London Bloggers Meetup: Wine Tasting

Ugh, December has just been too busy! Too many events, meet-ups, trips and other stuff to go to; I’ve been swamped with busyness. 

I’ve been to a couple of London Bloggers meet-ups now and I like the format of them. This time it was sponsored by a couple of winery bloggers, who each donated a bottle of their wine for some wine tasting. Robert McIntosh from WineConversation.com organized it all, and also gave a little presentation about wine and how the one thing he wanted to achieve with this evening was to get people talking and thinking about wine.

Now I’m horrible with wine; the names, grapes, everything. Most of the time I let Cristiano choose, cause I really don’t know the difference between the types (or I’ll just order a sweet white wine or something down that lines). This evening hasn’t really helped me yet, but I think I should read up a bit more about wines and figure out what I exactly like.

That evening I tried seven of the ten wines they had and a couple really stood out to me. I started with the wine I liked the most: the Riesling Auslese 2003. It was a nice fruity white wine, very light and sweet and easy to drink. The second white wine I tried was a Riesling Kabinett 2007, which was much drier and less tasty in my opinion than the first one I tried, but still way better than the usual fair I have. The final white wine I tried was a Vivanco Viura, but that too was quite dry compared to my first one.

From the red wines, none of them really spoke to me. I tend to prefer white over red, but this time all the red wines (at least the two that I tried) were slightly too heavy for me. Those were the Cortes de Cima Syrah, and the Dinastia Vivanco. Looking at the blog posts from others at the meet-up, I think I should have tried Higuerela wine or the Morellino de Scansano.

The last two wines I tried were a port and a sherry. The port was a Quevedo Reserva Tawny Port and I really the nice strong taste of this wine. As I expected, I didn’t like the sherry; it’s just not a taste I can appreciate (my Spanish flat mates come from the Sherry region in Spain and brought us one of their wines last year. Never finished that bottle, cause I really didn’t like it).

Here’s the complete list of wines at the tasting:

1. Vivanco Viura/Malvasia 2007, Bodegas Dinastia Vivanco –  thirstforrioja.co.uk
2. Riesling Kabinett Trocken 2007, Weingut Clauer – winzerblog.de
3. Higueruela 2007, from Sta. Quiteria – tintoralba.com
4. Dinastia Vivanco Crianza 2004, Bodegas Dinastia Vivanco – thirstforrioja.co.uk
5. Bellamarsilia 2007, Poggio Argentiera – poggioargentiera.com
6. CVP 2007, La Casa de las Vides – casavides.com
7. Syrah 2004, Cortes de Cima – cortesdecima.com
8. Antique Oloroso Sherry from Fernando de Castilla – jerez-xerez-sherry.blogspot.com
9. Special Reserve Tawny Port, Quevedo Port – Quevedoportwine.com