Learning about red wine

Last Updated: 26 September, 2020

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter you may have noticed a few photographs of red wine recently. This is fairly new to me; I used to drink mainly cider (and before that Bacardi Breezers or Wkd). Wine was usually something I only drank when a bottle was already open. However, recently I started noticing I was really enjoying some of red wines, but I didn’t know why or how to replicate the choice on my own.

Collecting data

So it was obvious to me I needed a spreadsheet to log the wines I drank, with a score for each bottle. This would give me a record of specific wines, and I hoped using a pivot table would help me see a pattern for the wines I liked by showing the average score by country and grape.

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If I look purely at country or grape my favourites are shown in the lists below. But I assume this is not actually a good method as the grape flavours will vary between country so it is better to look at the highest scores in individual cells, so my favourites so far are highlighted in the pivot table above in red.

Drinking wine

My scoring got off to a good start while attending a local fundraising wine tasting evening hosted by Laithwaites. It was a revelation, and I walked away with some new favourites; Pillastro Primitivo and Black Duck.

Once we finished the twelve bottles we bought at that event, we bought a case of Black Reds and a red mystery case; 12 bottles of red wine of any grape and country (see my video below to see the contents of our box). Both were a great opportunity to try a variety of wines and we found more favourites: The Black Stump, The Waxed Bat and Antakari.

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Images from Laithwaites

And I musn’t forget my wine buddy, Hannah, who I frequently chat to online about our evening wine plans. She recommended Cabalie which is possibly my favourite (although it is hard to compete with Black Duck).

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What I’ve learnt

• There are more grape varieties than I knew, for example cinsault, carignan, monastrell, sangiovese
• I thought Rioja was a grape variety but it is in fact a region in Spain
• I like deep red wine
• Region makes a difference which is why I’ve started splitting out the french regions
• I need more data, we’ve drunk such a variety of wines that there is not much in the way of averages yet

I’m hoping to make an impact on those averages later in the year as my wine buddy has convinced me to go to a wine tasting event in Manchester, and with unlimited samples I’m hoping to add more data to my spreadsheet, and therefore learn more about what I like and don’t like.

What are your thoughts about wine? How did you learn what you like?

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