This evening the three of us got to attend a wine tasting event courtesy of our friends at TheSecondGlass.com! The Second Glass is a print and online wine mag that seeks to demystify wine for wine amateurs and connoisseurs alike. We also featured The Second Glass co-founder Morgan First in this HC article where we profiled her as an amazing female entrepreneur! The event was at Downtown Wine and Spirits in Davis Square.
The Second Glass hosts a bunch of these kinds of events and they are super cheap! You can see upcoming ones here.
All newly 21, especially Annie, we were pumped for a crash course in wine!
First we learned how to taste a wine:
1) Look at it- check it out.
2) Swirl it- this adds oxygen, which makes it more pungent.
3) Smell it- stick your nose all the way inside the glass.
4) Taste it- Just a little bit, don’t chug it, swirl it in your mouth.
The first wine we tasted was called Iqhilika and was made with honey and chili peppers! It was really interesting but we all liked it!
We also tried a Sherry, which the three of us concluded smelled like soy sauce and tasted like a buttered popcorn jelly bean. We know, weird right? But it did.
Then we tried St. John’s Commandaria, which was sweet and tasted like golden raisins! Yum! The guys told us that this wine is made through a process called apacimiento, which means to wither the grapes, which concentrates the sugar and dehydrates the grape so the wine tastes sweeter.
We also learned how wine is made! Check it out:
1) Acquire grapes
2) Crush them –> juice
3) Add yeast + wait –> turns into alcohol
4) Let it ferment, put into barrels to sit for 3-18 months
5) Bottle it, then sits for 3 months-10 years before being sold
And a few more fun wine facts we learned:
-The alcohol content listed on the bottle of the wine is allowed to be off by up to 1.5%, and the number on the bottle is often an underestimate!
-Some wineries buy ladybugs to eat the other bugs off the grapes, rather than using pesticides.
-You can make white wine from red grapes- you just don’t let the skin of the grapes touch the juice.
The event was super fun and we learned SO much! After wine tasting, it was back to Harvard! Pretty good for a school night! ;)
Here we are with the team of The Second Glass and Downtown Wine and Spirits at the wine tasting event!