Here at the Vineyard Team we spend most of our time on the farming side of wine making so we thought that we would get into the cellar and learn a little about tasting the fruits of our farmers’ labors. The Team loaded up for a trip to Firestone Vineyard in Los Olivos where the fabulous Amy Freeman offered to be our wine tasting teacher for the day.
Our tasting training center
We began by blindly testing our sniffers on a line-up of wines enhanced to smell like an individual characteristic found in that wine.
The line up
Dry grass? Red fruit???
Then we tasted four solutions (bitter, sweet, astringent, and sour) so that we could feel where these flavors hit our taste buds. And the grand finale…an official tasting of four Firestone wines.
We ended the day with full senses and a homework assignment to smell everything. I look forward to improving my sensory memory and wine evaluation. As they say, practice makes perfect and there is no better place for wine than right here on the Central Coast.