4 April 2007

General Pintoage...everyone's favourite dictator.


My blog has been visited by someone who really knows about wine and doesn't just pretend - like I do!
So PM, welcome :) How did you find me?
This is the Pinochet that beat me into servitude.
I know next to nothing about wine, truth be told but at the beginning of 2007 I decided to hone my wine skills beyond "Of course, I like it, it's red" so I started a wine journal, as modelled by the lovely Moleskine notebook here. I rate my drinking experience from Low 1 through to High 3. This Pinotage got a high 1 which is very good. Only my favourite Chianti regularly scores higher than that! (Tonight I'm drinking a low 3 and I don't know if I'll bother to finish the glass)
I write up a short review of the wine after drinking such as 'Actually perfect. Dark and meaty with hardly any bitterness...' and 'Really bad. Had one sip and had to throw the glass out.' Then being the geek that I am, I enter each wine at the back so I have a page for each rating and can see what types of wine keep coming up higher than the others. Oh, and I have a final page of countries where I tally off the bottles to make sure I'm drinking from all over the world and not just going back to favourite places all the time.
PM, please add whatever comments you like here - anything you can teach me about wine is great.
No-one needs to tell me what to do with this glass I'm on now though. It has a bouquet of urea.

3 comments:

Peter F May said...

No secret how I found you -- just Googling for Pinotage references for input to my blog. (Corse you fooled that today with Pinochet and Pintoage :)

Using a notebook is a great idea and writing just a few notes on each wine is excellent. If you're stuck for words you might like to use an aroma wheel (a Pinotage one is here - http://www.wynboer.co.za/imagesart/aroma_e.html )

Re the photo -- you may be better off putting less in the glass, fill it about a third full so there's room to stick your nose in to enjoy the smell.

Another way of tasting lots of wines without too much cost is joing a wine tasting group -- see http://www.wineontheweb.co.uk/wineclubs/wineclubs.html for a list -- there may be one near you. Any questions, feel free to contact me, details on my blog. I am in St Albans.

PS -- Seems you run a book shop -- I do hope you stock my book

Peter F May said...

PS -- there's a picture of Beyers Truter, the owner/winemaker of Beyerskloof, and a piece about his winery at http://pinotageclub.blogspot.com/2007/02/red-leaf-and-green-pinotage-beyerskloof.html

kumquat said...

I LOVE the wheel!!

I'm going to buy some more Pinotage today just so I can try out this groovy tool.

I will check out the other links later when I have a few mins spare.

Yes I run a bookshop. I have the details of Marilyn Merlot and will endeavour to get you stocked asap :)