Echelon Pinot Noir, 2008

Tonight we started our quest to learn more about wine with a bottle of Echelon Pinot Noir that we picked up at PCC this afternoon, regularly priced at $15 but on sale for $10. Overall, this was a very drinkable wine, but not especially interesting, complex, or "wow-worthy." I detected a distinct vanilla aroma, and we both felt that the wine would be categorized as dry and light. Patrick picked up some black cherry, but I never really got too much of that. This is a perfectly fine table wine to go with dinner, but if we'd paid the full $15 I think I would have felt that we paid too much. On a scale of 1-5, this wine is a 3 - drinkable, but nothing special.

Wine for the Confused

So, last night after we both stumbled with good ways to describe the wine that we had with dinner, Patrick introduced me to John Cleese's Wine for the Confused. In the documentary, John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, attempted to tell us about different kinds of wine, what the price of wine may or may not mean about the quality of the wine, etc. He especially stressed that what the "experts" say about wine really doesn't mean anything, at least as far as whether or not you will actually like the wine.

Inspired by this documentary, Patrick and I have decided to try to teach ourselves more about wine: what we like, what we don't like, try to come up with clear words to describe wine, and maybe even learn a little bit more about different kinds of wine along the way. Right now, neither of us know a ton about wine - I might know a little bit more because I've been wine tasting more times than Patrick has, but both of us are far from experts. Hopefully, after we've tried some different wines, we will at least be able to really say what we like, even if we don't get to the point of having a crazy big wine cellar of our own.

As I already have a beer blog (WashingtonBeerYear), I decided it would be fun for us to actually write a blog about our wine adventures, so that we can go back and really see how far we've come, and actually remember what wines we liked and didn't like for future reference. And, who knows, maybe we can help someone else learn about wine too!