There are a few vices I have in life. I have already explained my obsession with coffee and magazines. There are a few others I need to add to that list, dessert (of any kind), sweets/lollies (whatever you want to call them), Kylie Minogue and wine.
I went to a winery once in Australia a while ago and I remember the experience being highly enjoyable and very drunken! I was keen (as I am now an avid wine lover) to test out this experience again. Also there is a vast range of wine delivered to the UK that we just don’t receive in Australia and when it comes to buying wine for dinner in the UK I am totally lost.
As there are no wineries in the vicinity of London the next best thing is Vinopolis. This is a venue space where they conduct wine tasting, champagne tasting, whisky tasting, beer tasting, absinthe tasting (why you would want to partake in this is beyond me!) and rum tasting. My lovely friend offered to accompany me to a self guided wine tasting tour on a particularly wet and cold Friday night.
The tour starts with a 15 minute session with an expert who takes you through the process of swirling, smelling, tasting, gurgling and identifying flavours within wines. The flavours thing still gets me as you are supposed to be able to smell fruits, vegetables and some spices, I think I really suck at this process and really it’s a matter of individual taste buds. If anyone is considering going on this tour take notes!!!! 15 minutes goes really fast and it’s hard to take all the information you need in during this time.
You are then lead into a large room that is spilt into 3 different areas: old world, new world and emerging world.
Within the old world room you will find wine from Italy, France etc; within the new world room you will find wines from Australia, NZ etc. The emerging world room is quite a bit smaller and has wine from unusual locations such as Greece and Austria.
We had 5 wine tickets each so we decided to share our wines to extend our experience (we even managed a few freebies!) so in total we tasted 13 wines.
I must say the whole experience took much longer than I was anticipating, my friend and I were really taking our time, swirling, sniffing, gurgling and writing notes on each wine. In total we were there for 3 hours (lucky we had agreed to have dinner beforehand otherwise I think I would have been wasted), however they do have a lovely selection of olives, nuts, cheeses etc if you get peckish during the process.
I was open to trying different sourced wines to the ones I knew however I couldn’t resist a few from home I'd been dying to try for a long time! In total we tried 2 Italian, 1 Argentinean, 1 Chilean, 2 Greek, 1 French, 4 Australian, 1 Spanish, 1 Austrian; 7 red and 6 white.
Not to sound bias or cliché but my favourite wines were the ones from Australia. Maybe my taste buds are that way inclined as I have spent most of my drinking life in this country but it made me appreciate the great produce that comes from my home land. I must mention how amazing the Grant Burge Semillion was and the Merlot wasn’t that bad either :)
You end the experience with a ticket for a Bombay sapphire cocktail in special Bombay Sapphire blue themed room. I had a French martini and it was a welcome sweet taste after all the wine we had drunk.
I had such a fantastic time and I would definitely recommend this experience to anyone else living in London or anyone who loves wine!
x
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