Ideas Please

[DRT]

My Mother is one of a group of dedicated individuals who have spent the past 25 years running a fund raising group. Suffice to say she is very good at it and has a medal awarded by the Pope to prove it Anyone interested in knowing more of this part of the story please PM me.

As part of the planning of their events list for 2008 my good old Mum asked me how she could run a wine tasting centred on Fair Trade wines. I am no expert on dry wines and could not begin to advise anyone on how to run a tasting for the uninitiated.

I should stress at this point that we are looking at a group of 50 or so individuals who probably have no interest whatsover in wine, other than to buy it cheap and glug it down. What they are looking for is a fun event, probably with some sort of "competion" theme and an opportunity to extract as many pound coins as possible from all those in attendance.

If anyone has experience of running "fun" wine tastings can you please let me know. Better still, if anyone reading this who has experience of running such an event, lives within striking distance of Edinburgh and would like to give up an evening to entertain this bunch of nutters and raise some cash for a good cause please PM me.

Thanks

Derek

[Andy Velebil]

Derek,

Since most of my family loves to put ice cubes in their wine I've a little experience here.

Stick with the more fruit forward wines. Nothing to structured of complex, it will be lost on them and they won't like it. I always head to my local market and find wines by large "chain" type wineries. The Robert Mondavi's, Woodbridge, "Two buck Chuck"...kinda like the Cruz Ruby of dry wines. Most of would hate them, but those that don't know love them.

Also, had a good number of white wines. I've found most non-wine drinking women tend to perfer white wines, very heavily chilled. Of course, since you're doing a bit of rec's here, I say add in a couple bottles of Ruby Port. Say a Quinta de la Rosa, Grahams Six Grapes, etc.

Of course small pours of 1-2 ounces is perfect, but can be more or less depending on how many different bottles you got and what they charge per sample.

But a station with reds, a station with whites, and of a course a small station for some Port and other high octane "dessert" wine.

[DRT]

Thanks, Andy

I'm also looking for any suggestions on how to make it fun for them. In previous conversations with AHB he told me that he has run port tastings for non-portoholics where he gets them to taste the wines blind and then pt them in order of least to most expensive or identify which style of port it is having been given a short description of the characteristics to look out for. The problem I would have with both of these options is that the wines will all be <£10 so not much to separate one from the other.

For those who don't know, Fair Trade is an initiative which has caught on in the UK over the past few years where the producers of wine, food and other stuff receive a fair price for what they produce rather than being ripped off by the big distributors and supermarkets. The group my Mum is involved with promotes Fair Trade goods and the idea is that they only use Fair Trade wines so the choice is serverely limited, and doesn't include port

Any other experiences or suggestions like the ones above from AHB would be very welcome.

Derek