Feature || Please puff (oops, sip) and pass

Our columnist Koliswa Jayiya takes a polite dig at “immobile” visitors who overstay their welcome at wine show stalls.

Wine is conversational. It stirs one’s musings and stimulates thoughts and conversations.

This blog is chilled and merlot. Get it? Mellow. You’re surely going to chuckle at many, gasp in horror at a few, while you let some wine wisdom warm you up.

Let’s chat briefly about wine tasting – not testing 1 2 3. Real talk, though, I honestly think that people complicate this and, as a result, they confuse themselves silly with the terms and explanations and then go all over the place repeating odd things. STOP IT please!

Just last week at some wine show, I was chatting to a lady about wine, as one does at these things. I asked her to please rinse her glass, I poured water into her glass. This is the conversation that ensued.
Wine taster: The colour is very subtle…. Mmmmm the taste is subtle, but very nice and smooth.
Me: I stood there in horror and thought to myself, if we had not had the conversation earlier about her just arriving at the wine show and starting with my wines, I would have thought she had been there since the wine show started; and that perhaps she had had a couple of sips already.

My advice is to try everything. Stop boxing yourselves to brands, colour or cultivar; that’s so limiting. There’s so much out there, just try it, who know you might actually like something!

Sip, swirl and swallow or spit. You don’t have to spit, but remember if you’re going to be tasting/sampling a few wines it’s safer to spit and have some water so that we can keep standing on our two feet at the end of the show. Nobody likes a wasted/messy drunk anyway!

If you really enjoy wine, I suggest keeping a diary of what you’ve tasted, you know to remind of you the new finds, plus this way you will at least you remember what you enjoyed.

I get it, you just sipped on something nice and now you would like to know more about it, but honey,  hogging the stand for a bit of history lesson on the estate is not the way to do it. There are hundreds of other people behind you who are keen to taste the wine too. Besides, what are you going to do with all that hundreds of years’ long history.

Keep it light, be open-minded, listen and don’t forget to spit Mogel. Like Bonang we also want to buy wine farms, we’re in this together.

“Wine, it’s in my veins and I can’t get it out.” – Burgess Meredith

• Koliswa is a brand ambassador for Avondale Wines