LH Franz The previous evening at the hotel, we’d signed up for a wine tasting lunch-and-learn. It turned out to be lots of fun. Twelve people were arranged around three sides of a large square table. The instructor asked me, sitting at the end, to start by introducing myself, name, where I’m from, favorite wine. I had already decided that if asked where I was from, I would say New Jersey.
From abroad, I think people are aware that the US is not one big homogeneous country, but it’s hard to really understand the implications if you’re raised with notions of a country as a relatively culturally cohesive place. The United States is in fact a conglomeration of fifty small countries plus a few territories. Although connected by a common language, the attitudes and cultures can be very different from one to the next. Each has a degree of autonomy, a bit more than individual European countries have in the EU. For example, Europeans will hear how the American President says he is not going to enforce the health care mandate passed by the Congress in 2010. That’s international news. They will not hear the Governor of New Jersey say that New Jersey is going to enforce it at the state level. That doesn’t make it to the international news desk. I felt I should try to help people understand how that works for us.
For this reason, I answered “Lorraine, New Jersey, Merlot.”
There were other Americans in the group from Maryland. Another young couple was from Canada, another from New Zealand, and another from England.
I thought we were going to taste different liquids with the instructor saying things like “This one has a hint of apple blossoms with a touch of vanilla.” I never know how to react when I hear such descriptions. All I can say when I drink a wine is whether I like it or not. Apparently, my taste sense is not very refined. When wine people talk about hints of this and touches of that, I politely smile and nod my head. Our instructor did something different. He had us tasting different wines in comparison to each other, which was much more helpful. He also had us tasting wines after chewing on different foods to help us see how the tastes mingle in the mouth and to what effect, also very instructive. He showed us maps of France and talked about the different regions. He talked about agricultural considerations, how certain conditions make wines sweet or tannic. We tasted one champagne, two white wines, and two red wines. It was not cheap, but it was all (my favorite wine-word) delicious. It was certainly worth the €75 per person they charged for this.
Daughter had more experience with wine tasting than I.
The wine tasting was in English, and recommended by my guide book. It was in a wine bar just North of Les Halles. Everyone was crowded in close together in a back room, circling a table filled with cheese and meats. The woman to the left of me was from Hagerstown, MD and the women to the right of me were from England. The master of ceremonies was a very gregarious man in his thirties who was trying to start a wine distribution company. There were no buckets to spit in, which I can’t help but feel was a calculated effort to get us all drunk. Three glasses of wine gone, I chuckled a bit at the man’s jokes about oysters and drunk Britons and tried to enjoy the (admittedly) very good wine.
