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.

Lights Out for Earth Hour

Friends,

Because I was powered down earlier for Earth Hour, and so as to conserve resources and share a truly great experience again, I am repurposing from last year's post:

I seriously need reading glasses. Somehow, I misread the time on Earth Hour's excellent website about when we were supposed to turn the lights out and experience the difference that even an hour of darkness can make.

I invited friends over for the occasion, but none could come.

And so, alone at the appointed hour, I powered down all appliances, lit candles, turned my rocking chair towards twilight, and experienced realizations, revelations, and rewards that I could never have imagined.

Realization: Quiet and calm accompany darkness to a great degree. Nature seems closer when you are calm and quiet.

Revelation: More is less. Soon, I was economizing even candles. And what I could see, hear, feel in the deepening of dusk and descent of night asounded me.

Reward: A raccoon traversed my windowsill and scampered up the netted scaffolding next door.

WOW!!! Did this happen often, I wondered, and I was too busy, noisy, bustling to see?

Was this some kind of sign -- an enticement to spend more time in silence, stillness, observation, contemplation?

Or was I CRAZY?

Later, walking to dinner, I took the park path to see who else was lighting up or powering down. At the gate, I quizzed the local police: Had they been aware of Earth Hour? No. If they had been aware, would they have taken action or encouraged others to do so? Questionable. Could they notice a difference in the city lights from where they stood? Not really. And finally: Could I have been hallucinating? Though I was admittedly alone and drinking in the dark, I could swear I saw a raccoon....

Absolutely affirmative! The police were as excited as I was: They had seen a hefty critter amble out of Central Park at the time in question, in no particular hurry, headed west....

Increasingly, it seems, 'coons leave Central Park to stake out new territories, run errands and the like. One neighbor reported that a raccoon accompanied her to Duane Reade the other day. And I've since been told not to invite them in for lunch, lest they never leave.

Anyhow, I arrived at dinner EXCITED to share my tales of calmness, wildness and wonder with friends...only to learn that Earth Hour was the next night. And I'd get to do it all again....

Spring Is....

"Spring is in the cock's crow, in the smell of freshly turned earth. It is no longer wise for the nature lover to procrastinate."

So says a favorite, unattributed quote that I found in the early days of FarmHands-CityHands.

And now, you don't have to wait!

Here's hoping you ENJOY the first day of Spring, which officially began this morning, and that you'll find ways of getting your hands dirty and your mind clean.

Warmly and looking forward,
Wendy Dubit aka Biodiesel Babe

Taste of Terroir

Among the many things I LOVE about wine?

How much complexity and magnificence it can contain.

Each finely crafted wine tells the story of a time and a place, a region and its soil, vines and their age, grape varietals and their characteristics, of a growing season’s worth of weather, of how the maker shaped these elements of nature into art, of how the wine aged -- in what types of steel or wood and for how long, of whether or not the wine will improve with age, and of how the whole hangs together...always more than the sum of its parts.

And that's just where the beauty of wine starts!

It is within us that the story of wine unfolds, its personality is revealed, and its fullest potential is realized.

But before I get ahead of myself and into the full raisons d'etre (reasons for being) of The Senses Bureau and The Wine Workout, let me get quite literally down to earth...and a little below it.

This year, I came to experience more deeply than ever what terroir -- the French term that literally means "soil" or "earth" and that largely encompasses all that that factors into "sense of place" -- can mean to and for a wine.

First, an International Sauvignon Blanc Tasting held by St. Superygenerously drove home how uniquely S.B. can express itself when grown in the alternately steely, stony, gravelly, shaley, flinty soils of areas ranging from California's Napa Valley to the Alto Adige region of Italy, the Martinborough region of New Zealand, the Casa Blanca Valley of Chile and the Stellenbosch appellation of South Africa. From St. Supery's 2004 Dollarhide Ranch wonder -- balancing the lushness of lychee, guava, lime and pineapple with a minerality that the winemaker's notes call "a million polished pebbles" -- to the bracing acidity and elegant austerity of Didier Dagueneau's 2004 Blanc Fume de Pouilly from France's Loire Valley, the world tour drove home the power and importance of place.

Then, aWines of Germany tasting, Raimond Prum gave me an education about slate, and elucidated how different types of slate can affect a Riesling's taste -- from the red slate that is rich with iron to the blue slate that is colored and flavored by copper to the grey slate, which, containing tin, confers the most elegant minerality of all.

Soon, I was not only tasting terroir as never before, but was also noticing how many winemakers carry their earth and stones with them to tastings, as exemplified by Lockwood Vineyard's Shale Ridge, shown above.

Now, in addition to drinking wines I love, I am collecting rocks...and reveling in the first-hand experience of new knowledge, which is what I live for.

For every good reason, I hope you'll join me!

Warmly and looking forward,
Wendy Dubit and The Senses Bureau