Someone in Kevin's family now owns a liquor store. His goal is to test all of the wines in order to get a better idea for their flavors so he can make educated recomendations, as well as to see what he'd like to continue to order, phase out, etc.
Many of the wines were sent off to Virginia with us. We had a different wine every night before dinner, and even though it was one at a time, we had to each night treat it like an actual tasting. We were swirling, sniffing, sipping, describing all week long. It was a lot of fun.
The most interesting thing was that each of us had to rate the wines. The way that I think (and probably most people think) when you say "rate this wine on a scale of 1-10" is "hmm... it's good, but not great... is that a 6? a 7?" and then someone calls out... "6!" and then I think "yeah, it's a 6, I'll agree to that!"
After a couple days we realized we were influencing eachother this way, so we started doing secret ballots. We had a much greater range of ratings once that happened.
The most interesting wine was the last night. We were out of wine from the family liquor store. I had been shopping at Walmart earlier in the day and was hysterical that 1. wine is sold at Walmart! in the south, and 2. they had $3/bottle wine. I bought it as a lark to see how it would fare at the family wine tasting.
It actually fared better than some of the wines that retailed at 10x the price that we had sampled. Of course, it wasn't the favorite, but it wasn't terrible, surprisingly.
I'm glad you had so much fun at your tasting. Hope you have more soon, they're fun! I hope I have more soon too! | 
Linear Mode
