Wine Is For Everyone

    If you don’t know about my love for wine, you must be new here.

My love for wine developed from an early age. Growing up with parents heavily involved in the wine industry and great lovers of good wine, has meant that I learnt to appreciate good wine from the moment I was legally able to drink it. I know that this, along with working in the wine industry myself, has me at a great advantage – and I hope to share what I know and what I have learnt with as many people as possible.

You see, there is a really annoying stigma surrounding the wine industry (one that is thankfully slowly starting to fade), that wine is only for people who know about wine. A lot of students will go for the cheapest wine there is, because they are afraid to explore anything further in fear of being bombarded with technical wine terminology and ending up with something that they don’t like.

A lot of wine farms and wine brands are starting to realise this, and are starting to promote the idea that wine tastings should be more subjective and not full of technical jargon. Basically, what it comes down to is that, though people can tell you what you “should” be able to taste in the wine, it is also greatly based upon your own personal taste buds, experience and interpretation. If you taste asparagus, and your friend tastes pineapple you are both right – because that is what your own interpretation is.

If you have the opportunity nearby, and you are interested in finding wine that you like, my only advice is to try as much as possible. You can’t know what you like until you’ve tried a whole lot of it!

A really great thing to do is to keep notes about the types of wine that you enjoyed – look at the blend, the vintage (year), the style and the types of thing that are said about the wines that you enjoyed so that you know what to look for in the future.

A easy way to keep track of this is to use Vivino, which is an app that I found out about a while ago and I think that it is quite brilliant (this isn’t an ad, I just really like it). Basically you can take a photo of the bottle of wine that you enjoyed and it recognises the bottle, pulls up the price and other reviews that have been made about this wine. You can rate it according to a 5 star system, and then you can save it to your library for future reference if you want to find it again!

I’ve just started to use it, because my colleagues and I are trying to cover as many of Stellenbosch’s wine farms as possible before the end of the year, and I want to keep track of what I like and don’t like!

What do you think of wine – and how do you enjoy it?