardly keep from adding a creative twist to new dishes and old favorites alike. We began attempting to pair wines with food and found it tough to find advice beyond general varietal/dish combinations. Our goal is to try good wines and good food and chronicle the successes along with the wrong turns and detours.