If I had to name the top ten things that bring me great joy, wine tasting would be one of them.  My first wine tasting experience was in a conference room after hours, during a company retirement party.  Dee, the woman retiring, had been taking classes in wine appreciation to prepare for a wine tour through France, so our manager decided that a wine tasting in the office would be a fitting send-off.  I’m pretty sure this is something you could not do in an office setting today.

The fifteen or so of us in the department gathered in the conference room where tables had been set up with wine glasses, plates of cheese and crackers, and brochures from the local winery that was hosting our event.  We were attended to by a young and enthusiastic sommelier named Jason, from the same winery featured in the brochures.  He was wholesome and freckled, dressed in black pants, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black apron.  He was arranging wine bottles on the table, labels forward.  He placed a dump bucket at the other end of the table.  This would come in handy for pouring or spitting out wine we didn’t like.   I stood at the end near the wine bottles, away from the dump bucket.

There were nine wines for us to choose from; six reds and three whites.  Jason did a good job of describing the wine as he dispensed the standard three-ounce pours into our glasses.  He discussed the color and appearance, bouquet, and tasting notes of each wine.  He showed us how to properly swirl the wine in our glasses to separate and enhance the aromas, and to swish the wine in our mouths so that it touched all the tasting regions of our tongue.  A few people used the dump bucket after this exercise. I did not. 

Dee, the retiree, asked questions and commented on each wine, drawing on her recent studies.  She chatted with Jason about the Judgement of 1976, when wine from California’s Napa Valley won the Paris Wine Tasting Competition over French wine, gaining credibility for wines outside of Europe and changing the wine world forever.  I hung on the edge of their conversation, riveted.  The next day I headed to Barnes and Noble and picked up The Judgement of Paris and devoured it.

Until my wine awakening in the office conference room, I had not tasted truly good wine or understood its appeal.  In the years since, I have been on numerous wine tasting trips.  Most have been in California, from the Sacramento Valley to Temecula.  Recently I visited Washington State and experienced exceptional wine.  On a sister’s trip a couple of years ago in Sedona, Arizona we were surprised to come across a tasting room for a local vineyard.   We tried six wines.  All of the pours went into the dump bucket.

Several years ago, my mother and her sister, my Aunt Connie, came to visit my family in San Jose. My mother flew in from San Diego, my aunt from Cedar Falls, Iowa.  Both of them drank wine, but it was the supermarket variety, usually an iffy rosé of some sort.  I wanted to share my new passion and enlighten them on the joys of drinking wine that did not come in a box, so I surprised them with a wine tasting tour in Napa Valley.  My aunt never ventures far from Cedar Falls, so coming to the Bay Area was the trip of a lifetime for her.

The day of the wine tour, we left at 6:30 in the morning to meet our tour group at the Ferry Building in San Francisco.  San Francisco!  Aunt Connie was beaming with the thrill of it all.  We grabbed coffee and bagels inside the Ferry Building, which was already bustling with early commuters rushing toward their favorite morning brew.  We made our mandatory trip to the ladies’ room and dashed out to the small crowd waiting to board our tour bus.  When we climbed aboard, my aunt whispered to me, “do you think there’s a bathroom on this bus?” 

The tour bus was nearly full, with mostly couples, a few single day-trippers, and four or five French women, one of whom kept staring at my orange sandals like I had live chickens strapped to my feet.   Our “tour escort,” was a short, fuzzy-haired man with a deep tan and high voice.  He stood at the front of the bus facing us, presenting history and little-known facts about each of the four wineries we would be visiting that day.  He rocked from side-to-side in a balancing act as the bus rolled along, adjusting the glasses on his nose every few words.  He smiled heartily and spoke in the kind of sing-song patter people use when they’ve repeated the same information a couple hundred times.  We didn’t care, we paid attention because it was part of the experience.

The weather was spectacular that day.  The wineries looked like watercolor paintings, the wine tasting rooms were welcoming, cool and faintly musty.  At each stop I stood at the wine bar sniffing and swirling my glass like a pro.  I swished and swallowed wine that was aromatic, luscious, and heady. I did not detect the tasting notes highlighted by the sommelier:  cassis, green bell pepper, spice, wood, vanilla.  My palate is not that refined, but a good wine will make my knees weak on the first sip.  My mother, aunt, and I took photos of each other standing next to rows of grape vines, gnarled and covered in green leaves lit by the sun.  Vivid fruit in varying shades of purple or yellow or green, hung in clusters shining like jewels.  We bought over-priced trinkets in the gift shops, ate wonderful cheese and chocolate, and floated back to the tour bus, tipsy and flushed, sporting our colorful new visors.  At the last winery we visited, I purchased two bottles of Cabernet for myself and one for my mother.  She wanted to save it for Thanksgiving, which was still months away.  My mother and aunt flew back to San Diego the next day.

The night before she left to go back to Cedar Falls, I called my mother’s house to tell my Aunt Connie goodbye.  My mother sounded distracted when she answered the phone. 

“Mom, are you okay?”  I asked.

She told me Connie was upset and crying. I asked why, concerned.  She said they had opened the Thanksgiving wine because they wanted to enjoy a glass before Connie had to leave the next day.  But Connie drank too much, or too fast, or it just didn’t agree with her.  I waited. 

“Anyway,” Mom said with distress in her voice, “she threw up and lost her uppers down the toilet.” 

I had a few reactions to this.  The first was horror, a $48 bottle of wine literally down the toilet. Confusion at the thought of Aunt Connie’s uppers ejecting from her mouth into the toilet and flushing away undetected. Wouldn’t you feel that?  And I thought it was really funny, despite my aunt’s emotional anguish.

My mother went on to explain the true tragedy of the situation, because I clearly hadn’t grasped it.  “Anyway, it’s important to your Aunt Connie to look nice, you know, put together.”  She said.  I nodded at the other end of the phone.  It was true.  My aunt never went anywhere without styling her short blond hair and applying her makeup, all before breakfast.

Mom went on, “Well, now she has to fly home on the airplane with no upper teeth.  It’s just awful for her.”  I was squeezing my lips hard between my front teeth.  Do not laugh.  “And, she had to call Uncle Bernie and ask him to bring her spare teeth to the airport when he picks her up.”  And how did that conversation go?  I felt a snort coming on.  Be a good niece.  I took a deep breath and asked to speak with Aunt Connie so I could say goodbye.

“Oh, she can’t right now, Honey,” Mom said.  “She has a hard time talking without her uppers.”  My hand flew over my mouth.  I was a goner.

We never spoke of this incident again because my mother and my aunt were mortified by the whole thing.  At Thanksgiving though, I lifted my wine glass and said, let’s all pretend this is expensive Cabernet from the Napa Valley.  My Mom made a face.  Smart Aleck.

The last time I went wine tasting in Sonoma I went with my son’s girlfriend, Diane.  We stayed two nights and three days at a resort, treating ourselves to spa treatments and dishes that were new to us, like wild boar ragout and mussels in white wine sauce.  We toured the wineries on our own, standing shoulder to shoulder with other wine tasters.  Everyone was dressed for the weather in shorts and sandals, T-shirts, and ball caps or visors.  Some tasters were serious oenophiles, holding their wine glasses up to the light, checking for clarity of color and “good legs” dripping down the inside of the glass.  Some were more like Diane and I, who may have started out going through the motions, but ultimately abandoned ceremony, taking big greedy gulps and smacking our lips, stopping just short of wiping our mouth with the back of our hand.  Yummy.   Others, there for the atmosphere and booze, were loud and animated, throwing back their hooch like cowboys in a western.  These were the people who ate all the crackers and cheese.  Diane and I got to know a few people, not by name, but by their stories.  Stepping into a wine bar, we might spot a couple from the tour bus or from an earlier wine tasting and remark, “Oh, look!  It’s the welder and the bartender from Kansas again.  I hope their next round of invitro works for them.” 

On our last day in Sonoma, we had already visited most of the wine bars for tastings, so we went back to our favorites to enjoy full glasses of wine.  I bought a few bottles, Diane bought several, and we lugged them, heavy and rattling, onto the hotel shuttle and back to the room.  After a brief rest, we went back to the square in search of dinner and a glass of wine to toast the end of the weekend.  It was a warm, clear night, so we decided to walk off our Kobe beef burgers with one more trip around the square.  We passed a tasting room on the corner of a side street.  Huh, missed that one.  We could see a man through the huge front window wiping down the bar, dropping empty bottles into a large barrel.  It looked closed, but he waved us in.   “Come in ladies!”  He said as we passed through the door.  “We’re open for another 10 minutes.”  He was gay, lively, and good looking, with brown wavy hair and bright blue eyes.  He gestured to an overstuffed couch in front of a gas fireplace.   

“No more wine tasting tonight kids, but did you want a glass of wine?”  He asked, hands on hips, smiling broadly. Well, of course.

He poured himself and each of us a full glass of the palest chardonnay I had ever seen, and it tasted incredible.  After a few minutes, he locked the front door and flipped the sign hanging on the window from “Come on in!” to “We’ll see you tomorrow!”  He sat in a chair across from us, his legs stretched out and resting on the table between us.  We chatted for about an hour; he said his name was Dan. He filled us in on how he left a high-paying corporate job in the city to live and work in Sonoma.  We dramatically assured him he’d made the right decision, and that he was AWESOME.  Awesome and brave.  So brave.  Wine talk.  After two glasses of wine, we were, for the first time all weekend, getting ripped.  My buzz had became a headache. I stood up on rocky legs, slapped on my visor, and announced purposefully, “Time to go.” 

Before we left, Diane purchased four bottles of the pale Chardonnay.  We hugged Dan and made our way out the door, staggering and giggling our way the shuttle, a bottle of wine in each hand.  I barely remember the ride back to the hotel, except that I think we were singing or chanting something.  The next morning, we woke up fuzzy tongued and dehydrated.  I threw off my comforter.  So hot in here!  I looked over at her, sitting up in her bed, staring at the many, many bottles of wine placed around the room. “Oh my God,” she said.  Her long hair was sticking up all over her head and her voice was froggy.  “Where did all that wine come from?” I had to break it to her that of the eighteen bottles of wine, four were mine and the rest were hers, most of it purchased in a joyful wine-fueled mania the day before. 

She croaked, “But this is all of it, right?  God, there isn’t more in the bathroom is there?”  I assured her there was not.  She reached for her phone and looked up her bank account.  “OH MY GOD,” she said again and ran her fingers through her wild hair.  She glared at all the wine bottles, standing stoic and blameless, and shrugged.  “Well, a lot of people are getting wine for Christmas!”

My sisters share my interest in wine, so we make wine-tasting a part of our annual girl’s weekend.  (My brother does not like wine.  I don’t understand.)  We have come a long way since our first wine-tasting trips together.   Back then, we would gulp our way through a wine flight, and dissolve into hilarity over the smallest things.  In Cambria, I recall laughing uncontrollably, doubled over and gasping for breath after hearing the name of a German wine: Gewürztraminer.  I thought the wine steward had said as he uncorked the bottle, “now this wine is Gertie’s Wiener.”  We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard.   We are much more refined now.

My continuing love affair with wine has prompted me to join a wine club that delivers wine from around the world, arriving in a case of twelve bottles every three months.  I am like a kid every time they arrive.  The wine is here!  The wine is here!  I downloaded a twenty-episode course called, “The Everyday Guide to Wine” through The Great Courses.  I’ll start watching them soon, for sure.  Whenever I pour a glass of wine, I try to remember to sniff, swirl and swish, and search for those subtle notes I’m supposed to detect.  Raisin. Tobacco.  Vanilla.  They still elude me.  No matter.  I am delighted by the very act of pouring wine, releasing the rich, grapey aroma, and raising the glass to my lips, my senses poised for that first luxurious sip.