You Need To Know About Wine-Blending Parties
There's really only one reaction people have when they hear their office is doing a team-building event: An Anchorman-style collective jump in the air and fist pump! Who wouldn't get psyched at the thought of doing trust falls and trying to untangle yourself from a human knot with the coworker you passive-aggressively trade emails with all day long?!
As much as it's meant to boost morale, just the phrase "team building" can induce an eye roll so severe you're not sure your pupils will ever return to the front of your head. Brooklyn Winery's out to change all of that with its offerings. The company offers five options, ranging from a blending session, where you create your own wine, to blind tastings and designing your own bottle label. It's less self-help-y, more boozy. But even still, we had to know: What's it really like?
We chose to sample three different events: a blending session, True Wine Detective, and the wine and cheese walkabout. Here's what to expect.
The Blending Session Will Take You Back To Chem Class.
At first, I worried this would be like playing "suicide" at Taco Bell in middle school, where you pour every fountain drink into your cup and dare each other to drink your - way too sugary, often putrid - creations. It turns out this isn't a gimmick; it's an actual practice, designed to create a more balanced, complex drink. You're creating a meritage blend, a Bordeaux-style wine made using California vinos.
Brooklyn Winery provides five different types of red wine, all served in beakers, and has just two rules: (1) You have to use at least two types of wine in your blend, and (2) no one varietal can comprise more than 90 percent of your bottle.
I went HAM, using all five varieties - even whipping out a graduated pipette so I could add exactly 3 percent of Cabernet Franc, an earthy wine - at the very end. It made me feel all Bill-Nye-meets-Alton-Brown, especially when the end product tasted like French kissing a cowboy while eating cherry pie. Not that I know anything about that, but that's what I'd imagine when Brooklyn Winery's in-house sommelier, Sarah Saskaan, called out its smoky, cherry, and leather-y notes. I had to agree.
True Wine Detective Will Really Test Your Skills.
Blind tastings get taken to the next level with this game. You're given four different glasses of wine, along with a list of "clues" to help you figure out what type of wine it is (and no, "red" or "white" won't cut it), its alcohol percentage, whether it's oaked or not, and which part of the world it's from. You're given four options for the latter, and even with Saskaan's help, I struggled to guess the correct state. Every. Single. Time.
I did learn, though, that more prominent "legs" on the wine - AKA those rivulets that stream down the sides of the glass when you swirl it around – usually means it has a higher alcohol content. And that more acidic wines tend to come from cool regions.
The Wine & Cheese Walkabout Is For Anyone Who Doesn't Want To Think.
Of course, one of the challenges of team building is that these games require you to potentially make an a** out of yourself. In front of people you have to see again on Monday. So, it makes sense that Brooklyn Winery's most popular event is pretty much no-fail. At the Wine & Cheese Walkabout, you basically wander through the room, sipping wines and enjoying chef-selected cheeses, like a salty compo de montalbán (AKA manchego) from Spain, or a tangy, creamy cana de cabra (a goat cheese). As long as you like to eat and can mildly tolerate small talk, you're good to go.
Out of all three, True Wine Detective turned out to be my favorite. It challenged me, it messed with my head, and I never had so much fun getting buzzed while learning something new. I got more from that round of trial-and-error than I ever did attending wine tastings or winery visits. Just don't ask me to recall it after I've had four glasses of vino.
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