First Blog Assignment

To be completely honest, my personal experience with wine so far includes going to Kroger and buying cheap rose/white wine for Monday night when the Bachelor is on. When I am feeling crazy, I pick a clever label. That being said, I have gone to two wineries this past semester and am very curious to learn more! I never drank before I was 21, and my mom always liked white wine, so when I starting drinking wine I was definitely partial to whites and sweet wines - the more bubbly the better. I like the cool, crisp wine, and tend to shy away from the darker colors. I seem to enjoy red wine with heavy food, like pastas and meats, but I never really go out of my way to choose wines of this variety. Unlike what the syllabus says, I don't usually buy wine to consume with food, instead I buy wine that I can consume by itself, and that's probably the ultimate reason why I lean towards sweet instead of bitter tastes. One thing I do have going for me is that I am a slow wine drinker. I enjoy the slow taste and am not a "pounder" of wine per say.
When I graduated high school I got the opportunity to travel to Europe for a month with my Grandmother. We spent a little under a week in Italy and I got to taste a lot of different flavors. When we would go to dinners, it also put into perspective that wine was meant to be eaten with certain foods. Every different course usually had a different wine pairing, and dessert wine to me always seemed more bitter than I expected. I was 18 at the time and had not developed a taste for wine, so while I tried it a few times, I stuck more to the carbonated water. Now, being older, I am more curious of the thought behind what wines were paired with what. And going into this course, that is a huge piece of what I hope to get out this. I really want to be educated on what wine to serve when, and the reasons behind it - instead of making a random guess or sticking to the wines that I usually like. I want to learn to enjoy wine with food and use wine to bring out different flavors in food - because honestly that's what seems to happen on TV.
Since my usual reach for wine is all white/rose, my final goal for this semester is to find some red wines that I really enjoy. Maybe a dessert wine, or maybe just something that relatively tastes good with all dinner meals. My aim isn't to particularly develop a taste for red wine, but to understand it and be able to name a few that I like. I would also like to refine my white wine pallet. I want to be able to pick up on different undertones that before I would have never noticed or appreciated. Although I will still drink wine for Bachelor nights, drinking wine with different food seems to be a big part of the course and I am excited to learn more about this and see wine from a different angle.