My Personal History With Wine

Wine. Its been part of my life as long as I can remember. I cannot remember a single family dinner that wine was not served. Like ever. I won't say my family are wine experts, but they definitely know they're stuff. I think I learned what wine legs were before I started driving. My personal wine history has 3 main periods: The France trip of 1999, The hesitant taster period, and finally my current quest to increase my wine knowledge in an effort to converse intelligently at the Thanksgiving dinner table about wine. That is where this Geography of Wine class comes into the picture. After graduation in May, I want this class to have taught me enough about wine to the point where I am teaching my  parents/ grandparents/ aunts/ uncles stuff they didn't know. In short, I want to be confident in my wine vocabulary and "out-wine" my peers. So now that my goals have been stated, lets get back to my wine history.

Its November of 1999. I'm 8 years old and in 3rd grade. My family went to France over Thanksgiving break that year, throwing traditional Thanksgiving out the door in the name of "getting-cultured". At this point in my life, my knowledge of wine was that it was some adult drink that the parents drink with food but its not for children. Yet, as I soon found out, the French did not think the same. During that trip I came to the conclusion that for the Frenchies, wine is equivalent to water, and if you can read, you can drink. In their wine craze, my parents wanted to stop at every vineyard, wine shop, winery, etc. Looking back, who can blame them? I wish we could go back and do that trip now that I actually enjoy wine. Anyways, my sister and I at first were not big on listening to someone try to speak English and talk about some weird adult drink that was off limits. That was until they started serving us wine...yes, my 6 year-old sister and I were served wine. My parents didn't seem to care that they were serving us wine, so we both just went for it. Obviously I wasn't picking up the oaky flavors of the Bordeaux Sauvignon Blancs, or the fruity or buttery tastes of the Chardonnays, but hey, wine was wine. Fast-forward to final 2 days in France. Living-Hell. There's really no other way to put it. I had the flu and could barely even move. In my youthful, unrealistic 3rd grade mind, I attributed the flu to all the wine I had consumed in the past week. And so begins the love-hate, timid wine taster period of my life.

I don't think I touched wine again until maybe 8th or 9th grade. At that point my parents would let me taste whatever they were drinking for dinner that night and ask me if I tasted crazy things like blackberries or leather. I didn't. I tasted spiked grape juice. This continued for some years. I would always try wine and taste it with cheeses or something but it never really clicked for me. Slowly but surely I grew out of this phase, but it took another trip to Europe to seal the deal. Spain 2009. Ten years after my first wine tasting in France, I had my first ah-ha! moment with wine. I cannot remember where or what kind of wine it was but it was the first time I realized how good wine can taste if paired with food. It all started making sense. This was the turning point for my wine history. I had flipped a switch and now wanted to know all that I could about wine. I had a lot of catching up to do! My family had years of experience on me and I didn't want to get left behind on the wine train.

Possible Location of aforementioned Wine epiphany

So here we are today. The never-ending quest for knowledge. That makes it sound like I'm trying to figure out the meaning of life, but for my family, our gatherings are defined by wine so it might as well be the meaning of life. My mom has started saving magazine articles to read when I come home about tannins vs. acids, and how they affect different parts of your mouth. I think she wants me to catch up too. This quest for knowledge also brings us to this class. It part of my master plan to learn as much as I can about wine before I enter the real world. For me, wine knowledge is almost a rite of passage into the adult table at Thanksgiving. I'm almost 22... I think its time to move on up to the adult table.