Wine tasting your way from being a Wine Bluff to a Wine Buff can be a long journey, in my case over 40 years since being a student. What began as a few bottles each on a Saturday night in Glasgow became a serious team study of grapes, countries, wine regions and wine producers. Wine collecting then evolved into wine travel as holidays were often into wine regions in France, Italy and Spain. It’s a personal wine tale, reblogged here to mark the change in focus and style of my ageing blog. Hope you like it and find some inspiration.
I began my wine tasting journey from “wine bluff to wine buff” when I was 22 years old, and now at 70 I cannot believe how much cheap Spanish and Austrian rotgut I poured down my throat by the time I was 23! (Yes, Austrian, if anyone remembers Hirondelle wines?) However by the time I was 24 I had also swirled, sniffed and slurped a fair number of classed growth red Bordeaux, some fine Burgundies, and even a Chateau y’Quem, (You might need to Google that!) via lots of wine tasting.
Having made ourselves thoroughly ill several times, a small group of us at University of Strathclyde, all postgrads doing PhDs, decided enough was enough. The time had come for some serious research into grapes, countries, bottles, labels, corks, the whole bloody lot, because it sure as hell wasn’t “quantity” making us ill since big Frank could down more…
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Should you join a wine club? 
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The Two Doctors 
Good advice in the linked article. I was once a member of a wine club. Used to get a box of wine every month and tasting notes to go into a little folder. Probably still got them somewhere.
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Still got my note and log from around 1983, didn’t take notes as students in the original club, couldn’t stand up most of the time! We even started to make our own wine …. I’d forgotten that, maybe another Blog tale! Won a prize for one too, much to the annoyance of my professor!
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I tried that. I remember an airing cupboard full of fermenting jars and the satisfying sounds of plink plonk!
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