Wine Me Up

The Virginia Wine Expo got a new volunteer this year when a friend suggested I help out at the Cardinal Point Winery table Saturday afternoon. Sure, why not? After all, we unemployed types have no reason not to volunteer some of our abundance of free time. Well, that and I would be paid in wine.

The expo opened at 11:00, but only for those in the trade, which meant it was extremely slow for the first two hours. But holy crap, Batman, once the public was allowed in at 1:00, we were slammed. It didn't help that Cardinal Point's Cabernet Franc Reserve had won the Gold Cup the night before, but a surprising number of people who stopped by the table told me that they had been to the winery and had liked every single wine. Quite a testimonial.

So, I got a crash course in CP's wine offerings and began to pour and talk like I knew what I was doing. The A6? A blend of 61% oak-aged viognier and 39% steel-aged chardonnay. The Rockfish Red? A summer wine, an easy-drinking Beaujolais style picnic wine that might even woo some white wine drinkers. And so on.

Many tasters were wine novices and then there were the really obnoxious wine snobs. My favorite was dressed like a woman, but she sure came cross like a man in a leopard-print blouse and informed me that one wine was "accessible...for the uninformed." Give me a break! Then there were the husbands and boyfriends who would flirt with me as their women stood behind them sipping. A couple of them even winked as they left, like we'd made some sort of intimate connection.

After 5 hours smiling and pouring, I left with 4 bottles of wine and probably all kinds of new smile lines. But I had been too busy to focus on all the crap that's been going on in my life lately, so, in some ways, it was the ideal way to spend an afternoon. And plenty of wine for the future...