We’re wine makers; sippity doo dah, sippity yay.
Vicki Baker
You’ve heard about classes to make expensive 30 bottle batches of wine; but none gives you the opportunity to make just one bottle. Well, Wine Fusion Winery in Historic Downtown Grapevine does and Girls on Wheels had a chance to become wine makers for a day. We never really thought about the marriage of grapes when drinking our well-deserved glass of wine. Wine Fusion changed all that by offering a blending class where we became well-versed in wines before getting the chance to make our own one-of-a-kind blend.
Rather than lecturing in a classroom setting, this was a fun, hands-on tasting education where we learned about wine characteristics while also learning how to create our perfect blend! The class lasted over 2.5 hours and was devoted to teaching, tasting, and learning about wines. We were taught how to read the basic parts on a wine label; producer or name, region, vintage, grape variety or appellation and percentage of alcohol by volume.
Then it was onto the wines themselves where we were instructed in the profiles of four red wines—malbec, merlot, tempranillo and cabernet sauvignon. We tasted a sampling of each and graded the wines on characteristics of aroma, flavor profile and mouth feel.
After the tastings, the real work began as we decided whether to create a white or red wine blend. Based upon our tasting of the four different 100 percent varietal wines, we selected our three favorites to use for our own signature blend. After creating our master blend, we then bottled it, corked it, created our own label and carried the bottle home to enjoy the fruits of our labor!
We learned so much about wine fundamentals during our class. But, no matter what your wine preference, be it white or red, dry or sweet, foreign or domestic, the most important lesson we discovered…girlfriends are the perfect blend.