To say I have been busy recently would be a huge understatement – I’ve been so busy I haven’t posted here in months!

I’m currently on a hiatus from wine school classes. My most recent course, Food and Wine Matching, had its last class on Tuesday night. I’m also sad to report that I had to miss the last class – I blame it on the automotive industry – but apparently our project went over well. The culminating activity for this short class is to choose a dish, cook it and pair it with a wine. Then, on the last night, the food and wine will be judged and a paper will be handed in.

The marking of the project is apparently based on the paper – not on the cooking, or on the wine – and the paper has to include comments on the wine’s structure, flavour profiles, etc and how it pairs up with the food that was served.

We cooked a chicken crepe with cream sauce and chicken & mushroom risotto. My group’s plan was to include one riesling, for the sake of completeness – as riesling is always a great match with food – but to try as many wines as possible with the goal of picking another wine to pair.

Unfortunately, the riesling was the best match. I don’t even know why we tried to find something else. We should have just gone with the riesling and avoided the hangover that came from trying seven different wines in one night. Oops.

It’s Valentine’s Day. I’m kind of ignoring it, and the rest of the world, by sitting and hanging out in my apartment today. I’m also watching a rather ridiculous amount of 30 Rock… but I guess you win some and you lose some.

I finally opened my last bottle of Zuccardi Q Malbec. It’s from the 2005 vintage, and it’s from Mendoza. I first discovered this wine while out a fantastic restaurant in Bogota called “Ochenta Sillas” – they had some deliciously crazy ceviche combinations. After struggling to get the cork out of this wine, I discovered that it still has all of those delicious fruit characteristics, that great purple colour and a totally refreshing mouthfeel. I really love this wine. I also hate that I can’t buy it in Ontario. I bought the last two bottles from a NSLC store in Bayers Lake this summer. I couldn’t even find this wine in Alberta!

Anyway. I realized I was saving this special wine for a special occasion. But, as Miles in Sideways, maybe I don’t need a special occasion to drink my delicious malbec. Maybe I should drink all of those wines I’ve been holding onto for a special occasion.

As an aside, I opened another bottle of Fuzion. I’m over that wine. It’s a great wine for $7.50 – but I think I’d rather spend another $5 and get something I really like.

I’m overjoyed to have the Internet working today. For some reason the darn Internet hasn’t worked for me all week!

Wine School has been keeping me busy. In Vinification, we received our first test back. The highest mark in the class was 47/50 – which sounds high, but seeing as how the class average for the midterm in wine tasting was something like 95%, it’s pretty different. I find that our instructor, Aaron, is a surprisingly hard marker. I was above the class average but I still lost more marks than I would have liked.

I didn’t love today’s class as much as I normally do. We started off with sparkling wines and Champagnes. We later moved onto dessert wines that were the result of Botrytis or, as the wine industry likes to spin it, the result of “noble rot.” Sauternes dessert wines are one of these, with Chateau d’Yquem the most famous. The afternoon was spent learning about sherry and valpolicellas.

Sherry. I never thought I would find a wine I didn’t like. Aaron kept telling us how cheap it was – and when he asked the class who loved wine, only one person put up their hand. I think it must be an acquired taste – because I really couldn’t concentrate on or find any of the positive aromas or flavours that must have existed somewhere in the wine. The process of making sherry, but using the solteras, was pretty interesting to learn about – although I think that working in a sherry winery would drive me nuts. All those careful pours and division of sherry from each barrel down must be incredibly repetitive.

Anyway. Enough of that.

The drive out to Grape Varieties on Wednesday was miserable. Ottawa received a dump of something like 15cm of snow which meant my normal 15 minute drive took closer to an hour and a half. I crawled along the streets, avoiding the highway, and was surprised that by the end of the class pretty much everyone had shown up. Natale, our instructor, even brought us in a red pepper and goat cheese dip to snack on throughout the class. The focus for the week was pinot noir, baco noir and gamay. The pinot noirs he chose were pretty interesting, however he pulled out the same example of a “don’t” pinot noir as Aaron had done in Vinification the week before. The “don’t” pinot is from a winery here in Ontario, that I refuse to name. I actually want to visit this winery to see if they have anything that I like to drink… I’ve only tried their red wines and haven’t been impressed. Maybe they have a great white wine!

I like pinot noir, but saying that is almost trendy because of the movie Sideways. A girl I used to work with out west hated pinot noir – which I struggle to understand. Winemakers can do so much with the grape and pinot noir is grown all over the world, which makes it such an interesting varietal. A pinot noir from New Zealand can be completely different from a California pinot noir which is different from the great wines of Burgundy.

Oh – in excellent news, Natalie totally understood the importance of the California wine fair and offered to let us write the exam a week early. He’s going to discuss it with everyone else next week!

I’m starting to hate how people ask me what I want to do with this Sommelier program. After this semester I will have three classes left. Should I rush through them and finish them off quickly? Or should I do one at a time? I’m currently leaning towards the latter – almost to give myself more time to make a decision about what I want to do.

Growing up is so much effort. I’m almost done my year of the quarterlife crisis – as I’m calling the period from when I decided to quit the Chartered Accountant path to now – and I still don’t feel like I’ve really progressed. I have a junky apartment, my car lease is going to be up in November… the only really good thing is that I’m in a new city and I now (fortunately) have a permanent job which means I won’t be given the bum’s rush anytime soon.

I’m completely obsessed with a blog. It’s called Wine Terroirs and it’s by a man named Bertrand Celce who is a French photographer and writer. I can browse through it for hours.

He basically shares his travels around the French wine world. Tastings, wine bars, vineyards, wineries… you name it, he includes it. The photos are enough to make me want to pack up and move to France to pursue a life of wine. The stories and the descriptions are enough that I can actually visualize myself living in France, pursuing a life of wine!

My absolute favourite posts are the wine bars. I love wine bars – I love the idea of wine bars, at least well done ones. I should actually start visiting the wine bars in Ottawa on a frequent basis – the only wine oriented establishment I have really visited is Divino’s. And it wasn’t really how I had imagined a wine bar to be. I desperately want to go to Paris and wander around wine bars, getting lost in tiny cobblestoned streets and alleys. I’ve never been to Paris, so I’m sure my desires are overly romanticized, but sometimes it takes everything I have to keep me from racking up a few thousand on my credit card and flying over there.

I still don’t know what I want to do with my wine education. I love my vinification class – that much I’ve decided – but I’m not sure if I want to pursue a career as a winemaker. It seems like a lot of responsibility and pressure, yet it also seems as though it could be immensely rewarding. The only problem would be the sheer amount of education required and the type of wines I would want to make. The winemaking programs here in Ontario are all cool climate oriented and I wouldn’t want to stay in Ontario to make wines. I would rather move to the Okanagan, if I were to stay in Canada, or head further south. Although I love pinot noir, I would like to make Bordeaux varietals and those just don’t work in the Ontario climate.

Anyway. That’s just more musings. I’m glad to report that Wednesday’s Grape Varieties class was a better. I’m looking forward to the Riedel tasting, done by Diane Paradis of the CA Paradis store here in Ottawa. There will be different grape varieties tasted in normal glasses and then the specific Riedel glasses. If we bring our chequebooks we can buy the glasses at a discounted price, too… which is tempting, because Riedel glasses are pretty.

None of us have had the guts (yet) to ask our Grape Varieties instructor about the timing of the final exam and the conflict with the California Wine Fair. I discovered, however, that a number of my classmates are equally concerned about the conflict. I’m glad I’m not alone!!!

My absolute favourite wine event (ever) is coming up. It’s the California Wine Fair.

I discovered this event in the Calgary Round-up Centre (on the Stampede Grounds, for the uninitiated). It was a giant room full of delicious wines. I went with a big group of people from my old job and we basically hit the ground running as soon as we walked in the door. It was a fundraiser for the Calgary Opera.

What do I remember about this event? A room full of California wines, of course. We paid around $50 or $60 to get in with unlimited sampling. And sample we did. It was my first serious wine event. I remember talking to a lot of the importers, distributors and marketing representatives, wishing I had a job that was so cool. I also learned that by actually talking to the individuals working the table, as opposed to going around with a glass out to be filled, you could try some extremely special wines. I actually think this is the first time I ever tried a bottle worth over $150, retail.

Why am I discussing the California Wine Fair? I was crushed to discover that the fair this year, here in Ottawa, runs on a Wednesday. Coincidentally it’s the same Wednesday as my Grape Varieties final exam. How can one of the best wine events of the year be held on the same day as my final? I’ve already discussed this with Morgan, wine school friend, and we are going to casually bring it up to our new instructor. Just so that he’s informed. In case he wants to make the final exam some other time.

I mean, really. We only have class on that Wednesday because it’s the final exam. It would be so much easier if we could just fit our final into the last actual teaching class. Right? Right?!?!?!

I’m also missing the Ontario Winter Wine Night Out, which is being held on a Wednesday during Winterlude (February). I’m not happy with these Wednesday wine events!

So, wine school has started up again. Wednesday evening was “Grape Varieties” while today, Saturday, was a full day of “Vinification”. It should be noted that when I say full day I mean it – class started at 8:30am and went until 4:30pm. Our first wine was poured before 10am!

Grape Varieties
The point of this class is to learn the characteristics, viniculture and viticulture of different grape varieties. The instructor is supposed to be Natale, who works for the LCBO and is a colleague of my old instructor (Paul). We were a bit confused to walk in the door of the classroom and find a short, thin woman named Denise.

It was a different atmosphere than my class last semester. To be completely honest, I started to wonder what I was doing there. I wasn’t having nearly as much fun as I did in my other classes and I found it to be almost oppressive. Plus there’s an entirely new class of people and an entirely different dynamic… but I was pretty excited to see some of my favourites from last class!

Instead of doing a lecture and then doing a big tasting at the end, this class would do a bit of a lecture and then taste a few wines. The total was still only about six, but it made things a bit more structured. We were also given ten minutes to taste each wine and then the instructor asked for volunteers to share their tasting notes. Her goal seemed to be to break down the wines in a strictly academic sense – one person said “this wine tastes really balanced, I found that I really liked it” as her ending statement after giving her tasting note and the instructor quickly told her not to include her personal assessment of the wine. I missed the informality of Paul’s class where we could throw out descriptive words. I also missed how engaging he was… this was an entirely different wine school ballgame.

Vinification
This class was way too early in the morning for my liking. Especially because I really like sleeping in on Saturday’s and it was -24 this morning (according to my car’s temperature gauge).

For the first time we were in the CA Paradis Wine Lab. This is set up with three rows of seating and a sink at each spot. We ended up at the end of the first row, which would normally be an excellent seat except for this smell I noticed early in the morning and throughout the rest of the day. We finally determined that it was from the sink to my right, after Morgan (my wine school friend) correctly identified that the smell had a faint vinegar characteristic. Seeing as how wine can turn to vinegar… well, we took a sniff in the sink and our problem was solved.

So for future students: avoid the last sink in the first row. My sink (the second last one) didn’t smell at all.

The class itself was great. Our instructor, Aaron, really knows what he’s talking about and is incredibly engaging. There is a lot of material, however, since the class is compressed into four days. Next week we have a test worth 25% on today’s material, the week after that we have another test worth 25% on the previous week’s material and then our final exam is worth 50% and is on the afternoon of the last day.

We tasted so many wines… I haven’t even looked back at my notes yet because I want to do some more research on the wines and on the wine making methods. I was glad to walk out of this class wanting to know more about what we covered. I think that’s what I’ll spend a lazy Sunday doing (aka tomorrow)… especially because it’s so darn cold in Ottawa.

I look forward to Wednesday’s Grape Varieties because we’ll have our normal instructor. I’m hoping I end up with a better impression.

I’ve been visiting my parents in rural Nova Scotia for Christmas. It definitely makes the pursuit of wine a bit more challenging! It also doesn’t help that my parents aren’t really wine people – nor are any other family members beyond an aunt and uncle who are fortunate enough to reside approximately five minutes from the Naramata Bench in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

The closest large town from here is called Amherst – and that is the closest large liquor store. I was sent in for one bottle, I came out with four. I couldn’t help myself. I was excited to see some offerings from Toasted Head on the shelves but was distressed to note that the unforgettable Toasted Head Merlot was not included. I was certain that Toasted Head Merlot would show my parents how exciting wine could be! One of my favourite parts of the Amherst NSLC (Nova Scotia Liquor Commission) store is the “pour your own wine” section at the back of the store: there are large vats (that are apparently up to five feet tall) in the storage area that funnel directly to four spigots that allow the consumer to bottle their own wine, by the case, for prices under $6/bottle. They also have little plastic wine glasses set up so that you can taste each wine before making a decision on which to bring home by the case. I don’t recall ever seeing this in Ontario at an LCBO store but I will definitely need to keep my eye open.

I had to visit the NSLC in their small town in order to pick up a more appropriate red wine for dinner one night. There were two pinot noirs on offer in the entire store. *sigh* I really don’t consider myself to be a wine snob, but I always like to find more challenging, interesting bottles. I love to try small production wines or ones that I haven’t encountered before. I hate seeing dozens of bottles of the same wines over and over and over again.

I’ve already decided that if I come to Nova Scotia this summer I must head out to their “wine country” and visit as many vineyards and wineries as possible. There are some wineries that are already receiving major praise in the Canadian wine publications – I think that Jost is probably the most famous Nova Scotian wine at the moment or at least the largest winery. It’s hard to stumble into an NSLC without finding one of their many varieties. I found some sort of Jost icewine hidden away in a drawer in the house yesterday – that bottle has three days to be consumed or it will find a new home in Ontario!

The Wines of Nova Scotia website is very well done and definitely shows the visitor an entirely new world of wine. When I was visitng in May, shortly after quitting my job and moving cross country, I spoke with a woman at the NSLC out in Bayers Lake. I told her that I planned to pursue the sommelier program in Ottawa and she was almost offended that I was doing the program in Ontario. She was doing an in-store demonstration and was eager to tell me all the great things that are being done in Nova Scotia’s wine world. After reading about Benjamin Bridge, a small upstart of a winery that is already gaining cultlike status down here, I can see what she means.

I seriously feel as though I’m going to finish this sommelier program with a better understanding of these non-traditional wine areas than of the traditional ones. Especially since I sadly don’t see a wine-oriented trip to the Old World, South America, California or Australia coming up in the next year or two. But – as 2009 is in its infancy, who knows what the next twelve months or so will bring?!

Happy New Year!

It’s amazing how little I have updated this blog recently! After my whirlwind escape to Toronto, I’ve been consistently busy with all sorts of work related challenges. The end of the year is always busy anyway, however, so I suppose I shouldn’t be overly surprised.

My wine tasting class had our exam in our Wednesday evening class. It was like the the midterm, but it was considerably more challenging. I think it’s because our instructor had taught us more in the second half of the course – he really focused on the French wine regions, which helped to give more structure.

I was happy to realize that I had 5/6 wines correct. For this exam we had to guess the grape varietals and I was bang on all three whites and two of the reds. I had mixed up one of the red varieties and put down zinfandel… which was stupid, on my part, as I should have erred on the side of Old World grapes – especially because I was trying to guess 50/50 between two different ones. Oh well! Annoying but not life altering.

The written portion was more difficult, with questions about wine faults, standard descriptors used for certain grapes and a fun mish-mash of French wine questions. I know there were a couple that I had incorrect but not enough that I would let it get to me. I had decided before taking this course that I wouldn’t drive myself insane over right or wrong answers – it’s not like a university degree!

I still don’t have the mark, however, for the class. And that is driving me insane. So I suppose I am still a bit of the ridiculous overachiever. Or at least I still have a bit of it in me.

I escaped to Toronto this weekend. My basic plan was to get away, do some shopping, wander the neighbourhoods and be anonymous for a bit. I love Toronto… I probably should have looked for a job there when I was going into public accounting, but I wanted a smaller firm and more advancement opportunities, so I chose Calgary. I know that when I moved to Ottawa, it was because I viewed it as more approachable than Toronto and I had a line on a job here… but it’s still close enough (well, five hours) that I can escape when I really need to.

And this weekend, I really needed to. Even though I should have been studying for my wine tasting final exam.

I had originally been planning on heading to Montreal, however it was Grey Cup weekend. So I chose Toronto. And when I checked to see what was going on in Toronto, it was the Gourmet Food & Wine Expo. A celebration of food and wine. I could live with that.

This expo was very similar to the one in Ottawa I attended a couple of weeks ago. Only more expensive! There were a few options to buy your admission. You could do it in advance, over ticketmaster, for $15 + whatever fees Ticketmaster was charging. Admission could also be bought at the door, for $15. There were coupons available that let you save $3 off that $15 admission. There were also two for one coupons floating around out there to also help you save money on admission.

I arrived at the Convention Centre – I had forgotten how big it was – and finally found the correct exhibition hall. The line to buy admission tickets was pretty massive, so I headed to an “automated” ticketbooth, realizing I would also be forfeiting my $3 discount. I was ok with that. Unfortunately, the machine was charging $1 convenience fee. Ughhhhhh.

Coat check, $2.50.

Sample tickets? $1 each, sold in books of 20. So you could either buy $20 or $40. No refunds on unused tickets!

I also started to compare the wine prices. Catena Alta, for example, which is a $60.95 bottle of malbec from the Catena winery, was going for 8 sample tickets at the Ottawa show, which worked out to $4/sample. At the Argentina booth in Toronto, it was going for 6 tickets, which was $6/sample. At the Vintages booth in Toronto, it was pouring for 5 tickets, or $5/sample. Sheesh!

I also found even less people willing to talk wine in Toronto. I had a nice chat with a woman about D’Arenberg wines, as I was looking for some Dead Arm to sample. The rest of the crowd was pretty dead. I decided to track down some Northern Rhone wines as France was the feature country of the Expo this year… and I only found one. It was 3 or 4 samples and nowhere near as delicious at the one I had tried in class.

There were a few other features offered at this expo, however, that Ottawa didn’t have. There was something called Connoisseur’s Corner, where for 5 tickets ($5), one could attend a tasting seminar hosted by the International Wine Educator’s Guild (IWEG). They had them every hour and the first forty people could attend – which meant that if you wanted to get in, you had to be there half an hour early. Had I arrived earlier and wanted to kill more time, I would have gone, but it was basically a commitment of over an hour. There was one I saw going on which was called “For the Palate, for the Planet” when I walked by – and the presenter had an entire table of Tetra Pak wines laid out in front of her. I was very glad I hadn’t waited half an hour for Tetra pak wines.

The food was delicious, however, and a lot easier to find than in Ottawa. I had some beef samples, a prime rib sandwich, some cheese samples… there was a cheese platter available that looked delicious, but it was 6 tickets and I couldn’t bear to part with that many. If someone wanted to do some shopping, however, there were lots of great deals available on cheeses, dips, sauces, etc. There was even a well stocked LCBO on site.

Would I go again? Probably not. Of course, it’s unlikely that I’ll randomly be in Toronto the same time as this wine show again. I was there mid-afternoon on Saturday and the place was packed. I also didn’t find that the value was there – although now the Ottawa show seems like a total bargain. I’ve come to the conclusion that I definitely prefer the wine show where you pay $50 to get in and can drink/eat all night without shelling out anymore money. I miss the Roundup Centre (this is the main venue for wine shows in Calgary)!

This past weekend was the Ottawa Food & Wine Show, which is generally considered to be Ottawa’s premiere wine event. It was held at Lansdowne Park, in the civic centre, which was a nicely disguised hockey arena. Basically this event is known, on Friday evenings and Saturday, to be an excellent excuse for the cougars to come out to play. Which is why I decided to go on Sunday.

Driving by Lansdowne Park on Saturday also helped to reinforce that decision: I have never seen such a crazy line up to get into a wine event in my life. This was out of control. A friend from wine school went mid-afternoon on Saturday and waited over half an hour to get into the show.

Sunday was a much more sedate affair. I was able to quickly walk up, buy my tickets and head straight into the show. The hockey arena had been transformed – lots of dramatic black draping and massive booths. It felt more like a fancy trade show than a simple wine and food show. The entry was dominated by a miniature LCBO store – there was a Vintages booth pouring some premium wines for varying quantities of sampling tickets.

Ah yes, sampling tickets. My least favourite part of this. I’m from the Calgary school of wine fairs where you pay $45-$60, depending on the event, and it’s all you can drink. No worries about how many tickets or the constant thought that you need a few more tickets. I finally started asking for half pours and splitting between two wines…

There was a mammoth California booth with many recognizable wineries. A smaller, yet still noticeable Chilean booth. In the next room over there was a massive and well decorated French area complete with a wine bar. Restaurants were serving small plates, there were hotel restaurants doing food and wine pairings… there was my favourite booth, the “free cheese” booth that handed out different varieties of cheese on teeny toothpicks. For free! No tasting tickets required!

My goal for the day was to check out wineries that I didn’t know, specifically those from Niagara and Prince Edward County. I also had a rule where I didn’t want to drink any wines that were easily available in the LCBO or that I had already had. I couldn’t believe the people paying $1 (two tickets) for a 2oz pour of Fuzion, which is a $7.45 wine. Same with the people who were milling around the Yellow Tail table, sampling through as much as possible.

I ended up starting with Mountain Road Wine Company from Beamsville, Ontario – I tasted a delicious 2004 chardonnay and a great riesling. The individual who was doing the pouring was from the National Capital Sommeliers Guild and was very talkative. He was also an Algonquin Sommelier program graduate! I started to notice quite a few of them, wearing their distinctive pins, scattered around the show floor.

I kept wandering. I visited the New York wines booth, tasting some wines from the Finger Lakes region and, despite the fact that the booth employees were not from New York, learned a bit about the different regions just south of the border. I also hit up the Mexican booth because I have never actually tried a Mexican wine – this involved a boisterous Mexican marketer introducing himself to everyone who walked by and attacking people with “Made in Mexico” stickers. It was pretty chaotic, as far as wine booths go.

The Prince Edward County booths were also great… it’s just that my favourites were visiting and I had already tasted most of their wines. I had stopped by Rosehall Run while visiting the County this summer and had tasted Black Prince and the Grange while at the Taste! event in Picton during September. The only PEC wines there that I had not tried were Harwood – and I found them very good indeed. Black Prince is sort of a co-operative where small wineries can bottle, blend and label their own wines.

I also loved the Prince Edward County cheese booth. $2 (4 tickets) for a cheese platter. It was worth it.

The Wine & Food Show was definitely worth checking out, however I found it to be very expensive. It was $17 to get in the doors with tasting tickets an additional $0.50. My most expensive wine was a 2005 Catena Malbec that retails for $60.95 – this had a price tag of 8 tickets, or $4. I also found the people working the festival were surprised when I asked for a half pour – I generally explained that I was an Algonquin Sommelier student (one guy scoffed that it seemed like every third person was) and that I was at the fair to taste and not to drink… the half pour definitely helped my sample tickets to go a lot further.

I was also surprised at the number of unknowledgeable people behind the booths – a few just looked at me blindly, when I asked a question, or would just hand me a brochure. I had been hoping for a bit more education and was envisioning a wine fair where serious wine drinkers and winery representatives could come together to worship at the altar of the holy grape.

My expectations may have been to high. Or perhaps it was the influence of the LCBO, the liquor monopoly that regulates the vast majority of alcohol sales within the country. When I attended events in Calgary, for example, the individual who ran a supper club could negotiate with wine stores and agents to bring in bottles of wine not easily available elsewhere. This seems to be infinitely more difficult in Ontario. But this is another rant for another time. I’m not sure what it was, but I did find myself disappointed with the Food & Wine Show. I will likely attend next year, however I will probably go in with more realistic explanations and a better plan of attack.