Spit and Twit at City Winery
Last night I attended my very first wine tasting at City Winery. I love wine and I am surprised I have never made it to a tasting before, but thankfully I have now corrected that! City Winery is a pretty new venue, I think it has only been opened about a year. I had been there once before about a year ago to see Rachael Yamagata in a really interesting concert, so I knew what the space was like, but I didn’t know what to expect as far as the tasting went.
I learned of the tasting because I am on City Winery’s email list. They emailed me with a special offer for the tasting which I couldn’t pass up. If I bought a ticket for $35 I could bring a guest for free! Since there were going to be over 100 wines to taste at the event I thought $17.50 a person was a great deal for all the wine we could drink.
This tasting attempted to be very technologically savvy, although at times it struggled. The idea behind the tasting was that you would tweet about the wines you liked and didn’t like. They had several televisions set up throughout the venue that were supposed to show a constant stream of people’s thoughts about each of the wines. This is a good idea in theory, but after about an hour, the main site went down and it was sporadic until at least 5pm when I left. I also think the site administrator would have been better served to leave the tweets up longer because I was unable to read them before they disappeared. Mostly, I ended up documenting my likes the old fashioned way, with a pen and the book they gave you to write in.
We were glad we had gotten a slice of pizza before heading to the tasting. I guess you could choose to spit the wine back, but who wants to do that? Instead we enjoyed the wine buzz and the bread and water that was free. City Winery also sold very small cheese plates for $10 a piece. We grabbed a table and one of us would go get a taste of wine and bring it back so that we could decide if we liked it or not. You could place orders at the venue, or, of course, buy online later, but surprisingly there was no major pressure to purchase. After trying approximately 25 or so of the wines there, we came away with a few new favorite wines. First, City Winery makes a great Downtown White, the only wine made here in Manhattan. We also got really loved Bear Flag Winery. Both the red and the white versions were delicious and only $10 a bottle! It was a fabulous way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
