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Saturday, August 13 in Hermann, Missouri, Stone Hill Winery will host a Grape Stomp that supports a local charity. The Sheltered Workshop in Hermann is for the physically and mentally challenged.
Participants in the Grape Stomp have the opportunity to stomp 30 pounds of grapes with a two-minute limit. Winners will be based on the amount of juice pressed and style.
Registering for stomping is at 11:00am. The number of registrants is limited so arrive early. In the past some people have arrived at 8:00am. Participants will be in selected age categories: 0-12, 13-19, 20-39, 40-55, and over 55 years of age.
To enter the grounds, fees are $3 for adults and $1.50 for those aged 6-12 years old. The stomping fee is $5.
Visitors will find a food stand and cold wine sales inside a pavilion. Look for bratwurst, hot dogs, fries, ice cream, funnel cakes and more. The Boney Goat Band will play Bluegrass music for everyone’s enjoyment.
Enjoy a watching or stomping at a grape stomp event and know that you are supporting a Sheltered Workshop for the mentally and physically challenged.
More information is available online.
Save time for a tour of Stone Hill Winery.
Cheers, Kathy
Are You a Wine Taster or Drinker?
I initiated a discussion on the LinkedIn Group Wine Reviews asking if it is better for wine writers and bloggers to taste wine or drink wine. There are several comments supporting each position. The idea for this question came from Eric Asimov’s Saturday Keynote address at the 2011 Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. Eric presented an analogy: someone who taste wines is like a person that counts visiting a state when he only landed at an airport and transferred to another plane. Someone who drinks wines is a like a person who flies into an airport in a new state and takes a few days to explore the sites.
Tom Lewis, commenting on the discussion, didn’t care for that analogy. Tom believes that tasting wines is like a traveler that visits a city for a day or weekend with a guidebook and several pages of Internet research. This person hits the main spots but doesn’t linger. Tom wrote that wine drinkers are like visitors to a city for a week or month with no guidebook or agenda. They are spending time in the city discovering if they like it or not. Given enough think time, other analogies could surface on the differences between tasting wines and drinking wines.
Most commenters agreed that when wine is placed in the context of food and friends, the drinking experience is exceptional. One has an experience that is not duplicated by merely tasting wines. Kathy and I are in a position to do both tasting and drinking wines. Often when tasting I think of the foods that would pair well with the wine. When drinking I still go through the steps of a structured tasting, however mental notes are replacing written notes on a napkin. Which is better? Both the activity of tasting and drinking have advantages and disadvantages. It may be dependent on the situation. For dinner, I expect to be drinking wines. When visiting and interviewing winemakers and owners, at three wineries a day, I taste the wines. Both activities add to my wine knowledge.
Cheers,
Terry