Make Mine a Nebbiolo

For the third time in four years, I spent the afternoon pouring for strangers.

The Virginia Wine Expo is at the Convention Center, mere blocks from my house and an easy, if breezy, walk for me.

I'd been asked to pour for Gabrielle Rausse, Italian winemaker of some of my very favorite Virginia wines.

True, I'd have to smile at drunk people all day, but I also got to surprise people ("Wait, why isn't this Pinot Noir red?"), listen to their defiance ("How can you have a Malbec? There's no Malbecs in Virginia!") take compliments from people ("Whoa, look those amazing tights!") and confound them ("What do you mean there's no tasting room or website? How off the grid is that?").

How could an eccentric like me not be impressed with a winemaker not playing by everyone else's rules?

As you might expect, the first few hours are far saner than later in the day when people have their buzz on.

You can tell because after a while, some people just walk up and stick out their glass and say, "Gimme your fill-in-the-blank" instead of doing a full tasting.

You can also tell by the glazed eyes, but I don't want to judge. Much anyway.

And we're not even going to talk about the ones who wear their wine glass on a string around their necks.

But all that is mere comic dressing for the pleasure of pouring well-made wines while the winemaker stands next to me doing the same, but with an Italian accent.

And he was so good at working the crowd.

When a woman asked how he made such great wines, he responded, "I tried making bad wines and this was the result."

At one point he asked me about our mutual friend, the one who'd asked me to be a pourer today.

"How did you meet?" Gabriele asked me and I explained our Virginia wine connection.

"Well, you must be practically perfect because that's the only people he makes friends with," he told me.

Of course, that just solidified that Gabriele must be the same since they're friends, too.

And while I'm anything but, I am more than happy to be standing for six hours on a concrete floor conveying my enthusiasm for fabulous wines made by a practically perfect Italian with grapes grown in Virginia.

Call it an eccentric's idea of a good time.

Pouring for the Drunk at the VA Wine Expo

Because volunteering once already this weekend wasn't enough, I did it again today only for a radically different event than the Handmade Bike Show. Today I poured at the Virginia Wine Expo, also at the Convention Center, but full of inebriated people instead of awed bike geeks.

It's fascinating pouring wine for people at an event like this (I did it for Cardinal Point Winery at least year's event, too) because the attendees run the gamut form wine snobs to novices and everything in between. And the later in the afternoon it gets, the less people care about what they're drinking or learning. The increasingly frequent sound of a wine glass crashing on the concrete floor brings up cheers every time it happens.

Three different people came up and asked if they could sample the wine to erase the taste of burnt rice in their mouth (apparently a nearby food table had overcooked the rice and palates everywhere were suffering for it). One girl walked up, put her hand on her hip and asked me, "What have you got with at least 2% sugar?" Clearly she knew her palate and wanted no part of tasting beyond that.

One guy came up to the table, called a friend and told him where he was. After liberal use of colorful language, he hung up and apologized. "Sorry, but I love dropping the f-bomb. And I'm inebriated, so I really like dropping the f-bomb." He then introduced himself to me and the other pourers and even an innocent bystander.

My favorite was the group of five who definitely had a buzz on and were greatly enjoying tasting and shooting the breeze with each other. I had to keep reminding them what we were doing and bringing them back to the moment. Finally, one woman looked at her friends and, clearly perplexed, asked them,"How ARE we getting back to Powhatan anyway?

Ma'am, I don't even want to think about that.

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...