The menu for the night.
In my 26th year of life, I am attempting 26 new things that I’ve never done before. Full list here.
This one fell right into my lap. Since coming to New York, I have been fairly active in my alumni group. This has led me to a Pac-12 alumni group, made up of alumni from the larger, West coast schools.
They organize a wine tasting two, maybe three times a year at a fancy Murray Hill restaurant that some alumni’s family owns. It’s an amazing deal, and I was excited to see my Pac-12 friends. Pac-12 softball is gearing up, and I dearly love playing with them in Central Park, then getting rather sloshed at a sports bar in the Upper West Side.
I always thought of a wine tasting as touring some countryside, swirling wine in glasses, sipping it gently, trying to distinguish notes. Maybe that’s how they do it in Napa (I really have no idea), but in New York, we through them back. All of the wines were bottomless. They had waiters walking around filling our wine glasses. Like filling ALL our wine glasses from ALL the courses.
In my early sobriety, I was taking this wine tasting rather seriously, but by first course I didn’t even know what I was drinking, just that the wine was ever-flowing. I was kind of listening to the wine-guy who was talking about special grapes in South Africa. But sitting here in my jammies two weeks later, I can’t tell you a single thing about those wines. Except that they were white. But I didn’t need no sommelier to tell me that.
I like white wines. A controversial opinion, apparently, as most wine-snobs I’ve met in my life have scoffed at such a statement. But I like what I like. I also like fake maple syrup over real maple syrup. Sue me.
Funnily enough, my favorite course/pairing was dessert. Feast your eyes on this beaut…
Mango Mousse with Amarula Cream Liquer
Honestly, I wish there had been five courses of this. It was fantastic. I was certainly not listening to wine-man at this point. All I could really think was “cake cake cake cake cake cake booze cake cake cake…” It was like being a kid and having to wait for your parents to light the candles before you can eat your birthday cake. I’m infamous in my family for prematurely licking the frosting off my birthday cake when I thought no one was looking. No one was looking, except the family friend who was videotaping me. Shame.
To sum up my wine tasting experience, it was a variety of delicious booze. It was an experience akin to most of my weekend excursions. Maybe I didn’t do the experience right? Maybe I should have paid more attention to what I was tasting. I was looking through one of my notebooks the other day, and I found something I had written down last fall.
“I tend to devour, but I am looking for someone to teach me a thing or two about savoring.”
Well, obviously, I have not learned my lesson. But there are certainly more wine tastings in my future.
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