A Day at the Tasting Room

A tasting room is a place to sample wine, not a place to do shots of it. This is my pet peeve about running a tasting room. Many people don't taste our Chardonnay because before they can even smell aroma one, it is in their stomach. I avoid correcting them, because that means they are doing something wrong. The experience is not for my benefit, but for the person tasting. So I boast about the fragrance of the next wine and talk about how if you hold it in their mouth it really shows character. After that they tend to sniff and swish with the best of them.

You see, when people walk into my tasting room they either announce that they have never done a wine tasting before or they tell me they are shocked there is such a thing as Arizona wine. That is what we get: adventurous newbies and the curiously incredulous. So the goal of a tasting then becomes to initiate and to convert.

It is a lot like a club. "Have you tried Arizona wine?" If the answer is yes, you are usually barraged with question of where, when, what, how and oddly enough why. If the answer is no, most people who have tried a few Arizona wines will give directions, recommendations, websites, and offers to car pool. Once initiated you find that you could conceivably spend almost every weekend for the rest of you natural life with fellow Arizona wine fanatics. There is always an Arizona wine event going on. But once you become a zombie, vampire, or some other form of undead you are cut off.

While still human a tasting room can be a scary place for the uninitiated. If someone comes in with a group of friends who are self proclaimed connoisseurs, how is she to feel when the only descriptor she can come up with is "good"? That is one of the reasons I like Arizona wine. There is a comfortable lack of pretension. We don't have the baggage of estates that can be traced back to the Roman Empire, or brands crafted by marketing mavens, or even storied dynasties(check back in 60 years). We just have good wine. I say good because great wine, by popular and critical definition, needs about an inch of dust and a name that most of us would not bother trying to pronounce.

Most of the people who taste here end up talking about life more than wine. I learn about where the kids go to school, their family history, how their grandfather used to make wine in the basement(an extremely common conversation), and the personal details of ones life that no other salesman ever hears. That is because I am not selling them, I am just talking to them while they enjoy my wine. A friend once told me a tired saying that the best souvenir from a winery is a bottle of wine. Perhaps the more wine they buy, the more they want to remember their visit.

Cheers.