Did you know that the earliest evidence of grape wine making was taken from the fragments of 8000-old-wine jars in Georgia – the country not the state.
Or that an Italian man boarded a ship in Italy not knowing where it was bound, arrived in Australia and went on to plant a renowned vineyard from grape seeds he carried?
Those are just some little facts and sideline stories about wine you can learn while trying out different wines and deciding which one is for you – or to just drink some wine and eat some delicious food – when you go to a Victoria Wines wine tasting event.
After a three-year lapse, Victoria Wines held its first post-pandemic wine tasting at Shenanigans, one of the company’s Suva outlets last Wednesday night.
Company director and founder, Liam Hindle was on the floor hosting his guests to a night of wine flights.
They were greeted with a glass of sparkling wine and offered a fivestar style buffet to match the world class wines – this was very popular.
Out came two mystery wines, a red and a white, a sort of warm up and indeed a refresher to what the regulars would have been used to, where they were asked to name the wine and where it was from – and people got it right. Then they did the same for 12 more wines.
Mr Hindle has been hosting these events for 15 years pre-COVID and selling wines since the 1990’s, and he’s racked up quite a bit of knowledge about the stuff.
“The main problem in all this is that I have enough wine knowledge to carry this sort of a thing and it’s quite hard to get anybody ready to take over but we are working on that because I’m now 80 years old and I have to start, sometime, taking things a little bit easier,” he said.
Going back to normalcy, where the wine tastings become a monthly affair is something he and his team at Victoria Wines are trying to do.
But why all the fuss about wine, it’s all wine right, red or white, it’s basically the same thing? Wrong! Every wine has its own peculiarities, from the flavour to the aroma and the texture of the wine as it sits in your mouth.
This is an immersive educational experience, for learning about wine and learning which ones you like and which ones are not quite for you.
“It’s an education proposition because people can taste 16 different wines and they range up to wines which are very expensive.
“It’s a hard thing to do, to go in and buy a bottle of wine that you know nothing about.
“And you’re going to be paying $20, $30, $40, $50 and you don’t know whether you’re going to like it or not.
“So this gives people an opportunity to taste 15 different wines and they can work out whether they like them because there are thousands of different varietals, different wines, different wine companies.
“And people have to find out what suits their individual palette, their individual taste, and tastes evolve.” What suits your palette?
