Online wine tasting

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The other day a friend has invited me for an online wine tasting that he was organizing. Theme: Portugal.

I have to confess that at first I was a bit sceptical about how you could organize such a thing and how your personal perception and enjoyment of it could be. 

About the organization I have to confess that it was with a sort of childish joy that I have given the bottle I have selected for the tasting and half an hour later got 12 small bottles properly numbered. This excitement kept on growing till the beginning of the tasting. 

From the twelve participants I knew only three but that was not a problem as we soon got to the purpose of the evening, discussing in a rather passionate way the wines that we were coming across. None of the participants, except the organizer, knew which wines we were trying, giving it a very similar feeling of a blind tasting.

From the beginning it became clear that most of the participants did not really have too much experience with Portuguese wines and were rather surprised with the variety and complexity of both wine grapes and terroirs that Portugal offers. Having chosen middle high quality wines there were quite some interesting things such as a white wine from Colares or a 96' Baga by Luís Pato or even the amphora wine by the Astronauta project about which I have written here. 

Still, the general tendency was for pretty complex Reservas, mainly from the Douro and Dão regions, which easily ended up tiring the palate and making the whole evening rather heavy. 

Please do not get me wrong: I have nothing against these sort of wines being, in fact, quite a huge fan of them, but a whole evening trying them can be rather exhausting.

Already predicting this situation, I have opted for a Pegos Claros Grande Escolha 2016 which is a 100% Castelão made from 100 years old vines. My main goal was to present a typical Portuguese grape from a region (Península de Setúbal) which could be not the most-known among this evening fellows.

At the end of the evening every participant was invited to vote on their favourite three wines and "mine" has surprisingly  won.

Even though I was really happy for finally joining a wine tasting which, due to the several lockdowns we have been living, has not been possible for over a year, I have to confess that it was rather exhausting to always be focused on wine and not really enjoying the casual conversations that often happen in these kind of events. 

I have somehow missed the human aspect connected to it and sometimes it was hard for me to keep on focusing on what people were discussing as I have started struggling with my German somewhen in the half of this marathon which has lasted for five hours.

But being sincere, I had a lot of fun and it was more than worth it, being now busy with preparing one for my colleagues somewhen soon.

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