All You Can Eat – Tetra Pak Wine and Natalie Maclean

On this edition of All You Can Eat, you’ll hear some advice on wine shopping and her take on modern wine journalism from popular Canadian wine writer, Natalie Maclean. You can find out all about her and her take on wine by visiting her extensive website.  On her website you can also subscribe to her free e-newsletter, and make sure you check out her comprehensive food and wine matcher.

Don’t be fooled by the ‘glamour’ photo of Natalie you see here.  She is a very down-to-earth person who carries an infectious enthusiasm for the world of wine.  To follow some of her travels, you could order her first book from Amazon.ca and save 37 percent off the cover price!  Red and White and Drunk All Over is the story of her visits to some of the most important wine production in the world. 

At the beginning of this podcast I mentioned a fun way my wine journalism instructor Richard Baudains taught us of doing a blind wine tasting that can also reveal how different, or similar, your perceptions of wine colour, aromas and tastes are to your friends.  I would say having about 10 people to do this would be fun, but you could go even higher and put people into groups of two.  Here’s what you do:

• Buy five bottles of red or white wine.  They should all be the same colour, and there should be some variety in the way they taste, but not that much.  Try mixing different vintages, and varietals. 
• Cover the bottles in foil or paper and number them 1 to 5. 
• Then give each taster five pieces of paper on which they will describe each wine in three different categories:  Colour, aroma and taste.  Make sure they are smaller pieces of paper so they don’t go wild!  Each taster writes their name on each piece of paper.
• But they don’t write the number of each wine on each description.  They make themselves a letter key.

The key would look like this, for example:
1  2  3  4  5
D O N N  Y   

• So when they describe wine number 1, on the sheet of paper they write ‘D’, on the next sheet for number 2 they write ‘O’, and so on.  For the descriptions, colour could contain red, dark red, ruby red, brownish red, etc.  Aroma could be tobacco, fruit, blackberry, etc.  Taste can be tannic, soft, acidic, plummy, jammy, etc.  There are really no rules as to what you write down for the descriptions.
• When everyone has finished tasting and writing throw all the descriptions into a hat.  Then each taster picks out 5 descriptions, none of which can be his or her own.  Then after reading the descriptions each person writes the number of the wine they think it is, and write their own name beside the number they think it is.  Then everyone returns their descriptions to their respective owners.
• The fun begins when you see whether people have recognized the wines they tasted by the way the other people described them.  The better the job you do describing your wines, the more people should guess which is which, right?  Well, maybe not…that’s where the fun comes in when you discover whether your describe your perceptions in the same way as your friends or colleagues.

In this podcast I also talked about Tetra Pak wines and how they are turning up more and more often in liquor stores and wine shops not only in Canada, but around the world.  Here’s the Tetra Pak story of how French Rabbit wines in Tetra Paks first came to Canada. If you go to this link on the BC Liquor Distribution Branch website you can download as a pdf file the spring edition of Taste, which is relatively new publication from the LDB, very ably put together with help from my friend at the branch, Anne Gilmour.  Nice work, Anne!  On page 61 you will find a feature about the new line of Tetra Pak wines you can find soon in BC Liquor stores, and even if you’re not from BC, check out Anne’s very useful story on outfitting your bar with glassware depending on how much space and how much money you have!  That’s on page 30.  Update: The Globe and Mail’s wine writer, Beppi Crosariol, just wrote an amusing little feature with a hint of insouciance on wines in boxes and plastic bottles.  Here’s the link.  Hopefully it will remain active and not go immediately into the ‘pay’ archives of the newspaper.  Let me know if it goes down….

thanks to my sponsors for this week, Folgers Gourmet Selections and GoDaddy.com.

For free samples of Folgers Gourmet Selections coffee, visit www.folgers.com/podshow.  While quantities last, act soon!

And to take advantage of GoDaddy.com offers such as 10 percent off any order, use this code when you check out:  eat1