There'll Be No Wine Before It's Time!

Wine 1001 Fundamentals is going great!  I am so looking forward to the sommelier course at my school.  I just took my mid-term and got a 100, I think that I am only one of the few out of maybe 80-100 or so people that did so well.  This course is a beast!  It is so in-depth, involved, intense.  I never knew that there was literally so much to learn about wine!

My instructor Alexander (Alex) Fox is so patient with us, we struggle to grasp concepts and abstracts about the old world and the new world.  Regions in France, Germany, Austria and other areas like Sonoma, Napa and New Zealand.  Bottle shapes, grapes, how wines get their color, texture, scent.  We learn about terroir and what a Cru means, entails when you see it on a wine label.  We learn the dynamics of wine and barrel making (a barrel maker is called a cooper (Cuper?), white and red wines.  Wine glass, bottles and why they are shaped they way they are.  That definitely does not exhaust what our brains have had to inhale within these short 5-6 weeks so far.  Now we only have a few weeks left before finals and then it's off to more academics and Sommelier classes for me and others who are interested in it too.  You don't need a vineyard to grow wine.  I can do it in my back yard.  If my terroir is not up to par then maybe it won't be good wine, but it'll be wine nonetheless.  But, I learned early in this class that I do favor the old world way of wine making and so to me, soil is of utmost importance.  So terroir would be a focus for me in producing good quality wines.  I'm just not ready for that yet, I need to get my toes wet a little more.  Twinkle them in more wine classes, then maybe I'll be ready.