The WSET level 2 course offered by Fine Vintage was held last night in Vancouver. Thinking I had plenty of time, I left home and arrived around 6:15 for the 6:30 class. Damn, I thought, I hate being the first one there. To my surprise, the classroom was packed with only a two seats left! Not your typical school crowd....
I sat down at my table and met my fellow wine aficionados for the evening. Across from me was a woman from White Rock who had just sold one business and I think was getting ready to start another one involving wine. Beside me was a guy that grew as part of the family that owns Desert Hills Winery in the Okanagan and wanted to improve his knowledge of wine. Finally, at the end of the table, was a woman who works at Capilano Golf Course - I think in the restaurant. Everyone was quite friendly at the beginning of the evening but our table was pretty quiet through most of the night - I think that people take this course very seriously and it's probably good that I'm not chatting to someone while the teacher is teaching, so to speak, as I do tend to get distracted.
Speaking of our teacher, his name is Dave Munro and he is did a great job the first night, keeping us interested, using lots of humour, and showing an expert understanding of wine.
Right off, we tasted two fizzy wines. I had come to the course with the intention of spitting out the wine that I tasted but that didn't last past the first glass. I did manage to spit or dump half of most of the wines so I felt fine by the end of the evening. Interestingly, the wine tastings were all blind. It's a really good way to train the palate and not bias yourself to a particular type of wine, but it's also really difficult!
The first wine in our fancy ISO tasting glasses was a nice bubbly champagne. It had lots of baked apple, even apple crisp and also the smell of toast caused by having the dead yeast cells (lees) being in contact with the wine. This is called autolysis and I think this info will be on the exam..... It was not too sweet and had a high acidity and was a dry wine. Dave rated it as a very good wine - which is not hard to believe as it is a Grand Cru - the highest rating, I believe, for Champagne.
It was revealed as a Charlemagne Grand Cru Champagne that was a blanc de blanc - all Chardonnay grapes - made in 2010. The price? $96.00.
The comparison wine had an amazing almost perfume nose. There were tropical fruits, melon and even lychee in the nose. It was a sweet wine which, I found out, usually means high acidity to balance the sweetness. This was also a very good wine and Dave noted that it would make a very good breakfast wine!
This was a La Serra Moscato D'Asti from Italy made in 2015. It was only 5% so you could drink it all day! It was also just $32 a bottle.
After covering some more information about tasting, we tried that next two wines.
And this is when I realized that I had a dead thing in the middle of my face.
I thought I was doing pretty well with the tastings of the first two wines, when the third wine was passed around, I couldn't smell a damned thing! The little tasting glasses makes it difficult to jam your nose in the glass but, try as I did, I couldn't smell anything.
Of course, the know-it-alls from the course sagely nodded and pronounced "cork taint" which was so frustrating to me because I had always wanted to find out what it smelled like. And, thanks to my dead thing, it didn't't smell.
Happily, when instructed to drink (and spit) this spoiled wine, it truly tasted hideous! Few things have ever tasted this bad!
This was an Alsace Riesling made by Gustave Lorentz, and it costs $38 for a hopefully unspoiled batch!
The final wine before the break was another Riesling. This was a clear wine that was German so it was rated as a "spatlese" that was medium sweet with high acidity, and a medium finish. The pronounced nose included green apple, apricot and petrol (!). Stone fruits like peach and apricot were also noticeable in the tasting notes.
This was a German Riesling from a Mosel producer called St. Urbans that was 11% and cost $82.
I was interested by the range of people and also the knowledge of wine. One woman said that she only knew the difference between red and white wine while others knew so much, especially about the wine tasting, that I felt as dead as my nose.....
Next time, I will look at the reds we tasted and a special kind of wine that I have never tried before!
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