The Wine Workout:Tastings to Train Senses & Brain

It’s a great time to be drinking wine! Never has the quality been higher, the selection greater, the prices more reasonable.

And it’s good for us, too. Among wine’s ever-growing attributes, studies show that moderate consumption can prevent heart attacks and strokes, aid digestion, lower blood pressure and cholesterol and reduce the risks of certain cancers and degenerative diseases.

Now, The Senses Bureau adds to these benefits through The Wine Workout, wherein tasting wine becomes a training ground for the senses, memory and mind.

Through a series of enjoyable experiences and exercises, savoring wine becomes the practice that:

• Deepens curiosity and elevates learning
• Strengthens the senses, singly and in concert
• Builds a vocabulary with which to express impressions and perceptions
• Enhances the way memories are made, stored and retrieved
• Clarifies personal preferences and style
• Promotes relaxation, conversation, stimulation, realization

While The Wine Workout elucidates the multi-faceted magnificence that resides in each well-made bottle of wine -- the embodiment of time and place, vines and grapes, soil and weather, nature and art -- it also acknowledges that that’s just where the beauty starts! Of equal wonder is what takes place within us when we experience wine -- from anticipation to articulation, from awakened and enlivened senses to the creation, integration and consolidation of memories.

Right and left brain, and numerous other parts of the body and mind, collaborate and communicate in making memories and keeping them alive. But there are few places that they work together as powerfully or as pleasurably as in tasting, describing, and remembering wine.

We hope you will join us for upcoming Wine Workouts that will feature some of our favorite tasters and tastings…and that you’ll invite us to organize a Wine Workout for you and your group.

For details, please e-mail wendy@thesensesbureau.com .

Meantime, happy tastings to you. And please check out Coming to Your Senses, about enjoying wine in and with every sense, and WineSmelling 101, a chapter that Kevin Zraly and I co-authored for his 2009 Complete Wine Course.