Hold Your Sipping Horses

Through trial and error these last few weeks we have come up with a system for tasting our wine. We don't just crack open the bottle and gulp it down... At least we aren't supposed to. The Smeals like to prematurely sip their wine when they think no one is looking, but usually it goes something like this. After everyone is ready, the initial chit-chat is out of the way, and the wine breathes as necessary we begin. Melissa, as the designated person of the group, asks us what we see in the wine (yes we do really follow the 5ish Ss of wine tasting) and she dutiflily writes diwn our winy thoughts as we go along. Then we smell the wine and discuss which notes we notice. We swirl and resmell as needed (Sherry and Brit at this point usually prematurely sip their wine before everyone else. I can't decide if it's because they just love wine that much or they really want to be first.). Finally, when we all declare that we are ready, we sip the wine together. As we sip and savor Melissa writes down our thoughts on the wine. We note what we taste as Melissa gives us taste options from her book. We score the wine based on a five star system but Brit has his own wine scale based on four stars which will hopefully be posted sometime soon.