How I got my taste for wines

When I was an undergraduate, going to school in California, the University I attended offered an extracurricular class in the art of wine tasting. Having just turned twenty-one the previous December, the class was offered in the Spring quarter. What an excellent opportunity! I just had to sign up (seats were limited and I was lucky to snag one of them). Now mind you, this school was known to host a big party or two. Just about every day. Since it was built on a beach cliff and beach access was within walking distance from the dorms and apartment, it was a natural place to host a wine tasting for those of us who wanted more than just going to a kegger or a rage almost every weekend (do people still say those terms?). I knew nothing about wines, other than “stealing” a bottle or two from my dad’s collection. It was not much of a collection either. Just bottles of wines friends or family brought over to the house as gifts. My mom was an excellent cook and hostess and threw a lot of dinner parties. People came over and I helped out, but that is for another blog. Anyway, having sampled those wines, and maybe a six pack with my high school friends, we just drank to have fun. I did not know or care about the nuances of the wines we drank.  We drank just to drink. I do not even remember what types of wines we sampled, I just remembered they were good. And that started my drive to start drinking good wines, more than just beer.

I had a college friend, whom I since lost track of, and we would get together almost every Friday and Saturday night. We would both share a bottle of what we thought were good wines and listen to really good music while we finished off the bottles. Other things were consumed that were not so legal at the time, but that might be for another blog, too. We both thought we had the world in our hands. What young twenty-year-olds didn’t think that? But, as with most things, those times did not last. I had to leave the school and the city to get my life in order. I traveled a bit, came back to the place where I grew up, had a baby, started a family, and finally got my college degree at another school. Life got in the way. I floundered, became an ex-husband with a young child and wandered through life. In the meantime, I had a short-term relationship with a person who loved to drink wines, and I rediscovered that taste again. We would sneak off to Napa for the day, go to a couple of wineries for some wine tastings, and I figured out what wines I liked and didn’t like. Again, life got in the way. I started a career in the medical field and just sort of wandered through life.

It was not until I moved to another state that I finally got my act together. I met and married my wife, and we grew up discovering what we really enjoyed in life. I knew I still loved wine, but I still didn’t know how to really enjoy it. Occasionally, we would fly back to the northern California area, go to Napa, and visit a couple of wineries. At this time, my cousin and her husband also started to enjoy wines and we learned we could make a trip up to the wine region and do a couple of tastings together. Now it was a family thing.

I got older, the medical field I fell in love with was changing and I started to get tired of how it was evolving. When asked what I wanted to do next, I produced three ideas. Photography, travel, and foods/wines. Photography was a hobby I had when I was in high school, but never really took it seriously. Through various moves, I lost equipment and just never got serious again, until I bought my first digital camera a few years ago. I also started acquiring equipment to go along with my camera. I went from color and black and white film to this digital thing that I could not get the hang of. Recently, I bought a few online courses to really learn about how to take pictures, but it has proven to be difficult. As you can see from my travel pictures on my website, it looks very amateurish and needs a lot of improvement.

The way I like to travel is probably not the way a lot of people travel. I like my comforts, but they could be awfully expensive. Afterall, it is all about the upgrades and access to the travel lounges. I did travel for a bit in the early 2000s but 9/11 happened and that changed travel forever. Airlines cut corners, even though they charged more for tickets, overbooking has become more common and air rage happens almost every day. Getting to a destination has become a hassle, crowds are bigger and sometimes the locals don’t want us there, even though they rely on the tourist to fuel their economy.

I love food, I love to cook, and I love to eat and enjoy really good foods. However, I recently lost a significant amount of weight and foods I used to enjoy, I can no longer eat. I eat in small quantities now and that causes me to appreciate every small bite. At restaurants, I now have over half a meal left on my plate. There have been times when the waiter asks me if the food was all right. I say of course it was, but I just cannot eat that much anymore. I bring it home and enjoy it as leftovers the next day.

I live in a town known as the Napa Valley of beers. Not a lot of opportunities to go wine tasting. The state is not known for its wine growing ability, which is why I take trips to Napa, drink really good wine and contemplate what opportunities there are in the wine industry. As I have said, I love to drink good wines, buy, and save some of the better ones to drink someday. With that being said, I have taken that love a step further and started to seriously study wines. I recently passed a level one course and am studying the level two course. It is difficult because sometimes I think I am not tasting the notes I should be tasting but that comes with time and training my senses to pick up these notes. I still don’t know what I will do with it, that is still to be determined. But I am having fun doing it. I will let you know what that is. So please come along on this journey with me, maybe I can teach you a thing or two about wines.

jlg

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#thesweetnessofdoingnothing