Wine Craze at the InterContinental

Earlier this week, I was fortunate to receive a last-minute invite to a special wine craze event at the InterContinental Hotel on Wednesday. While the hotel's Clear Bar hosts a Wine Craze event every Wednesday (get more details here), this was a special event for some wine lovers/connoisseurs and/or food/local bloggers (clearly, this was my category, since you should all know by now I love beer and don't know much about wine).

I took Nate along, and we were joined by six other people--some people from a local PR firm and another local blogger and a friend of hers. A wine distributor introduced us to, and explained in great detail, two wines. The first was a merlot from Sterling Vineyard's Three Palms and the second was a cabernet wtih some merlot from Beaulieu Vineyard (BV).

The wine distributor (sorry, I wish I could remember his name!) was very thorough and detailed, and told us a lot about the wine. After we were done sampling, he asked us for feedback on the wine and what we tasted. It's amazing everything peple taste in the wine: cedar, blackberries, cherries and more. I have a hard time picking out each individual, but hopefully I'll get better the more wine I drink ...

I prefer ed the first wine, the merlot, over the second one just a bit. I don't have a good explanation as to why that was, but that's just the way it is!

In between samples, we were served tapas that were just as good as the wine. The food was as good as the wine! We had bacon-wrapped dates, flatbread with a wonderful roasted garlic flavor, big pretzels like you get at the ballpark (one was filled with cheese!), chicken quesadillas and some kind of roasted whole peppers with a dipping sauce.

The event was great, and I really want to get to another wine craze event some Wednesday. Those events are a little different, in that they last longer--from 5:30 to 8:30--and include $5 pours of mid-tier or high-end bottles of wine. I would recommend the event for both wine lovers and connoisseurs as well as those a bit new to the wine scene, like me.