Degustation

Last weekend Jen, I and our friends Caitlin, Ryan and Ale went to a wine exhibition in the city. It was a last minute plan as we had plans to spend the weekend in Normandy and canceled on Thursday night because of the weather and the fact that Jen was coming down with a cold. I heard about the wine tasting and got tickets from a friend of mine who ironically didn't need his tickets as he was leaving town for Normandy.

We showed up not knowing what to expect. I figured it was a wine tasting of maybe a dozen independent wines and would be some kind of uptight affair. Instead, we entered a convention center size building that was absolutely jammed with people and wine! There were over 300 independent wine producers from all around France. When you enter the event and hand them your ticket (which was only 6 euros), they give you a wine glass in return. Then it's time to sample. Most of the wine producers have 5-7 wines available for tasting. You don't need to speak French to taste the wine, you just need to say the degustation. That means tasting, or more specifically, I want to taste all of your wines in the proper order (lightest to heaviest). Now there are spit buckets (I'm sure there is a better word for them) available in front of each stand, but I would be lying if I said I used one. We worked our way around the exhibition tasting wines from all different regions. At first we were a bit hesitant, but after a few tastings we started buying bottles. It was almost like being at a farmer's market. There wasn't anything fancy about the exhibition room or the setup. Each vigneron had crates of wine of different vintages behind the stand and would happily package up your wine in a box for you. We quickly realized that we would have a problem after a buying a couple bottles of wine as the wine started to get heavy. Luckily the French had already thought of a solution to the problem. They were selling dolly's at the entrance that could carry up to 30 bottles of wine. I split the cost of a dolly with Ale and we began collecting. Between tasting over 40 wines, eating foie gras and steadily convincing myself that my French was better than it really is, we passed the next 5 hours and ended the day with an overloaded dolly!

The exhibition was an unexpected suprise and one of those real French experiences. With all the wine that I dragged home, we are ready for some degustations for the next few months.