Survival skills of a wine nerd!

Survival skills and wine you ask? Why, yes, absolutely! Work with me on this one while I set the stage. Cool, crisp evening. Dark sky, soft lights glow through huge windows and patio doors. Chandeliers light the immense ballroom filled with the humming of voices. Dispersed throughout the scene are ten tables lined with bottle after bottle of wine! Are you starting to get the picture? Ten, you heard me, ten tables covered with sparkling wine, white wine, rose wine, red wine and every kind of wine in between. And I’m there to taste them all – well at least as many as I can get to in 2 hours! How on earth am I to survive this one? I must confess, I’ve failed miserably in the past!

This isn’t my first wine rodeo my friends. I’m sure you’ve been to many yourself and it is SOOOOOOO tempting to maximize your experience by trying every single bottle being served. But let’s get down to some quick math. Even if the wine expert pouring and sharing awesome nuggets about each wine limits your pour to 1 to 2 ounces for each wine. At the recent Taste of Colonial at Colonial Country Club in Ft. Worth, TX, each of the ten tables represented a minimum of six different wines! Simple math, that’s 60-120 ounces of wine! Not sure how much wine you can drink before turning into a slobbery, stumbling disaster, but for me it is well below that. Seriously, one standard bottle of wine is 25 ounces / 750 ml! Just imagine drinking around 3 bottles in 2 hours – holy cow help me now!

What does wine survival even mean?

Knowing the morning after for me would start with a 6:40am workout (total glutton for punishment here), I walked into the event on a mission, survival! Game plan solidly defined in my head I walked into the ballroom and launched my strategy. Table 1, bubbles, yes, three white wines, yes. Doesn’t sound like I am holding true to any strategy, right? WRONG! Evaluate color – check. Swirl and sniff – check. Tiny sip – check. Swish – check. Now for my survival strategy – POUR IT OUT! Only if I totally loved the wine did I take a second tiny sip, swish and savor!

Never before had I been so determined to try as many wines as I possibly could in one evening, but with a game plan to not walk out sloshed and to wake up refreshed and ready for the day! I did it! Super proud of myself and had a fantastic experience. Most importantly, I got to taste so many absolutely amazing wines! And, I made my 6:40am workout ready to kick some bootay and take some names! I’m definitely doing a full repeat on my new-found survival skills for wine tasting.

Cheers!