Wine tasting at our Spanish language school: a treat for the senses.

On the 19th of August, a group of Hemingway students and teachers met in the school for a special class in wine tasting, led by our very own Alfredo. It started off with a bit on the history of wines, and the story behind the reason some are white and some are red. It just so happens that all wine starts of being white, because it goes through a process of fermentation of the juice alone so and when it’s ready it’s a clear colour, then the following process is to leave it to ferment a little more with the skin of the grape and that is where the colour comes from.

After our learning a little about the process of wine we learnt about the different senses used in wine tasting, sight, smell and finally taste. As a little game we were given 13 vials containing different smells ranging from strawberry and apple to smoke and humidity. It was great fun, and coming from a world of perfumes and such, so us girls had the upper hand!

In the end we finally got down to the tasting of the wine, we put our new found wisdom into it by describing the colours, the smells we recognized and finally the flavour. We tried three different wines, two young ones and one older one. Finally to round off a brilliant evening, some students and teachers headed out for pintxos in the Casco Viejo.

An evening well spent!