Wednesday, November 14 2012

Doings, Goings, To and Fro-ings

 

Is it just me, or does it look like that city just sneezed out a bunch of jet planes?

 

It’s been a long time since my last update. I’m starting to think this should be my standard blog header ‘Tim Seldom Blogs’. Ah, well, it’s a busy life and I do try to keep folks updated on my Facebook and Twitter feed.

I’ve been doing my Limited Edition wine tasting events for LE 2012, which amounts to about ten weeks of travel between the last week of September and the middle of December. Even at this schedule I’m still not getting out to see everybody who wants to come to an event. Luckily for me I’ve got a trove of capable and engaging surrogates who conduct the food and wine tastings and pairings for me in places that I can’t get to in my busy travels.

In addition to our dedicated and hardworking account managers who do a bunch of events for their retail partners, we also engage the services of both Dave Laroque and Tim Ellison across Canada. Dave is a wine educator who has worked for Andrew Peller (the parent company of Winexpert) for many years and now does education and consulting events. He’s a brilliant speaker, knows a tonne about wine and is probably even funnier than me (I’m not jealous, much!) He was the first non-Tim to do consumer events for Winexpert and it’s been a joy working with him—his take on the presentation is naturally different from mine, but it’s all the better for his input and insight, and folks who get to see him are very lucky.

Tim Ellison has been doing LE events for past couple of years and he’s another treasure. A wine educator and teacher, I first saw him speak at an industry conference four years ago and thought he did a bang-up job there. Luckily he can cover the parts of British Columbia I just can’t get to, and besides, anybody named Tim is automatically smart and handsome—of course!

So far I’ve done some events for our retailers in BC (Nanaimo, Coquitlam and Kelowna), for their customers as well, and done work in Minnesota (had some fun there doing employee education events, component tastings and a video interview) Ohio, Indianapolis, Port Moody, Abbotsford, and Calgary. Tonight I’m on an Air Canada flight between Vancouver and Winnipeg: tomorrow I’ll be in Brandon doing the first of two shows there, one a component tasting and the other a standard LE food and wine event. After that it’s back to Winnipeg to finish out the week doing more component tastings and LE 2012 food and wine pairing nights, then home for Sunday breakfast and to do some laundry and back out to Denver on Monday, and the week after I’ll be in the US Northeast to do New Jersey, Pennsylvania and environs, home to check and see if I still live there and off to the Pacific Northwest for Edmonds, Seattle, and probably Portland.

Whew!

I’ve mentioned component tastings a few times. This is something new we’re trying out this year. In the past I’ve done them exclusively for our retail partners, as an educational programme. It’s pretty simple to describe, but much more fully realised in person. What we do is arrange two wines, a crisp white and a medium-bodied, oaky red with some decent tannin and we taste them against standardised solutions of

• Acid
• Tannin
• Oak
• Sugar
• Alcohol

I’ve attended other component tastings over the years and all of them have featured aromatic components. While this is a worthy and desirable endeavour, I’ve never found them completely satisfactory, reason being, everybody has very different thresholds for smelling things. What might be glaringly obvious to some folks may not even show up for others.

But not so with the basic flavour components of wine: everyone can taste the major ones, and comparing them against two wines, a fruity, crisp white and an oaky, tannic red can help most people understand the basis of wine balance and character.

If you’re interested, and can’t make one of my events, I have a treat for you. My friend Chip Walton, videographer extraordinaire over at Northern Brewer, filmed the presentation I did for their customers.

 

I think it turned out pretty great (except for the whole camera-adds-fifty-pounds thing) and there’s also an attached explanation at Northern Brewer’s Connect blog.

Enough lollygagging on the interwebs: I’ve got to get ready for a big day on the road—Brandon Manitoba, here I come!

Posted by Travellin' Tim AT 8:22AM

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