Judgment of Paris

Readers, I'm still taking a bit of a mini-break from writing, so for this week I'll run one more post from Casual Kitchen's archives. Today's post is a fun one that shows how "experts" sometimes know a lot less than they think. 

Once again, thank you for all your support!
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The Judgment of Paris

Today's post is about a 1976 winetasting competition that made a roomful of French wine judges look like fools.

It used to be an article of faith among wine experts that the world's greatest wine came from one place: France. Back in the 1970s, for example, winegrowing regions like Napa and Sonoma California were thought of as producers of decent jug wines and not much more. And if you were to flip through a typical wine guide back then, you'd see barely any mention of Australia, South Africa, New Zealand or Chile.

Never mind that several leading winemakers in California were already making world-class wine. Nobody knew or cared. The best wines came from France, and that was that. This was the received wisdom of the world's wine authorities.

Until 1976. That's when a minor British wine merchant named Steven Spurrier held a winetasting event that changed everything. Spurrier was looking to publicize a Paris-based wine store he had recently purchased, and he dreamed up a seemingly ridiculous idea: invite a group of well-known French judges to blind taste France's best wines against several relatively unknown wines from California.

Spurrier thought he might be able to show the Paris wine community that some of these up-and-coming California wines could hold their own against the world's best. But of course the California wines would lose. Duh. If anything, the French judges would easily recognize their own wines--and probably score them higher out of pride.

And then the impossible happened. The California wines won. The French judges chose them over their own wines.

Today, we take for granted the idea that California's best wines are as good as any. But back then? The idea was laughable. But even more laughable was the fact that the judges at this tasting--among them some of the foremost tastemakers in French culture--literally could not tell which wines were from where. There's an amusing passage from George Taber's book Judgment of Paris that lays out the scene:

Raymond Oliver, the owner and chef of the Grand Vefour restaurant in Paris, one of the temples of French haute cuisine, swirled a white wine in his glass, held it up to the light to examine the pale straw color, smelled it, and then tasted it. After a pause he said, "Ah, back to France!" I checked my liste of wines twice to be sure, but Oliver had in fact just tasted a 1972 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay from California's Napa Valley.

Soon after, Claude Dubois-Millot of GaultMillau, a publisher of French food and wine books and magazines, tasted another white wine and said with great confidence, "That is definitely California. It has no nose." But the wine was really a 1973 Batard-Montrachet Ramonet-Prudhon, one of Burgundy's finest products.

Things went downhill from there. After the tasting was over and it was hideously apparent that these French wine "experts" had betrayed their own country's finest wines, they did what any self-respecting French person would do. They complained. One of the judges, Odette Kahn, furiously demanded her ballot back--once she learned she'd awarded her highest scores to two California reds.

Later, the entire French wine industry retaliated by banning Steven Spurrier from industry events and wine tours. And several of the judges refused to talk about the event at all--even after years had passed. It was too painful to discuss.

All of which raises a question: why would grown adults behave like this?

Think about it this way: if your ego was entirely invested in the success of your own country's wine, and you saw your precious national wines defeated in front of your eyes--and by your own hand!--you'd probably be capable of embarrassing and immature acts of rationalization too.

And the French wine community continued to rationalize. Later, they argued that the contest unfairly pitted "young" French wines against "less young" California wines. This actually wasn't true--all the wines were from similar vintages.

However, this complaint did raise the entirely valid question of which regions' wines would age better. Which is why Wine Spectator magazine ran an anniversary tasting ten years later with the same wines.

And the California wines won again--by an increased margin of victory.

So what is this story really about? Well, first, it's evidence of how blind-tastings can make even world-renowned wine experts look like dopes. More importantly, it's proof that we as consumers should drink what we like and never let experts tell us what to like.

Finally, it's about how our egos can go to embarrassingly great lengths to protect us from the truth. Here's what the now-infamous Odette Kahn--our wine judge who demanded her ballot back--later wrote in a French wine magazine:

The only lesson to be drawn from this tasting, in my opinion, is that certain winegrowers in California can produce (in small quantity, if my information is correct) wines of good quality, agreeable to taste.... I believe it is interesting for the French wine world to know this, but from this to proclaim (or to fear it to be proclaimed) that the California wines 'beat' our great wines, that is a leap, a very great leap.

This must be what they mean by "backhanded compliment."


For Further Reading/Viewing:
1) Judgment of Paris: The Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine One of the best books I've ever read about wine, and the definitive history of this event.
2) Bottle Shock: A 2008 film dramatizing the 1976 tasting.
3) An excellent article from The Guardian about the tasting and its aftermath
4) Wikipedia on Odette Kahn.


One quick postscript for readers: I simply have to share one more scene from Judgment of Paris, where a French customs agent refuses to clear five cases of English wine into France. With the wine sitting on the floor in front of him, Steven Spurrier angrily asks the agent why he won't stamp the importation papers:

"Because English wine does not exist," the customs agent replied. "Here is my list of goods that can be exported from England to France. There is no wine. There is no such thing as English wine, so I cannot clear it through customs. I cannot clear what doesn't exist."





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How To Be Fooled By Expensive Wine

If you expect wine A to taste better than wine B, it will.

It's easy to fool wine experts and wine-buying consumers. Your perception of taste is so incredibly subjective that you can easily be persuaded to believe one wine is superior to another. Someone just has to manipulate a few external cues without telling you. And once your expectations have been manipulated, you will be too.

Even world-class wine experts can be fooled by their own expectations (for a particularly embarrassing example, read about the notorious Judgment of Paris wine tasting contest), so it should be no surprise that consumers--even sophisticated consumers--can be even more easily fooled.

What's the easiest way to mess with your expectations? Just put a much, much higher price tag on wine A. Any wine drinker with half an ego will automatically "believe" it to be superior.

And in David McRaney's exceptional book You Are Not So Smart, there's a hilarious example of this exact trick. A group of wine judges were asked to taste two red wines. They were told that one was expensive and the other was cheap.

But the experimenter tricked the tasters by pouring the same cheap wine into both bottles. Want to take a guess which of the two identical wines they preferred?

"The subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it 'complex' and 'rounded.' They called the same wine in the cheap bottle 'weak' and 'flat.'"

So, if it's this easy to fake out experienced tasters, does this mean that wine tasting is a total joke? Does this mean we should stick to boxed wine and forget paying up for the good stuff? Are we all just products of our own manipulated expectations?

Of course not. The point isn't that you can't buy good wine. Buy whatever wine you like. Just remember that there are outside forces trying to influence what you like.

More importantly, this influencing occurs with all consumer buying decisions, not just wine. All the product labels, branding, pricing decisions and other psychological techniques companies use to sell things to us are just more ninja mind tricks designed to mess with our heads--so we'll spend more than we otherwise would.

The point is this: Make sure you're the one setting your own expectations.

I'd like to thank Stuart at Addicted to Canning as well as David McRaney and his book You Are Not So Smart for providing some of the ideas in this post.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Cork Debate: Does Good Wine Really Need a Cork?

How can that wine be any good? It doesn't even have a cork.

With one glance, Casual Kitchen readers know that the above sentence is wrong. The assumption "all good wines have corks" is pure fallacy. In fact, you can more easily argue the exact opposite: if a wine has a cork, the odds are higher that it's actually bad.

Wait... what? How can that be?

Failure rate
In two words, the problem with corked bottles is failure rate. In reality, if a bottle has a cork, there's a non-trivial chance that cork will experience some sort of problem.

Here's why. Depending on where you get your numbers, the wine industry claims a cork failure rate of anywhere from 5% to as high as 15%. And there can be a wide range of types of cork failure: most of the time it takes the form of "cork taint"--an off taste or smell in the wine due to contamination of the cork. If you've ever opened a bottle of wine and smelled a musty smell (some wine writers describe it, appetizingly, as a "wet dog" smell), you've experienced cork taint.

It gets worse, however. Cork stoppers can fail entirely, ruining the wine completely. Sometimes a cork leaks, or fails to protect the wine from oxidization, or worst of all, just breaks apart. This happened to us recently with a depressingly expensive bottle of Chilean sparkling wine: the cork stopper totally failed and wine leaked out of the bottle. It should have been a bottle of bubbly, but this bottle was totally flat. (Confession: we drank it anyway).

Estimates of cork failure vary widely because they depend on how we define failure--and they also depend on wine drinkers' often limited ability to detect cork taint. And to be fair: the cork industry claims a far more optimistic cork failure rate of 1-2%. However, readers should clearly see how it might be in cork producers' economic interests to claim lower failure rates (hey, it's not our corks, it's your crappy wine!), just like it might be in the wine industry's interest to claim higher cork failure rates (hey, it's not our wine, it's your crappy corks!).

Either way, if you make a living selling wine, cork failure is pure disaster. Everybody loses: wine makers, retailers and consumers. And there are better options out there. Plastic cork stoppers, for example, have an extremely low failure rate--well below 1% from the data I've seen. Better still, metal caps, or what you can call "screw-top enclosures" have a preposterously low failure rate--essentially 0%. With these superior alternatives, cork failure rates, even if they're at the low end of the wine industry's estimates, are quite simply intolerable.

In defense of cork
And yet the argument against corks isn't entirely airtight either. Why? Well, for one thing, corks are both renewable and biodegradable, something the cork industry understandably takes great care to emphasize.

However, the biodegradability argument falls down quickly. Think about it: almost all cork products come from small cork-producing regions in Portugal and Spain. If you're a vintner in, say, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, California, South Africa, or any wine-producing region that's any great distance from cork producing regions, you'll actually waste far more energy--and generate a greater carbon footprint--by importing cork than by using some other alternative.

Worst of all however, is the profound environmental waste that occurs if 5-15% of your corked bottles end up going "off" in one way or another. Remember, 15% is one out of every seven bottles. In contrast, literally zero percent of screw-top enclosures fail.

Furthermore, just because something is biodegradable doesn't mean it's better. If you're a conscientious wine producer, you've got to consider the environmental impact of making, aging, bottling and shipping wine that will ultimately fail in the bottle. This is the logic that explains why the entire New Zealand wine industry, after carefully studying the relative benefits of cork versus metal enclosures, transitioned entirely to metal enclosures. For them, it was by far a superior solution.

Consumer empowerment
And of course, looking at cork vs. screw top wine bottles from the standpoint of consumer empowerment, you can easily conclude that consumers also end up paying for wine failures--in the form of higher prices. In other words, consumers get no incremental value from a corked bottle of wine.

Wait. I take that back. There is one advantage of a cork that you just can't get anywhere else: that romantic and satisfying pop! when you open the bottle.

Just cross your fingers and hope the cork didn't fail.


For Further Reading:
1) Wine Flaws: Cork Taint and TCA at The Wine Spectator (be sure to read the comments, many of which are extremely informative)

2) Studies and presentations on cork failure and cork taint issues by the Cork Quality Council, an industry trade group supporting cork suppliers.

3) The Great Cork Debate at Wilson Creek Winery. A good article giving the pros and cons of corks vs other forms of enclosures. 

4) Wikipedia's discussion of cork taint.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Why Box Wine Is Better

Most wine consumers hold a deep disdain towards boxed wine. It's low end. It's trashy. Heck, it comes in a box. Obviously, it can't be any good.

I want CK readers to stop and stare when they hear sweeping--and tautological--generalizations like these. Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting you plop a wine box on the dining room table at your next dinner party. Then again, you might be shocked at how few of your friends can tell the difference between a mid-range boxed red and a mid-range bottled red. If you doubt me, try your own blind tasting and see for yourself.

The truth is, box wine has improved dramatically in quality in recent years. And if you're looking for a simple white or red table wine for your typical everyday dinner, consider ditching your usual glass-bottled casual wine and try boxed wine instead.

And when it comes to white wine, boxed wine offers a gigantic advantage over glass: boxed wine won't oxidize. Remember, white wines tend to oxidize more rapidly than reds, so a half-finished bottle of decent white can taste "off" within a day or two of being opened.

However, with boxed white wine, you don't face this problem at all. The wine is in an airtight plastic pouch. There's no air touching the wine at all, which means you can drink boxed white wine for weeks without any decline in quality.

But where boxed wines really stand out is in their surprisingly low environmental impact. Boxed wine generates half the carbon footprint of traditional glass-bottled wines, and it produces up to 80% less landfill waste. Think about it: glass wine bottles biodegrade poorly, and they're relatively costly to recycle. The cardboard used in boxed wine is usually made from post-consumer recycled paper--and it can easily be recycled again.

Here's one more environmental factor to think about: boxed wine can be stacked efficiently, and its recyclable cardboard packaging weighs far less than glass bottles. Which means your wine can be shipped to your local stores using fewer trucks and a lot less fuel.

So, the quality's the same, the shelf life is longer, and the environmental impact is less. But it's the price that seals the deal. For around $15-$16, you can buy five liters of highly drinkable wine. For those of you without calculators, that's six and two-thirds bottles! Remember: you--the consumer-- will utimately pay for all the extra packaging and transport costs involved in getting glass-bottled wine to your stores. Why not avoid those costs entirely by switching over to boxed wine?

I know I talk a lot about consumer empowerment here at Casual Kitchen. And to me, boxed wine might be one of the best win-wins available to consumers right now. So the next time you visit your local wine store, don't turn up your nose at the boxed wine section--check it out instead.

Readers, what do you think about boxed wine?

Related Posts:
How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget
Recommended Reading for A Good Wine Education
Trusting Your Own Taste in Wine and Food
27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings
Red, White and Blue Sangria
Casual Kitchen Interview in the South Florida Food and Wine Blog
Top Ten Low Alcohol Drinks
Countdown: The Top Ten Best No-Alcohol Drinks


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Judgment of Paris: The Blind Wine Tasting That Changed the World

Today's post is about a 1976 winetasting competition that made a roomful of French wine judges look like fools.

It used to be an article of faith among wine experts that the world's greatest wine came from one place: France. Back in the 1970s, for example, winegrowing regions like Napa and Sonoma California were thought of as producers of decent jug wines and not much more. And if you were to flip through a typical wine guide back then, you'd see barely any mention of Australia, South Africa, New Zealand or Chile.

Never mind that several leading winemakers in California were already making world-class wine. Nobody knew or cared. The best wines came from France, and that was that. This was the received wisdom of the world's wine authorities.

Until 1976. That's when a minor British wine merchant named Steven Spurrier held a winetasting event that changed everything. Spurrier was looking to publicize a Paris-based wine store he had recently purchased, and he dreamed up a seemingly ridiculous idea: invite a group of well-known French judges to blind taste France's best wines against several relatively unknown wines from California.

Spurrier thought he might be able to show the Paris wine community that some of these up-and-coming California wines could hold their own against the world's best. But of course the California wines would lose. Duh. If anything, the French judges would easily recognize their own wines--and probably score them higher out of pride.

And then the impossible happened. The California wines won. The French judges chose them over their own wines.

Today, we take for granted the idea that California's best wines are as good as any. But back then? The idea was laughable. But even more laughable was the fact that the judges at this tasting--among them some of the foremost tastemakers in French culture--literally could not tell which wines were from where. There's an amusing passage from George Taber's book Judgment of Paris that lays out the scene:

Raymond Oliver, the owner and chef of the Grand Vefour restaurant in Paris, one of the temples of French haute cuisine, swirled a white wine in his glass, held it up to the light to examine the pale straw color, smelled it, and then tasted it. After a pause he said, "Ah, back to France!" I checked my liste of wines twice to be sure, but Oliver had in fact just tasted a 1972 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay from California's Napa Valley.

Soon after, Claude Dubois-Millot of GaultMillau, a publisher of French food and wine books and magazines, tasted another white wine and said with great confidence, "That is definitely California. It has no nose." But the wine was really a 1973 Batard-Montrachet Ramonet-Prudhon, one of Burgundy's finest products.

Things went downhill from there. After the tasting was over and it was hideously apparent that these French wine "experts" had betrayed their own country's finest wines, they did what any self-respecting French person would do. They complained. One of the judges, Odette Kahn, furiously demanded her ballot back--once she learned she'd awarded her highest scores to two California reds.

Later, the entire French wine industry retaliated by banning Steven Spurrier from industry events and wine tours. And several of the judges refused to talk about the event at all--even after years had passed. It was too painful to discuss.

All of which raises a question: why would grown adults behave like this?

Think about it this way: if your ego was entirely invested in the success of your own country's wine, and you saw your precious national wines defeated in front of your eyes--and by your own hand!--you'd probably be capable of embarrassing and immature acts of rationalization too.

And the French wine community continued to rationalize. Later, they argued that the contest unfairly pitted "young" French wines against "less young" California wines. This actually wasn't true--all the wines were from similar vintages.

However, this complaint did raise the entirely valid question of which regions' wines would age better. Which is why Wine Spectator magazine ran an anniversary tasting ten years later with the same wines.

And the California wines won again--by an increased margin of victory.

So what is this story really about? Well, first, it's evidence of how blind-tastings can make even world-renowned wine experts look like dopes. More importantly, it's proof that we as consumers should drink what we like and never let experts tell us what to like.

Finally, it's about how our egos can go to embarrassingly great lengths to protect us from the truth. Here's what the now-infamous Odette Kahn--our wine judge who demanded her ballot back--later wrote in a French wine magazine:

The only lesson to be drawn from this tasting, in my opinion, is that certain winegrowers in California can produce (in small quantity, if my information is correct) wines of good quality, agreeable to taste.... I believe it is interesting for the French wine world to know this, but from this to proclaim (or to fear it to be proclaimed) that the California wines 'beat' our great wines, that is a leap, a very great leap.

This must be what they mean by "backhanded compliment."


For Further Reading/Viewing:
1) Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine One of the best books I've ever read about wine, and the definitive history of this event.
2) Bottle Shock: A 2008 film dramatizing the 1976 tasting.
3) An excellent article from The Guardian about the tasting and its aftermath.
4) Wikipedia on Odette Kahn.

One quick postscript for readers: I simply have to share one more scene from Judgment of Paris, where a French customs agent refuses to clear five cases of English wine into France. With the wine sitting on the floor in front of him, Steven Spurrier angrily asks the agent why he won't stamp the importation papers:

"Because English wine does not exist," the customs agent replied. "Here is my list of goods that can be exported from England to France. There is no wine. There is no such thing as English wine, so I cannot clear it through customs. I cannot clear what doesn't exist."





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Use Food and Wine Jargon Without Sounding Pretentious

"Ah, this wine is steamy, racy and upside-down. Oh, and with a great nose!"

It's one thing to hear a genuine oenologist make this statement. It's another thing entirely to hear it from someone who just finished Wine For Dummies and now mistakes himself for an expert.


The problem with wine and food (and, for that matter, classical music and art), is that the sensations and experiences of these disciplines are extremely difficult to describe in plain English. Thus, each discipline naturally develops its own specialized jargon as shorthand for difficult-to-explain concepts.

There's more. Jargon can be a useful signalling device (a doctor can easily reveal himself to another doctor by tossing off a few key technical terms and phrases), and jargon can act as a barrier to a profession (lawyers create a comprehension barrier around their field by using a sort of shadow language of terms and expressions). At its worst, jargon can allow two insiders to have an entire conversation in front of an outsider without the outsider comprehending a single word (think two doctors discussing your case in front of you as if you aren't even there).

Food and wine, however, are different. After all, everybody eats, many of us drink, and most of us are on a mission to learn more about what we're eating and drinking. So it's inevitable that we'll pick up at least some eating and drinking terms, if only to help us talk about what we're experiencing.

But there's a distinct line between discussing a subject and slinging jargon like a sanctimonious blowhard. Which reminds me of a former Wall Street colleague named Bentley*, who, in the few short years I knew him, gave me a lifetime's worth of amusing food and wine snob stories.

Within days of deciding that he wanted to become an expert in wine, Bentley began asking for the "head sommelier" at all of his business dinners. He'd then sling ten minutes' worth of inaccurately-used jargon at the poor sommelier, oblivious to the wincing of everyone around him--including the wincing of the sommelier himself, who would be a fool in any event to correct a customer on an expense-account meal. At long last, Bentley would invariably select the most expensive wine on the menu, leading us all to wonder: why ask for a sommelier's help when you knew you what you were going to pick all along?

So, when in the company of friends, family or colleagues, how can we discuss food and wine intelligently without sounding pretentious? Here are a few ideas:

1) If you're the only person at the table slinging jargon, you're being pretentious. It doesn't matter if you're being insightful, it doesn't matter if you use every term correctly, and it doesn't matter if you're absolutely right about everything you say. Just stop.

2) Read the people around you. If you think you might be at a higher food or wine "level" than the people you're with, cut way back on the jargon and terminology. Don't create a situation where the people you're talking to can't understand what you're talking about.

3) Listen. Let others speak and share their experiences, thoughts and preferences. You might be surprised at how much you learn.

4) Ask questions, don't hold forth. Ask other people around you what they think about what they are eating and drinking. Help out by getting the conversation going, and don't expect to be in the center of it.

5) Finally, you can always use finger quotes and a self-deprecating tone of voice whenever you find yourself forced to use a jargon term. After all, finger quotes are the cure for everything, aren't they?

Readers, what else would you add? And do you have a favorite wine- or food-snob story to share?

* Note: Bentley is not (quite) a real person. He's a composite of several people I knew from my Wall Street years, and for obvious reasons I've completely disguised his identity--after all, Wall Street is smaller than you might think.

Related Posts:
How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Club
27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings
How Do You Define Truly Great Restaurant Service?
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
On the True Value of a Forgotten Restaurant Meal

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Recommended Reading for A Good Wine Education

I've been asked by a few readers to follow up on my series on wines by sharing some book ideas for those readers who want to continue their learning on the subject.

Of course, the best way to learn about wines, in my opinion at least, is to drink more wine. But once in a while reading can be good for you too.

With that in mind, here are five titles that you can consider buying to help accelerate your wine education. As always with books mentioned in this blog, I include links to Amazon. If you follow one of those links and buy a book or other item, I will receive a small affiliate fee. There is no incremental cost to you as the buyer. Think of it as a tip jar where you can give your support to Casual Kitchen!

And readers, if there are any particularly useful titles that you think I should add to this list, please suggest them in the comments section below.
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The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher
My favorite wine columnists collaborate on their own guide to wines. This book is down-to-earth, unpretentious and fun--just like the authors themselves.

Wine For Dummies
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wine Basics
I tend to avoid "dummies" guides, but these two books are actually extremely well-regarded. Either could be great starting points for you--you'll get a solid foundation of wine basics for less than the cost of a decent bottle of wine. That alone might be enough to satisfy your interest, but if you want to go further, I'd then suggest taking a look at a more serious tome like the Bespaloff guides below.

Alexis Bespaloff's New Signet Book of Wine
I got myself a copy of this book way back in college--our school offered a well-known course on wines. This book is dense, but encyclopedic and extremely informative. Can be bought cheaply in paperback.

Alexis Bespaloff's Guide To Inexpensive Wines
Since most CK readers will likely be as casual towards their wines as they are towards their food, let's not give short shrift to wines on the lower end of the price spectrum!

Related Posts:
The Favorite Cookbooks of My Favorite Bloggers
What I'm Reading
How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget
How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Club

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings

Welcome to the final post of Casual Kitchen's series on wines! Please be sure to look at the prior articles: Open That Bottle Night (Part 1), How to Enjoy Wine on a Budget (Part 2) and How to Start a Casual Wine Tasting Club (Part 3).
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We've already talked about tips and strategies to enjoy wine without spending a fortune, and we've dedicated an entire article to the most enjoyable of all wine activities, the winetasting group. Today's post is a simple list of twenty-seven ideas and themes you can consider for your wine-tasting group meetings once you've started your own club.

Be sure to bounce these ideas around with the members of your group--I'm sure it will spur even more great ideas from them.

Local Flavor
1) Taste a series of wines from wineries that are local to your community or to your state.
2) Taste (preferably blind taste) local wines against supposedly higher quality wines of the same kind from a better known region (eg: Reislings from Upstate New York against Reislings from Germany or New Zealand)
3) Try regular versus reserve wines from a local winery and see if you can discern the difference.

International Flavour
4) Try a tasting of wines from a country no one has tried wines from before (Slovenia? Poland? Latvia? etc).
5) Taste varieties of wine from one country against a similar variety from another country (Australian cabernet against California against Argentina or Chile), and rank the countries in order of your preference.

Varietals
6) Systematically work your way through every variety of wine you and your group want to learn about. Test Chardonnays one week, Reislings the next, Pinot Grigio the next, etc. Then switch to reds: Merlots, Cabernets, Chiantis, etc.
7) You can also taste similar varietals against each other (merlots against pinot noirs, or rieslings against white zinfandels, etc) to see if members can differentiate between similar, yet different wines.
8) Finally, you can blind taste wildly different varietals that all have similar sugar content (for example, Merlot, Pino Grigio, Chablis and Pinot Noir). It should at least be easy to tell the reds apart from the whites, but then again, maybe it won't be as easy as you think!

I Never Heard of THAT Wine Before
9) Organize a tasting solely around wines no one in the group has even heard of before. There doesn't have to be any rhyme or reason or systematic nature to this tasting theme--you just have to bring your curiosity and interest in trying something new.

Blends
10) Many wines are blends of different types of wines (eg, 85% Cabernet, 15% Merlot, etc). Try different types of blends and see if you can appreciate why the vintner chose the specific blend he or she chose.

Champagnes
11) Taste real Champagne (that is, sparkling wine made in the Champagne region of France) against sparkling wines made elsewhere. See which ones you prefer and why.
12) Try a blind tasting of sparkling wines for under $15 and see if there are any that the group particularly likes.
13) Try a blind tasting of bottles of inexpensive sparkling wines against bottles of the expensive stuff, and have your members rank them.

Sweet Wines
14) Have an entire tasting consisting of dessert wines, ice wines or other sweet wines.
15) Try famous dessert wines against each other, for example, a Tokaj from Hungary against a Sauternes from France, against a Recioto from Italy, against an Auslese from Germany. Again, a blind tasting likely works best here and will generate the most fun for everyone!

Low Cost
16) Set arbitrarily low price limits for one or more of your tasting club meetings, say $5.00 or $7.50. Make it a bit of a challenge so that your members will need to be creative to find a wine within the price limit.

Low vs. High
17) Taste test low-priced bottles of a certain kind of wine against higher priced ones (again, a blind test will likely be the most fun here). Example: a Chardonnay for less than $15 against a Chardonnay for $40. Have your members rank the bottles.
18) You can even stretch this comparison and blind taste an inexpensive type of wine against a very expensive bottle of the same type (a $15 Chardonnay against, say, a $100 Chardonnay). You can have several members split the cost of the expensive wine if you like. It could be shocking to try this comparison--perhaps you'll find that there's an enormous difference, or perhaps you'll find yourself quite neutral about the difference between the types.

Vintages
19) Blind taste test the same wines from the same vineyard but from different years. For example, you can try the 2002, 2003 and 2004 vintages of chianti from Ruffino Reserva Ducale. Larger wine shops will carry multiple vintages of the same wine. Have your members rank the years in order of their preference. Afterward, it might be fun to find out what year the so-called "experts" thought was the best and compare that to your group's opinion.
20) Try an amusing variation of the "blind vintage" test: include more than one sample from one of the years. Much hilarity will ensue when more than a few of your members will think the identical samples are actually different wines!
21) Blind taste the "reserve wine" versus a regular wine of the same year, type and winery (recall that this was the taste that 80% of people failed at in our How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget post. See if you're in that top 20%!)

Why Stop at Wine?
22) You can also taste test beers, distilled wines like brandies (cognac, armagnac, etc) or fortified wines like Port, Madeira or Sherry.
23) Taste test favorite hard liquors, like rums, tequilas, whiskeys, etc. This could of course get dangerous, so be sure everybody gets home safely!

Finally, For Those Not on a Budget
24) Taste various Sauternes against each other. This delicious sweet wine can be bought in decent quality by the half bottle at prices ranging from $35-50, and you can blind taste these against very expensive Sauternes (at prices in the hundreds of dollars per bottle or *gulp* even higher). Needless to say, a tasting like this will have to be a vicarious experience for me, but if your group tries something like this, please email me your thoughts on the experience! I'd love to know how it goes.
25) Try tastings of Bourdeaux. Again, just for fun, you can put very expensive bottles up against more reasonably priced ones.
26) Try tastings of extremely high-end Champagnes to see if they are worth the extra expense.
27) Also, you don't have to limit your tastings to just wine: You can also do tastings of single malt scotches, high-end bourbons, designer tequilas, etc.

Remember, for each and every type of alcohol, there is always a brazenly expensive premium brand out there just waiting to separate you from your money. There's no better way to learn if it's worth the extra expense than to do an honest blind tasting.

Readers, go on and get started with your wine-tasting club! What are you waiting for?
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Stay tuned for one final post in our series on wine: Recommended Reading for a Good Wine Education.

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Club

Welcome to Part 3 of Casual Kitchen's series on wines. Please be sure to look at the prior articles: Open That Bottle Night (Part 1) and How to Enjoy Wine on a Budget (Part 2)!
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If you've always wanted to learn about wines but you are put off by the expense, starting a wine tasting group with a small group of friends is a great way to try lots of wines at a significant savings.

Not only will you be able to share the burden of wine purchases with others, but as we'll see shortly, starting your own wine tasting club is possibly the most cost-effective and time-efficient way to learn about wines.

But best of all, your wine tasting group will give you the opportunity to try new wines in the company of friends. Wine has always been a more intimidating subject than it should be, and there's nothing that cancels out wine intimidation quite like enjoying it with a small, comfortable group of like-minded people. I can't think of a better way to enjoy wine.

Today's post will cover the basic details of starting a wine group. Our next (and final) post on wines will include a list of possible wine tasting themes and ideas you can try once you get your wine tasting group up and running.

Pick the Right People
One of the most important elements of a successful wine tasting club is finding other members who are not only interested in learning about wine, but who are also reliable enough to attend monthly or twice-monthly meetings.

You may also want to look for members who are all at a similar level of wine expertise. While having one member who knows a lot more about wine than the rest of the group can, in theory, present an opportunity for the rest of the members to learn, I don't recommend pursuing this option. It's too easy for this member to dominate both the agenda and the conversation of each meeting.

And of course it goes without saying that you should try and limit blowhards and know-it-alls from joining your group.

Size Matters
A few thoughts on the optimal size for a wine tasting club. Initially, I would recommend staying small and nimble. It's a lot easier to coordinate a wine-tasting date with four, five or six people than with fifteen or twenty. You can always add members if you want to grow your group in the future.

Starting with five or six members will still offer you scale in the sense that you'll be able to try many kinds of wines and distribute the cost of those wines over a reasonably large group of people. Also, if one or two members can't make a particular meeting, you'll still have enough other members attending to make the meeting worthwhile.

There are certainly successful large wine clubs out there--some with 20 or 30 or even more members--but in my opinion the logistics of managing and organizing a group of that kind of size, not to mention hosting the event itself, tend to overwhelm the scale benefits of group wine buying.

Ground Rules
You should dedicate a good portion of your first meeting to setting ground rules for the club. Have the group decide what kinds of wine spending limits to set, how much wine each member should bring to each meeting, what the meeting schedule will be, whether you want the group to meet at the same person's home each time or rotate meetings through each member's home, etc. Establishing some of these rules up front will save you from confusion down the road. However, be sure to keep the ground rules flexible, just in case a change to the rules meets the group's needs at some point in the future.

How to Start
What should you drink at your first meeting? I suggest you start out as casually as possible, perhaps by requesting that each member bring to the first meeting a bottle of any kind of wine for under $20. It doesn't matter whether it's white or red, sweet or dry. At the first meeting, open and enjoy them all, and spend the time working out your agenda and ground rules for the club.

You'll have months, if not years, of meetings in the future to get as specific as you like with the wines you try. The purpose of the first meeting is simply to get comfortable, get to know everyone and set a few ground rules.

Remember, this entire process is supposed to be fun. Take things slow at first. Later, when your members start to discover wines they like or don't like, and as everyone's collective expertise on wine begins to grow, you can be much more specific about the wines your group tastes.

Taking Notes and Grading Your Wines
I strongly encourage you and everyone in your group to keep brief notes on the wines you try, even if you're at a stage where you have no idea what you're doing and know next to nothing about wine. Just keep a small notebook and a pen and jot down the date, the type of wine you've tasted, the winery and its location and the vintage year. And last but certainly not least, jot down a few words on what the wine tastes like and why you liked it or not.

If you or members in your wine tasting club want to get more formal with your evaluations and note-taking, try using these wine scoring forms, which are free for the taking.

Why take notes at all? You certainly don't have to. But taking notes on the wines you drink can make the process of exploring wines even more fun. You'll better remember the wines you've tried, you'll accelerate your learning process, and in future years you'll have a blast looking back at your early note-taking attempts!

Rotate Hosting, And Don't Get Carried Away
Just as it's important to share the burden of buying the wine by having each member bring a bottle of wine to each meeting, it's also important to share the burden of hosting wine club meetings. Consider a routine for rotating hosting responsibilities, and also set a few ground rules for what the host should do.

Once again, simpler is usually better. You don't need to do anything fancy when you are the host. Just setting out some cheese, crackers and water will suffice. Remember, the whole point of establishing a winetasting club in the first place is to make it easy and affordable for group members to try lots of different wines. There's no need to make hosting the meeting into a complicated or expensive venture.

Set Up A Wine Queue
One of the more difficult aspects of wine tasting clubs is deciding how to choose what wines to try. You don't want one person dictating the agenda; everyone should have input into what the group drinks. However, it can be time-consuming to be too democratic when choosing what wines to taste. If you take too much time to listen to each member make their suggestion for next month's tasting idea, and then take still more time to vote on which idea is best, before you know it, your meeting's half over and you still haven't tried any wine yet!

With that in mind, here's an idea that I learned a few years ago (in a book club, ironically) that I think translates perfectly to a wine tasting club: Set up a queue of tasting themes for the next several meetings.

Decide The Next Five Meetings Up Front
Our book group used to spend as much as 15-25% of our time at each meeting trying to decide what book to read next, as each person made an impassioned case for their choice for the next book. Finally, one member suggested using one meeting to choose books for the next five or six meetings, so we could get those decisions out of the way all at once.

When we chose five or so books at once, everybody could see that, eventually, they would get a turn for their book idea--it might be two or three months from now, but their book choice was still on the list to be read. Suddenly, the decision-making process for the group became a lot easier. Instead of taking fifteen minutes to decide on one book, we were choosing five books in fifteen minutes. People are a lot more willing to defer if it's clear up front that everyone will get their turn.

Try this approach with your wine club and see how much time it saves. And if you're looking for suggestions of potential themes for your group to consider for your wine club, stay tuned: I'll run a list of ideas for winetasting themes in my next post.

The Wines Really Add Up
Let me wrap up this post by going over the math of why wine tasting clubs are so cost effective. Let's say you start a simple wine group with five members that meets monthly, and each member brings one bottle of wine per meeting.

After just one year, you will have sampled a staggering 60 wines at a cost to you of only one bottle of wine per month. Depending on the price constraints your group chooses, this could be as little as $15-$25 per month, or just a fraction of the cost of a single dinner out at a nice restaurant. And that laughable $15-$25 monthly cost is just for a small, simple group. With a few extra members, the number of wines you'll get to try will be even larger, yet the cost per member will stay roughly the same.

You would be hard-pressed to find a better or less expensive way to try that many wines. Why should enjoying wine hurt you in the wallet?

Readers, what experiences have you had tasting wines in a wine club setting? What advice would you share with the rest of us?
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Stay tuned for the next installment of Casual Kitchen's series on wine: 27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings.


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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

A Pox on Our 2009 Open That Bottle Night

I hope you took the opportunity to celebrate Open That Bottle Night on Saturday! What wine did you open and what did you celebrate?

Today I'll share with you our OTBN celebration, which, for reasons I'll need to explain, actually happened one day later than the official February 28th date.

You see, a little over a week ago, I had the singularly bad luck of coming down with a case of the chicken pox. At age 39. And no, I never caught it as a kid.

This is a vile disease to get at any age. But if you have the unique misfortune of contracting it as an adult, what's most shocking about the chicken pox is how painful it can be. I graduated from Ibuprofen to Tylenol to Tylenol with Codeine and then to Vicodin in a matter of just three days. And I don't even like to take painkillers. At least, I didn't until this pox made me see the light.

And I've always had a great knack for timing too. You see, last week, Laura and I were supposed to relocate, temporarily, to Hawaii for a four month break. Yep. Last week. But getting on a plane in a state of peak pox contagion would have been unthinkable (and, not to mention, bad for my karma for a million generations hence). So, we rescheduled our flights for two weeks later. I'll probably look horribly pock-marked and scarier than ever, but by then I'll no longer be a health threat to my fellow passengers. But please, no jokes about restarting the leper colony on Molokai.

Unfortunately, when OTBN rolled around this past Saturday, I wasn't healthy enough to really enjoy a glass of wine. So, instead of pouring wine, Laura doled out more pain meds for me to take. And we waited.

Fortunately, the next day--Sunday--was a bit of a different story. For the first time I felt better than the day before, not worse. So Laura and I celebrated by reheating some take-out Chinese food and opening our OTBN wine just a day behind schedule: a half-bottle of Sauternes that Laura got me for Christmas.


As for how much this wine costs, Laura won't even tell me. Fortunately, Laura is more generous to me than I am to myself.

And what did we drink to? We drank to the traveling we've been lucky enough to do lately, including a recent one-month trip we took to New Zealand (more on that tomorrow), as well as a recent trip we made with a team of eye doctors to do eye exams in Guatemala.

We also toasted our upcoming trip to Hawaii, and to the sabbaticals we are both taking from the work world right now that will enable us to live in Hawaii until the end of June.

And we toasted to the glories of Vicodin and the fact that I'm at last starting to feel a little bit better.

Last but not least, let me make a final toast to you--my growing number of readers here at Casual Kitchen. I'm grateful to have you, and it's been an absolute pleasure writing for you for the past two-plus years!



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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget

The subject of wine doesn't come up nearly as often as it should here at Casual Kitchen. And I'm long overdue to write an article about how this often expensive beverage can still be enjoyed even in the most frugal kitchen.

Many frugal food enthusiasts hold the misconception that you can't enjoy the pleasures of wine without spending a lot of money. And then there's the other side of the coin: too many wine snobs can't bring themselves to enjoy wine unless they spend a lot of money.

Guess what? Both sides are wrong. Good wine can be surprisingly cheap, and cheap people can enjoy good wine.

The goal of today's post is to help you develop a taste for good, inexpensive wine. I'll share some of the best tips and ideas we've come across here at Casual Kitchen so that you too can enjoy the pleasures of wine without killing your budget.

It's Highly Likely That You Can't Tell
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal quoted a 2003 study by the Oenonomy Society of the U.S. that argued that "80% of wine drinkers can't distinguish between regular and reserve bottles of the identical wine." And at a recent proceeding at the National Academy of Science, there was an equally embarrassing study in which "test subjects were given what was billed as cheap wine and expensive wine. As measured by brain activity, they thought the costly wine gave the most pleasure." Despite the test subjects' perceptions, however, both wines were exactly the same.

The point is this: it's highly likely that you, and almost all of the people you know, can't tell the difference between wine that's really good and wine that's merely decent. And very, very, very few people (like well less than one percent of the population) have a palate that can tell the difference between really good wine and truly great wine.

As much as we all like to think we have refined and highly tuned palates, the truth is, we don't.

Two Buck Chuck
This is not to say that there isn't any difference between, say a glass of Two Buck Chuck and a glass of Bordeaux from Chateau Lafite Rothschild. There most undoubtedly is a difference. But the question is, is pleasure you derive from drinking one 500 or 1,000 times greater than from drinking the other?

Interestingly enough, Two Buck Chuck wines (otherwise known as Charles Shaw Wines) have won some prestigious awards in major wine competitions over the years, yet again giving the lie to the claim that inexpensive wines are by definition low in quality.

Experiment with Blind Tastings
The best way to drive home this very point is to host your own blind tasting. Invite four or five friends over to your home and ask each friend to bring one expensive bottle and one inexpensive bottle of similar wine. Cover all the bottles with paper bags and do an honest, blind tasting.

You will be shocked at the results. And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that all the wines will taste the same. I'm simply saying that your preferences will be surprisingly uncorrelated to the prices on the wine bottles, and you'll likely prefer some of the lower-priced wines to some of the higher-priced ones.

Slaves to Wine Spectator
Believe me, this is really good news. No longer will you have to slavishly buy only wines with a 92 or higher score in Wine Spectator Magazine. Instead, you can see what wines are offered at a deep discount at your local wine store and, keeping an open mind, be pleasantly surprised by something new, different, and not rip-off expensive.

Oh, and if you have any friends who fancy themselves as budding oenology experts, be sure to invite them to this blind tasting too. When it's all over, everyone will have a humbler--and more realistic--sense of how finely tuned their palate is. And of course everyone will have a really fun evening too.

If you think you're at risk of becoming a mindless wine snob, a blind tasting could be the best thing that ever happened to your wallet.

Value and Price Are Often Completely Unrelated
Way back in this blog's life, a commenter left this comment regarding one of his coworkers:

I recently asked a coworker who's renowned for his wine collection whether he could recommend any good value wines under $30 a bottle. His reply: "I don't even cook with anything under $30 a bottle."

Aside from this being one of the most asinine things ever said, it also proves that people can grievously confuse price with value. If this guy can tell the difference between over $30 and under $30 wine in, say, a batch of my Risotto or my Casbah Curried Chicken, then he either has the best palate on the face of the earth (unlikely), or he lets others decide "quality" for him by setting high prices (highly likely).

Don't let others define for you what you like. It's the best way to avoid being separated from your money. Think of all the instances where people confuse price with value to their detriment (Jaguar cars? Le Creuset cookware?). Often, there can be an extreme lack of correlation between price and value.

Start a Tasting Group
One of the best ways to enjoy many different types of wine at very little cost is to start a regular wine tasting club. You'll want to have at least four or five members at each session to insure that you will have a solid selection of wines to try. You can set all sorts of parameters for what wines to choose--from the highly specific (Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand) to the highly general (red wines, dessert wines, sparkling wines, or just wines, etc). Establish a reasonable guideline for prices and let the fun begin. We'll discuss wine tasting groups in much greater depth in a coming post in this series.

Try Wines From Other Countries
There are a lot of factors that can make the best wines from some countries a relative bargain. Labor and growing costs in countries like Chile or Argentina are much lower than in France or the USA. On top of that, changes in currency values can at times make a given country's wines extraordinarily inexpensive. Laura and I were recently in New Zealand, and we took full advantage of the fact that the New Zealand dollar had fallen to about half the value of the US dollar. Heck, it was as if the entire country was having a 50% off sale, so we drank everything we could! We found several really good wines selling at prices below US$10 a bottle.

Mixed Cases
The next time you visit a wine store or a winery, ask if they offer a full-case discount. Quite often, wine-sellers will give discounts of up to 15% if you buy a full case of wine, and even more often they will let you mix and match bottles. Instead of buying just a bottle or two, do your wine shopping for the next several weeks by buying a full case at a big discount.

Buying Wine in Restaurants
This article wouldn't be complete if I didn't say a few words about ways to save money when you are buying wine in a restaurants. The short (and not exactly helpful) answer is: don't. Wine and alcohol are almost always the highest-margin products in the restaurant business, and mark-ups for wine in a typical restaurant can be as high as three to four times the retail price.

However, if you still find yourself considering a restaurant purchase of wine, I can still suggest two strategies to help limit the damage to your wallet.

First, you can consider buying two kinds of wine by the glass and sharing them with your dinner companion.

A second strategy is to buy the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu. Not only is it almost always a legitimate bargain, it also reveals one of the most clever profit-maximization techniques used in restaurants today.

What exactly is this technique? Well, have you ever bought the second cheapest bottle of wine on the wine list? I sure have, but since doing the research for this article, I won't do it any more. Remember, diners resist buying the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu--after all, that would be cheap, wouldn't it? So restaurants, banking on this tendency among their customers, do a clever bait and switch: they take an inexpensive wine, mark it up massively, and sell it as the second cheapest item on the wine list. The restaurant makes a ton of profit on what seems like a bargain, and you spend more money that you should have on a wine that's overpriced.

And remember, unless they hate their customers, no restaurant will put a crappy wine on their wine list.

Readers, what other money-saving wine tips can you think of that you'd like to share?
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Stay tuned for the next installment of Casual Kitchen's series on wine: How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Club.

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Open That Bottle Night--February 28, 2009

I want to tell my readers about an important wine-related event coming up just a few days from now, on February 28th: It's called Open That Bottle Night.


Open That Bottle Night was invented by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, writers of the weekly wine column in the Wall Street Journal, as well as the authors of The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine. If you haven't yet heard of them, they are two of the most wonderful and unpretentious wine writers out there, and they've been the spark for much of the interest in wine we have here at Casual Kitchen.

But back to Open That Bottle Night. In their column leading up to last year's OTBN, here's how Dottie and John described it:

"So very many of us have that special bottle -- from a departed loved one, from a visit to a winery, from a vacation -- that we're always going to open for just the right moment, but, of course, that moment never comes. So the wine sits and sits and sits and becomes more and more precious, so it sits and sits some more."

Do you have just such a bottle of wine, laying around, collecting dust, and waiting for a "reason" to be opened? Well, that's exactly what Open That Bottle Night is all about. This Saturday, February 28th is the night that you will simply open that bottle, enjoy it, and create new memories.

I love celebrations like this because they show us that great times and great moments are all around us. Open That Bottle Night actively encourages you to celebrate life now. After all, what's the point of waiting, passively, for memorable or celebratory events to come to you? Why wait to open a bottle at some point in the future when you can make memories today?

I've even started to think of OTBN as an annual holiday, since it always falls on the last Saturday in February. And OTBN grows each year in popularity--every year, more and more readers send their stories to Dottie and John of the special bottle of wine they chose, why they chose it, and most importantly, what memories they celebrated.

And Dottie and John always write a follow-up column sharing some of the best reader memories from that night. It's always one of their best columns of the year.

And if you want to add a little bit of extra fun to your evening, jot down the kind of wine you're drinking, the vintage year, and any thoughts on what you like (or don't like) about the wine. Keep the paper somewhere safe so you can use it to write down notes for next year's OTBN. Who knows, maybe this will be the start of an annual tradition for you!

At Casual Kitchen, we'll also be opening our own bottle of wine on February 28th, and I'll be sure to share the story with you. I also intend to use OTBN as a kick-off for a brief series of posts on wines at Casual Kitchen.

What are you going to do on Open That Bottle Night this year?

Related Links:
Dottie and John's Tastings Column in the Wall Street Journal

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How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Group



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.