The longest post ever, but it's about wine, so can you blame me?

And so, the first official "meeting" of The Wine Club came and went, hitchless but for the hangover. (It does occur to me we should give the club a more elegant name.)

We have a couple of friends with whom we share many interests; they are also "doers" in that they don't just say "we should get together sometime" but actually organize events at which we get together and have fun. (Dinner, brunch, Sunday runs, frisbee, etc). Because we also enjoy drinking wine, The Wine Club was born of this relationship.

Here is how The Wine Club works:

They invited a couple of their friends, and we invited a couple of ours (ie: four couples), thinking that this was a good number - not too many to make organization complicated or seating tricky, and enough that there would be ample conversation, opinion, and wine selecion. The objective is to taste some wine, learn something about it, and generally broaden our wine horizons. Each couple takes a turn at hosting. The hosts are in charge of selecting and obtaining the wine, doing the research involved in the "learn something" angle, preparing the food... Doing all the work, really. The other's just show up, but everyone pitches in for the wine.

We offered to host the first one - I don't know why, maybe to get it over with before the busy summer? Anyway, in an unpredictable move, we actually started planning our strategy right away, had a fairly clear grasp of our "theme" (if you could call it that) early on, and had the wine in our excited little hands an average of two weeks prior to the event.

Cut to the chase - if you are reading this, and you enjoy wine, I have some recommendations! My goodness, did we have some good picks. (We'd only tried one of these before - the other selections came to us by combination of research and serendipity.) Can you tell the theme? It's very loose:

• Raats "Original" Chenin Blanc 2004 (South Africa)- Unwooded, pineappley, not too tart. Yum. Served with sushi (California roll style) handmade by McPie.
  
  
• Bird Label Riesling 2005 (Germany) - McPie says it "didn't have a harsh bone in its body". We finally understood what they say about "sweetness perfectly balanced by acidity". It's true, it works. Yum. Served with aged cheddar.
  
  
• Domaine de Champs de Cour Moulin-a-Vent 2004 (Beaujolais)- I have so much to say about Burgundy wine. (But I don't know enough about it yet to proselytize with any credibility.) This one was bigger than the typical Beaujolais Gamay, and silky as hell. Yum. Served with steak and stilton "tarts".
  
  
• Le Clos Jordanne "Village Reserve" Pinot Noir 2004 (Niagara) - We hunted all over southern Ontario for this, and finally tracked down the last two bottles in the NCR in Manotick. Worth the work - the best wine of the night. Had the classic (to my untutored mouth) taste of Burgundian Pinot Noir... not that I could tell you what that is exactly other than VELVET. We served it with smoked salmon.
  
  
• Sandalford Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 (Australia) - Appropriately juicy as all cabs should be. Smooth after several hours of decanting (only an experiment, we're aren't actually savvy that way). Don't remember too many details since this was the fifth wine... But Yum! Served this with curried lamb and phyllo bundles, made by me, with help in the phyllo folding by McPie because we were rushing to do this at 7:27, minutes before the guests were scheduled to arrive.
  
  
• Cline Zinfandel 2005 (California) - The one wine we'd had before: I brought it the first time Sweetie McPie made me dinner. (Our first real date.) It was the least impressive of all the others, but I'd still recommend it, for the price. Not big like a Syrah, but nicely spicy. (Strangely, after the Cab, it had a distinctive smell of latex paint. We all agreed on that.) Definite Yum factor.

Notice the lack of real tasting notes? Pretty pathetic on my part, given that we sat down to the wine at 8:30, and spent the better part of 5 hours sniffing and sipping... It's just that I was so enjoying the sniffing, and the sipping that I couldn't be arsed to find the words for the heaven I was sensing.

A good time was had by all, but "all" was a bit different that we expected. One couple failed to show up. They just... didn't come. (And we'd set up a strict and elaborate framework for subbing guests in case of absence, and we'd planned the event five weeks in advance.) And one of the ladies arrived and announces she was newly pregnant, and would only be sniffing. That left five of us (one of which had to drive) with the six bottles of EFFING DELICIOUS wine (as in, as if we weren't going to finish the bottles), plus, McPie and I threw in a "bonus" opener of Prosecco as a welcomer/palate cleanser, served as our guests arrive. (We are enormous fans of sparkling wine. Try it on a random Saturday or Sunday morning, in bed or with the Globe and Mail.)

By the time we swilled the last drops of Zin, our good sense was drowned, our tastebuds puckered from an attempted to pair chocolate with red wine (bad idea), so we broke out the Maple ice wine (Gaspereau Vineyards in Nova Scotia), and our homemade limoncello. By all accounts these were also delicious - I have no recollection. (I'm actually familiar with both from previous occasions, and I have to say, we make a mean limoncello.)

I also have no recollection of us slowly tidying up the kitchen or going to bed at 4 AM. We dragged our arses out of bed at 10:40 AM, only because we had to meet our fellow wine club founders for a pre-planned 75 minute run at 11. (Oh, the folly.) And I was still 2 sheets to the wind. McPie humoured me, but was in not much better shape.

The run was good, fun, even with a post-mortem of the event and no shortage of giggling (by me), but the buzz had warn off by the time we got to the pub for our ritual greasy post-run brunch.

I'll skip the gory details, and let it suffice to say that we spent the remainder of the afternoon glued to the couch, watching Casino Royale - exactly what we needed/wanted, brilliant movie, I now have a true appreciation for James Bond.

[Edit: Actually, there was no need to have an appreciation for James Bond pre-Casino Royale. Even the twinkle in Sean Connery's eye couldn't elevate Goldfinger from "cheesy old movie" status. And it wasn't the new Bond that did it - the grittier action (hand-to-hand! With blood!), grim plot and lack of cheeseball lines all made the latest Bond a REAL movie.]