For the second travel week, I signed up for a DIScovery trip to Southern France and it was 100% the best decision I’ve made. Before leaving, I was hitting the point in the semester where I was feeling homesick and getting stressed about classes and travel planning and internship applications (the list goes on). Let me tell you, there is no better (or Nicer) cure to mid-semester blues than a trip to Nice.
The whole trip was planned and it was amazing to take a break and not stress about having to figure out activities and transportation. They booked our week so every day was full of wine tastings, beautiful views, amazing feasts and a ton of hands-on learning about food and wine. I can’t do this post without a huge shoutout and thank you to our trip leader, Russ (the same Russ that leads my wine club). He is actually the best.
Pictures don’t really do it justice but here are some glimpses into the best parts of the trip:
Food
The theme of the trip was “culinary exploration,” so I came in with pretty high expectations for the week. The trip completely exceeded those. I am pretty sure I had a food baby for 5 straight days and I have not one complaint. We had some pretty extravagant dinners, and I tried a lot of foods that I wouldn’t typically order (such as raw seafood). Although I didn’t love every single thing I tried (re: raw seafood), I was excited to get the opportunity to try new things and step out of my comfort zone.
White pizza with black truffles & seafood spaghetti. Both were INCREDIBLE.
Me and my dinner. This was not a family style dish.
Yes, I tried all of these.
Chloe eats a raw oyster and hates it.
Mussels and french fries were served after the raw seafood, thankfully.
Cinnamon and speculoos gelato (not the only cone I ate that day)
60+ gelato flavors to pick from
Wine Tastings
A trip to Southern France would not be complete without wine. The region is known mostly for their rosé wines, but we got to try a good variety of red and whites as well. We visited three vineyards, where we were given tours and tastings. It was great to build on what I had learned in wine club and actually get to see how the wine gets made.
More tastings
In addition to wine tastings, we also got to do a cheese tasting and an olive oil tasting, two things I had no idea even existed before this week. For the cheese tasting, we were given several varieties of cheese and 4 glasses of wine. We tried each cheese with each wine and it was really crazy to see how differently I felt about the cheeses and wines based on the different pairings. For the olive oil tasting, we tried eight different kinds of olive oil. They would come around and put a small drop of each oil on your tasting spoon and tell us a bit about how its made and what recipes you could make with it. I had no idea that olive oil could be so nuanced, but ended up loving the lemon, garlic and truffle varieties.
Cheese tasting in Nice
Picnics with a view
We spent the first part of the trip in Fayence and my favorite part was the picnic. We had a “market challenge” where we broke into groups and each group focused on a different part of the picnic like breads, cheeses, spreads & tapenades, etc. We were given cash to spend on our part of the picnic and we reconvened as a group around lunchtime. Russ picked a spectacular location for a picnic. It involved a lot of walking, but we had incredible views and so much food. Russ also got six different kinds of rosé wine, so we did a tasting of our own.
French cooking class
One of the coolest activities was the French cooking class. We got to help French chefs make a three-course lunch, and every course involved something with flower petals. We had a cold tomato soup with rose petals, violet-stuffed duck breasts and a rose tiramisu.
Nice times with nice people
We also had some time to explore and see Nice, which is a beautiful city. I went on the trip with my friend Kelli, but we left with some nice new friends, too (pun intended).
On Tuesday night, I had my first session of DIS’s European Wine Tasting Club, and I can already tell you that signing up was one of my best decisions I’ve made abroad so far.
I decided to sign up for the club because I’m not super interested in the bar scene here, and I’m kind of picky and don’t like that many alcoholic drinks, but I do really enjoy having wine. I like that it pairs well with different foods and I enjoy having a glass after a long day. That being said, I went into this class with no knowledge of wine whatsoever. Up until this point, I’ve made all my decisions on price (shoutouts to the $4 wine that I get at Netto✌️🏼) and I don’t know much about what I like or why I like it. So I signed up hoping to gain some skills that will help me make more intelligent decisions when buying wine.
Of course the first session of this wine class took place on one of my busiest weeks of the semester so far — the Architecture & Design department critiques for project one is happening tomorrow, and we had tons of preparation due by Wednesday morning (I’ll share more about critiques later), so I went into Wine Club with a lot on my mind with the rapidly approaching deadline.
The session ended up being the perfect break from my studio work. The club is led by a certified specialist of wine with over 25 years of experience as a wine educator, sommelier and consultant. So basically, the man knows his stuff (and he’s leading the DIScovery trip that I’m taking to France so that is nifty!!) His only two rules for our club are that we have fun and that we don’t talk over him while he leads the tasting. He warned us that although we were quiet at the beginning and we didn’t know all the other people at our tables, after glass #3 the atmosphere would start changing (he was very right).
For reference, here is an awful picture of Kelli and I as we began glass four. #BoozeDayTuesday
Each class we will try six different European wines, taking notes as we perform the 4 (S)teps of a wine tasting:
See
Sniff
Sip
Savor
When doing a wine tasting, you go through these steps, getting more and more information from observations before you even try the wine. Here’s the run-down of the process for those of you who want to try to be a fancy wine-taster at home.
See: You start off by just looking at the wine. You want to hold the wine up at a 45-degree angle against a white background (during wine tastings, your scorecard/notes book will always have a white back page for this purpose) and look at the deepest part of the glass and observe the wine’s clarity. Clear wine is always a good sign. Then, observe the color elsewhere in the glass. If a white wine has brown-ish colors or a red wine has orange-ish colors, it might be past its prime. The last part of this step involves swirling the glass and observing the “legs” and viscosity of the wine. The viscosity of the wine is how quickly the legs (or tears) on the sides of the glass drip back down after you swirl the wine glass. Wines that are more viscous tend to have higher alcohol and/or sugar contents.
Sniff: Now you take a quick sniff of the wine to gather your first impressions, taking note of if it smells clean or stale or faint or intense. Then, you swirl your glass again and stick your nose actually into the glass and inhale deeply and gather your second impressions. Try to pick out what you smell, whether its flowers, berries, vanilla, spices, etc. You do this a couple of times, trying to pick up on additional layers of aromas. And fun fact about this one, my mom actually sent me an article that says that doing this is good for you and that it prevents alzheimer’s disease!
Sip: This is the fun part. You take a taste and when you do this, you want to swish it around your mouth like mouth wash. You want the wine to touch as much of your mouth as possible, because you have taste buds everywhere. At some point while you’re swishing, you also want to purse your lips and breath in a bit of air like you’re drinking through a straw to help aerate the wine. You want to pay attention to the acidity (is it crisp, refreshing, tart?), the tannins (how dry is your mouth after a sip?) and the body (think of how heavy it feels, like skim milk vs. whole milk vs. heavy cream). Then you think about the flavors, and how much they match the aromas. Are there subtle and more complex flavors? Are the flavors intense or just barely there?
Savor: Continue sipping the wine and thinking about all these qualities together. Are all they harmonious or is the experience disjointed, some of the aspects too pronounced? Pay attention to how long the taste of the wine lingers in your mouth after a sip. Does it go away after 10 seconds or 45 seconds? Think of what the wine would go with, what stands out and makes it unique, and whether or not you like it.
So, now that you know how the process works, I’ll tell you what we tried in class one. We tried three white and three red wines. We focused mainly on pure grape varieties and did one blend to finish things off. In the next four classes we’ll focus on different European regions (next week is France!) and then our sixth and final class will be a blind tasting.
We tried these six wines:
2012 Clos Floridène, Graves Blanc (100% Sauvignon Blanc, 225 Kr. from Bordeaux, France). Goes well with goat cheese.
2012 Dr. Thanisch, Bernkasteler Badstube Riesling Kabinett (100% Riesling, 199 kr. from Mosel, Germany). Goes well with sweet meats, like pork chops and apple sauce.
2014 Jean-Claude Boisset, Bourgogne Blanc, Les Ursulines(100% Chardonnay, 159 kr. from Burgundy, France). Goes well with fish or soft chesees.
2014 Jean-Claude Boisset, Bourgogne Pinot Noir Nature, Les Ursulines (100% Pinot Noir, 249 kr. from Burgundy France). Goes well with salmon or fowl.
2013 Tardieu-Laurent, Corneas Coteaux (100% Syrah, 300 kr. from Northern Rhone, France). Goes well with barbecued meat.
2012 Les Fiefs de Lagrange, Sant-Julien (61% Cabernet Sauvignon, 31% Merlot, 8% Petit Verdot, 275 kr. from Bordeaux, France). Goes well with steak.
The only one that I didn’t really like was the Riesling. It smelled terrible, very much like sulfur, but we learned that all wine has sulfur-dioxide in it, and that in Riesling it can be much more pronounced, but if you swirl it around for a minute it will aerate and the smell will dissipate. The taste was completely different than expected, but it was a bit too sweet for my liking.
After the first three wines, we were really feeling pretty good and that was made even better by the most epic snack break. There was a huge selection of breads, meats, cheeses, hummus, pesto, fruits and vegetables. So all my favorite things, pretty much. I definitely got my money’s worth of food.
Looks like a solid dinner to me!
My favorite wines that I tried on Tuesday were the chardonnay and the blend. I definitely determined that I’m not a fan of sweet wines, and that I need to work on my smelling abilities. I really was not very good at determining what I smelled in the wines other than just “fruit.”
Here’s a few more fun facts that I learned about wine:
White wines gain color as they age, but red wines lose it.
Green tinges in white wine and purple tinges in red wine show youth.
Tannin acts as a preservative. It comes from wine being barreled and a lot of tannins means a lot of dryness. If you taste a lot of aggressive tannin, that means there is potential to be aged, because it goes away as it ages in the bottles.
German wines are much more sugary.
Any wine with no fruit smell is probably past its prime.
Chardonnay grapes are often overly-acidic and to make it palatable, “malo-lactic” fermentation is done as a secondary form of fermentation, which explains why you sometimes taste dairy notes.
Sauvignon Blanc is meant to be enjoyed while it is young.
Cherries and earth are the most common smells in red wines.
Any wine that you want to age should be big in all the categories (lots of tannins, very acidic, tons of flavor).
Upstate NY has made a name for itself in Rieslings.
Can’t wait to go into next week’s tasting with this knowledge and get to know some French wines!
chlo-penhagen 