04/06/11 – March Delirium week #3
Wednesday night is your last chance to get delirious! (With the Young Winos, that is. If you want to get delirious on your own time, there’s very little we can do about it.)
It’s the final week of our shorter, less intense version of our annual blind-tasting tournament, which we’ve decided to call March Delirium (to reflect its relative mildness as compared to full-blown “madness”). Instead of six single-varietal meetings, we’ll instead be hosting three combination meetings. Furthermore, instead of simply blind-tasting varietals and regions, March Delirium features guessing on a scale that will likely become all the more relevant to us this summer as fuel costs hit all-time highs: price.
Each week, we’ll feature several bottles of two different varietals, one white and one red. For each, we’ll blind-taste the bottles, one at a time, providing participants only a bare minimum of extra information about each one. Everyone secretly writes down their price guess, rounded to the nearest dollar. Then we de-bag the bottle, discuss our impressions, and compare our guesses. Jason has devised the following scoring system for tabulating points:
The score one would get would be the difference between the actual cost and the cost estimate, in absolute value. To turn that into positive points, we can give points per bottle:
–Closest to actual (rounded to dollar) gets 3 points each
–Second closest gets 2 points each
–Third closest gets 1 point each
–Within one dollar of actual (i.e. exact match) = 5 points
After the three meetings are up, the taster with the most accumulated points will win an awesome bottle from the Winos’ stash!
This week, we’re tasting our last two varietals, both of which play major roles in France’s Bordeaux region: Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. (Andrew, the current points leader, is an avowed hater of Sauvignon Blanc — for many of the same reasons as Mike Steinberger is — so maybe this is a great opportunity for someone to step up and dethrone him.)
The Young Winos will be buying all of the bottles ahead of time, so all you need to bring is your $15 tasting fee. That’s five dollars more than what we usually charge for tastings, but the extra cash outlay will be rewarded in the experience of getting to taste higher-priced versions of both varietals. (Of course, whether or not those will be the wines you like best remains to be seen. Prepare to be surprised!)
We’ll be meeting at a currently undisclosed location — please check back for details! The RSVP system functions like this: if you want in, you click on this link and tell me so (don’t forget your full name, e-mail address, and a cute message conveying to me your intentions). Once you’ve gotten your confirmation e-mail, all you need to bring is fifteen dollars, and your favorite tasting hat.
See you on Wednesday at 9pm!