My new apartment in Salzburg has come together so well. My girlfriend and i've finally finished with the decorating and he or she could be very proud of it. I just assembled the last piece of furniture, our couch. I've also managed to completely replenish my wine refrigerator. We decided to drain it out before the move, since wine doesn't exactly travel well. (Well, that, and that i desired to buy some new wines anyway!) Mostly, we drank it ourselves although we gifted a couple of bottles to friends.

You probably thought I USED TO BE just a beer drinker since I've gone to the difficulty to establish my very own homebrew operation. Actually, I've collected wine for a very long time. Once I was four years old, my parents moved our family to Portugal and our house outside Lisbon had it's own little vineyard. When it was time to harvest, I got to stomp the grapes, which was such a lot fun. So I knew about wine from an overly young age. These days, my favorite wines to drink are Riesling, a white wine from Austria and southern Germany and red wines from a region within the south of France called Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I DO NOT spend some huge cash on wine, maybe $20 to $50 a bottle. I'm more all in favour of the taste in place of even if it has a posh label or comes from a famous place. A $50 bottle may also be just nearly as good as a $500 bottle should you know what you are looking for.

Team PokerStars Pro George Danzer

My girlfriend's dad is a small merchant and travels around to wine tastings, mainly as a hobby. I HAVE BEEN going to tastings myself about once a month or even won a wine-tasting competition. There is a place up here that may be a big wine retailer for restaurants and stuff and each few weeks they have got tastings. At this one, they spread out 16 different bottles, vintages from 1977 as much as 2005. Everyone tasted the wines blind and needed to write down what grape they believed it was, the rustic it was from, the region, the year, and the winemaker. There has been a scoring system that awarded points for proper answers. Correctly guessing the rustic was two points, the vintage was two points, and the year, grape type, and region were five points each. I got lucky on this instance because we ended up tasting some wines I USED TO BE aware of. One among them I hit exactly--the region, the grape, the vintage, everything. I took home a magnum bottle of champagne for winning.

In a way, wine tasting competitions are so much like poker. You come back in prepared, but sometimes it takes numerous luck to win. At this competition, I got lucky for the reason that wine I guessed was certainly one of maybe five or ten wines I MAY identify exactly. It's like getting an excellent table draw on Day 1 of a tournament. You'll be able to either draw a bunch of wines that you just knew really well otherwise you can draw some you are not conversant in in any respect. However, within the last competition I took part in before this one, I ENDED last! That time, I wasn't as conversant in the wines and it was more like an unsightly table draw.

So now that I've conquered beer and wine, perhaps my next move have to be a distillery. My mom actually got me a small one for Christmas that I HAVE BEEN fooling around with. If you start making your personal beverages, you actually can't stop!

George Danzer is a member of Team PokerStars Pro.

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