Village Vintner Wine Club

If you’re someone who enjoys tasting wine, chatting with likeminded enthusiasts about wine, and educating yourself on wines that have come on the market, then the Village Vintner Wine Club just might be right up your alley.

We will profile up to six wines each meeting and serve food (usually good cheese and crackers) at an appointed break period. Each meeting, we will have an elected person from within the club to give a mini-lecture on the presented wine. These mini-lectures will touch on the flavors, aroma, country of origin, and age of the wine, as well as how it matches the foods being eaten along side it.

The Wine Club will focus on the educational aspect of the wines. We will impement some way of rating the wines through charts that are available at wine shops, online and through wine magazines. Each members will be rating the characteristics of the wines. Then, we can compare them to see if we all agree.

The 5 S’s of wine tasting.

1. Swirl the wine in the glass to aerate the wine. Notice the color of the wine. Is it pale and clear? Deep and rich? The legs of the wine refer to how the wine either sticks to or runs down the side of the glass and tells you how thick or thin a wine is.
2. Sniff the wine. Really get your nose down in there and take a big whiff. What do you smell? Vanilla? Flowers? There is no right or wrong answer. Inhaling the aroma enhances the taste of the wine.
3. Sip the wine.
4. Swish the wine around your mouth for at least 10 seconds. What flavors do you taste? Again there is no right or wrong answer.
5. Savor the wine. Think about what you just drank. What flavors, if any, do you still taste? The finish of a wine is basically the aftertaste. Is it pleasant or unpleasant? How long does it last?

We would like to try each wine with the different foods to see how the wine enhances the food and how the wine tastes with the food. Taking notes on everything is probably a good idea. While wine club is a social event it is also for the purpose of education. Take the time to really evaluate each wine.

We would like to meet once every 3 months and duties will be assigned for a particular meeting before the actual meeting is held. We will decide on who should host, how many bottles of each wine we will need — (this obviously depends on how many members are in the club), and which members should give lectures on the wines to be presented. Nine times out of ten, the members of a wine club are not experts or restaurant sommeliers—therefore, our members will need to educate themselves on the wines they’ve been elected to present. Many of the wines you may purchase will come with factoids, and if they don’t, talk to the salesperson in the spirits shop about the particular bottle, or research the winemaker online when you get home. Wine club meetings usually occur over a time period of two to three hours, with a 30 minute socializing break after the discussion and tasting of the first three bottles of wine. Many wine clubs have its members score (using pencils and paper) the wines being sampled on a scale of 0 to 20. This is done to prevent extended dialogue from breaking out over one particular wine (which can hold the meeting up). Once an elected member calculates scores, that member writes up the tallies for inclusion in your wine club newsletter, which should be sent out to members sometime shortly after the meeting.

Wine—as we all know—can be expensive, and we should not think of skimping when picking out a selection of wines for your club’s meeting (most people do not join a wine club to sample cheap table wine that costs six bucks a bottle). Aim to keep your per-bottle costs at $20 to $40 a bottle. Have whichever person is presenting for the upcoming meeting purchase all bottles and then have that person tally up the total cost of the wine. We will divide the total cost of the wine by the number of members in the club.

If you are interested in becoming a member of the wine-club you can email us here info@villagevintner.com or call us 604-865-0640