How to "taste" wine without buying it? Go to FREE wine tastings and CRUISE wine shops and up scale grocery stores on weekends for wine demonstrations

Attend public and political fund raising events. At parties, pour from someone else's bottle....

Why not put on your own wine tasting?

Keep it simple. Have everyone bring one each of the following crackers, fruit, cheese, LOTS of small, clear plastic cups and BYOB (bring your own bottle)... pick a varietal and bring one of that classification. Have a bottle of water for each guest and slices of lemon or lime. Having plenty of plastic (clear) cups available, don't rush the tasting process: let the guests discover that red wine tastes better after 30 minutes in the cup (breathing). Ice the white and rose types, or don't. Recycle the plastic cups for the next tasting!

Don't forget to give everyone a pen and a pocket size memo spiral notebook for note taking.

" You will forget it, unless you make a memo of it."

Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland

There are few national wine tasting event newsletters: here is the one that I was recommeded and have found useful for the DFW area; and, it publishes editions for all major cities: http://www.localwineevents.com/

They publish a weekly newsletter, called The Juice.
http://www.localwineevents.com/eletters/preview/61

My FREE trial of The Juice: Grand Cru is up this month, so I will be downgraded to REGULAR issue; however, here are the details for the GRAND CRU issue for $2 a month:


•Receive The Juice for as many cities as you want.
Standard subscribers are limited to 2 cities.

•Only include events in categories of your liking.
Events are designated as: Food, Wine or Wine and Food, Spirits Beer or Other (coffee, chocolates, tea tastings, etc) If you are not a beer drinker or do not care for hard spirits, you can opt to not have them in your issue.

•Only include sections of The Juice that you are interested in.
We have added a lot of content to The Juice over the years, but some sections may not interest you. We offer the options to close sections of The Juice Grand Cru that you would not read anyway.

•Only include events that are in a specific price range for your budget.
If $150 is out of your price range for an event to attend and you would rather not be teased, you can be notified of only events within your price range.

•Include a brief description for each event right in your issue.
In efforts to reduce the overall size of The Juice, we removed the snippets of descriptions formerly included in the calendar. As a The Juice Grand Cru member, you can have them included.

•Block posters you are not interested in.
If every week's "Wine Down Monday" at a distant venue that you have no interest in visiting, you can simply choose to "block" that venue and no further postings will be included in your issue.

•Block events focused on singles.
As an added designation for event postings, we ask the hosts to indicated if the event is focused on singles. You can choose not to see them if you wish.

•Eligible to win free tickets to selected events in your area.
At LocalWineEvents.com we are often offered complimentary tickets to events that are posted. Sometimes two tickets and sometimes more. Some events are big and some are small. We are going to, with permission from the hosts, randomly select a The Juice Grand Cru member in the areas of the events and give those tickets away, no charge, to the first randomly selected member who can attend.