Wine Tasting

I slept over at a friend's last night so in the AM we could go join some people for breakfast. We woke up to rain and a walk to be made across the city. I didn't have a jacket. Breakfast was nice; it was followed by a wine tasting in the city center. A French friend got me and some other kids hooked up with free invitations. I'm pretty sure that I was sampling some €100 bottles as well as some very high quality mustards (including fig and beer flavored mustards!).

I mostly hung out with a Japanese girl, who was fantastically and unabashedly inquisitive. We chatted a bit with the sellers at several tables and they cheerily refilled our glasses. One of the brand promoters shared with us how he viewed different nationalities described their wines. The Germans: very precise and analytical. It has this much sugar content and this much acidity. The French: very philosophical. Like a taste is more of a fashion of perseption. The Italians: like a woman.

One particularly remarkable wine that I recall was something like an "oak fruit" or the like. Sort-of a nutty, berry taste? It was cool. At the sampling tables, I would be given a list of their wines and their descriptions, but they abbreviated the descriptive words, I think, so trocknen, or "dry," had... just something else by it. Basically a lot of fancy wine terms in German, so something I already knew little about might as well have been written in Chinese. I played tag-along and did a lot of, "I'll have what she's having!"