I’m going to write as much of this as I can remember this evening before heading to sleep.
I met up with Jeremy, Max, and Rebecka at 4pm out front of our complex. We took a taxi to the subway station to our east (an easy bike ride, but a long walk) and then took the subway to the hilton. We got there just a bit after five. The event was above the main lobby area and covered two floors and several ball rooms. We walked around for a while before finding the official entrance (we’d come up the main marble stair cases, but the official check in was at the elevators) and picked up schedules and wine glasses.
We sampled for a while, there were booths from different distributors everywhere, roughly organized by region. Some of the larger distributors would have big corners where they had their whole range of wines that they were importing.
The event was primarily for people within the industry, who were doing things all day, the schedule started before lunch with coffee tastings. There were also a lot of representatives from hotels and upscale restaurants looking for new brands of wine to stock.
After making our way quickly around the third floor we stopped for a bit to get some food before continuing. The food was really good, lamb, salmon, prawns, etc.
I took off a bit early, and walked down to the second floor to explore the area. I ended up getting in a fairly long conversation with the director of marketing for ASC(I think) fine wines. He was a Spanish guy that took me through their whole range of wines, from Spain and France into their new world imports from Chile and Argentina. It was really cool, because he did a great job of explaining the different strengths of the wines, and so I was able to fit the vocabulary to the tastes.
I met up with the group for a while after that, and was happy to walk around and somewhat randomly sample different wines to get a sense of what the distinctions in grape types meant. I tried to take pictures of most of the bottles I tried, but failed miserably because there were so many, and it was so quick.
Essentially each booth would have a set of 8 to 10 different types of wine, a pitcher of water, and a bucket to pour out your extras. You’d take a sip of the types you were interested and then move on.
There were some less traditional offerings mixed in with the array of reds and whites. I remember a couple delicious desert wines from Australia, and there was also a booth that was showing off champaign based cocktails. I also got a chance to try absinthe, which was not what I was expecting it to be. (mind you, I didn’t get the elaborate preparation, it was just poured into a wine glass.)
At the end, the partially empty bottles are fair game, and the distributors hand them out to interested looking people, so I took a bottle of red and a bottle of white back with me. The red is a french 2007 Les Michelons Moulin-a-vent. I gave the white to max, because he decided to go back and get more to eat rather than stick around at the end.
It was a really cool experience. Even though we weren’t exactly the target audience, there were plenty of other people just walking around enjoying the wine so we didn’t feel out of place. It was a very classy atmosphere, and It felt like representatives from most of the classy restaurants and hotels were in attendance.
Took the subway back after it ended at 8:30, and then piled in a taxi back to the homestay. My family is still up, and were surprised at how early I was back.