Hosting a 'Wine Tour' at Home

If heading to the vineyards isn’t in your immediate future, bring the experience home instead.

Sure, you can find great deals on hotels, flights, rental cars and restaurants, but the price of a wine vacation can still add up; especially if you end up buying and shipping a couple cases of wine home, to your friends or family.

Visiting wineries and tasting several wines side-by-side can be a valuable learning experience. Fortunately, you can replicate many of the aspects at home. And it’s much easier to get your friends together for a wine party than an entire vacation.

Here are a few different approaches you can take:

1. Eliminate as many variables as possible so you can target the influence of the winemaker and specific vineyard the grapes were grow in. Select five or six wines of the same varietal, sub-region, year and price range. For instance, if you really enjoy Chianti with casual dinners during the week, but tend to grab the first bottle you see on the shelf or stick with the same couple of labels, use the tasting as a chance to branch out. Find a variety of Chianti Classico from 2001 in the $20 to $35 price range. Maybe you’ll discover a new favorite.

2. Try a varietal at roughly the same latitude or longitude. Find a couple examples of pinot noir from Willamette Valley, Oregon; Burgundy, France; and Central Otago, New Zealand. Or explore the differences in West Coast pinot noir with a few from Willamette Valley; Sonoma, California; and Santa Barbara, California. Make sure you buy at least two wines from each region.

3. Purchase wines from the same winery. Find a winery that specializes in one or two varietals and buy a few bottles of each from the same year, if possible. With the same winemaker, you can see the effect of the vineyard or aging process. Linne Calodo in Paso Robles, California offers two 2006 wines with at least 67 percent syrah and four 2006 wines with at least 64 percent zinfandel. This would give you the opportunity to experience the different blending grapes and their effect on the wine. Also, Peachy Canyon in Paso Robles has seven 2006 zinfandels with grapes from different vineyards.

Think about a particular varietal, region or winery you’ve been wanting to learn more about and let that serve as your source of inspiration. Even get out your favorite wine book, open it to a random pages and go from there. You can provide the wines yourself or ask each guest or couple to bring a bottle within the selected parameters. To mimic the experience you would have at a winery, have each person research the wine they bring so they can share details such as soil, growing conditions for the year, the aging process and more.

As you taste each wine, identify the differences among them and try to account for the various characteristics. Make everyone feel comfortable discussing the wines. The most important thing is learning to articulate what you taste and having fun. The more you drink wine and talk about it, the less intimidating it becomes.

Don’t Forget the Cheese
Since wine is intended to be enjoyed with food, prepare bite-size nibbles. First try the wine without the food and then with it to see the effect on the wine. Put out cheese, vegetables or skewers of meat. Also provide neutral crackers or bread to cleanse the palate between wines.

To complete the experience, put out buckets for guests to pour their unwanted wine into. And don’t underestimate the importance of wine tags for keeping track of each person’s glasses and what’s in them. It might seem easy to keep track of your wine until there are 30 or more glasses around the table. Along those lines, provide inexpensive journals or notebooks for jotting down notes.

There’s nothing like driving up to a winery with rows of grapes welcoming you on both sides. Recreate some of that ambience with little touches. Print off pictures of the regions or wineries you’ll be tasting wines from. You can use these as place mats for guests’ wine glasses or as backing if you want to print up a menu of the wines and food. For an easy name cardholder, put a slit in the top of a cork and tie a ribbon around it. Make use of wine labels, bottles, corks or pictures that you have sitting in your bar or cabinets.

One benefit of a "wine tour" at home is that you can do them every month. Start a wine club and let the host for the month choose the theme. Plenty of people use book clubs as an excuse to drink wine. Let this be your new reason to get together with friends and learn more about wine at the same time.

Until next month, drink well.