Blog 11

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PROMPT: What have you learned about vineyards and wine tasting today? What wine stood out for you? Were the vineyards tourist ready?

Today I learned that the vineyards that we passed are not all owned by just one person. Instead a few rows are owned by one person and then the next rows by a different person. The name of the wine also depends on the region the grapes grow in. The sparkling wine that we were served today can not be called Champagne because the grapes do not come from the champagne region in France.

Before coming in to the wine tasting, my dad had already taught me how to sample wines. I knew that you smell, swirl, sip, and savor the wine and not just down the whole glass. I had also been told by different people that you don’t drink the wine, but hold it in your mouth and then spit it out. Luckily for me, there was no spitting involved at this wine tasting. I did find it a little weird that any wine not drunk was supposed to be poured on the floor.

It wasn’t a wine that stood out for me today but liquor. I really enjoyed the Violet Liquor which was a beautiful purple color and smelled just like a bouquet of violets. It was a sweet taste that didn’t have a bad aftertaste. I enjoyed the liquor so much that I bought a bottle to take home with me. I also enjoyed the Riesling wine, which is a specialty in Alsace.

I don’t think the vineyards are tourist ready. This is mainly due to the fact that different people own different rows of grapes. If one person owned an entire field, I think that it could be made tourist ready. I also did not enjoy the winery tour as much as I had hoped. There was some things that I learned that I found interesting such as the fact that a person has to crawl inside the barrels using a very small door to clean the caskets.

However, I would have liked to see the whole wine making process from where the winery grows the grapes, and then puts the grapes in caskets, and then bottling. I think if I could get a better view of the entire process it might make me appreciate wine a lot more.

On a side note the castle that we visited today was so beautiful. It was a little depressing to know that the whole castle was not original (except for a few pieces of stone here and there). I think it would have been far more impressive if the castle had survived from the Middle Ages. One of the things I thought was really interesting was the paintings on the wall on the second and third floors. On the second floor the paintings were of famous mythological heroes (i.e. King Arthur, Hector of Troy) while on the third floor mythological heroines (Isolt) were portrayed.

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