Over two hours in Robertson Hall on a snowy winter afternoon, 68 students learned about and sampled six European wines: Vinho Verde from Portugal, Gruner Veltliner in Austria, Gewurztraminer from Germany, Garnacha from Spain, Bordeaux blend from France, and Chianti from Italy.
The Jan. 19 Wintersession workshop, led by Emily Miller, a doctoral candidate in Population Studies and Social Policy, was the second out of a three-part “Intro to Wines” series on the Americas, Europe, Oceania, and Africa. Of the 75 event registrants, the majority of attendees were graduate students. Due to the presence of alcohol, the event was 21-plus.
By focusing on European wine, Miller said that she hoped to “demystify its prestige” and encourage students to make their own decisions about their wine preferences.
“One way to demystify and equalize it is to not prime people [to judge a wine depending on] how expensive it is or how nice it is,” Miller said. “As a class, we literally taste the wine and decide for ourselves before we see anything else.”
Emily Miller is a senior writer for The Prospect at The Daily Princetonian.
Before drinking each wine, everyone smelled and observed the color and texture/tannins of the wines, which ranged from pale straw to deep copper for white wines, and pale salmon to deep tawny for red wines. The “leg” of the wine — the amount of time that droplets drip down the glass after swirling the wine — indicates the alcohol content: the slower the speed, the higher the alcohol content.
After drinking together, the class remarked on the mouthfeel, sweetness, acidity, and length (the beginning, middle, finish, and aftertaste) of the drink. Each student was equipped with an aroma and flavor wheel worksheet and another wine worksheet to write down their opinion under each wine. To avoid the influence of external factors, the price, tasting notes (fanciful names and labels describing the flavor of the wine), and the popularity of the wines were revealed after the tasting process.
Miller said she hoped attendees would come to their own conclusions: “I want them to think about, ‘Why do I like what I like?’ ‘Why do I not like what I [do not] like?’”
She explained that the quality of wines should not depend on price or geographical origin, contrary to the fact that European wines were generally more historic and expensive.
“Europe is very much considered the old world, which has a very distinct winemaking style and they’re known for specific things and tradition, while the new world, like the Americas, is known for innovation,” Miller said. “There’s more room for experimentation [in the Americas]. You can generally get a very good budget line for something much cheaper and that’s a great example of the style.”
“I tried the yellow tail, a very low-budget wine on Tuesday,” she added. “It’s a $5 bottle, but I really liked it.”
During her presentation, Miller included many anecdotes, most notably citing the Judgement of Paris, a 1976 wine competition in which French judges blind-tasted French wines and Californian wines. According to Miller, when the Californian wine ended up ranking best, the local press stopped reporting on the event and the event was banned for the next several years.
Through the workshop, Miller hoped to share her interest in wine with others. “It’s a worldwide beverage that has been around for tens of thousands of years,” Miller said. “I hope to make this world more accessible for everyone.”
Analysia Watley, a first-year Economics graduate student who attended Miller’s workshop, said, “I do think that sometimes wine tasting is about trying to taste the fanciest types of wines. What I really appreciated was the range of price points that we covered, but [all of which were] very much within what graduate students would want to buy.”
Another attendee, Chris Bottomley, a first-year Philosophy graduate student from Australia, said the workshop encouraged him to explore new wines.
“One thing I got out of [the class] was wanting to try more American wines,” Bottomley said. “I knew nothing about it, so to learn about how some wine regulation [between countries] works was really cool.”
“I learned more about how to differentiate between what’s going to be a good-priced wine versus a not-so-good wine,” Erin Crust, a first-year Economics graduate student, agreed. “It was helpful just getting a better sense of what you like about what you drink.”
When asked about her extensive knowledge in wine tasting, Miller said she was inspired by an undergraduate class she took at Cornell University called Introduction to Wines. For three hours each week for a semester, she got to taste different wines in class while learning about them.
“Wine is one of those things where you can kind of get what you put into it,” Miller said. “There’s so much diversity and categories and styles that you can really kind of create your profile can continue to expand like I did.”
“[Introduction to Wines] is the most failed course at Cornell, though,” she added. “You sit for exams and you do have to know your stuff.”
Besides her undergraduate education in wines, Miller also grew up in Colorado wine country in an American Viticultural Area.
“[Wine countries] are regions that people have decided are good areas to grow grapes, and they have a sense of terroir,” Miller said. “There’s something like 51 wineries in New Jersey which surprises people, and you can actually go to three or four of them within a 20-minute drive from [Princeton].”
While the wine connoisseur has tried many types of wines from different countries, there were some new wines she was looking forward to trying during her Wintersession workshops.
“I’m excited to try some new wines from Lebanon and South Africa.” Miller said, noting that she had nor previously sampled wine from Lebanon. “A lot of times the issue is that wine is produced in a lot of these places, but the distribution doesn’t make its way to the United States.”
Miller’s goal was for students to learn “the confidence to be able to articulate what [they] like” and develop “an appreciation for diversity and different options.”
Chloe Lau is a staff Features and The Prospect writer for the ‘Prince.’
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
Correction: A previous version of this piece incorrectly mistakenly identified a Vino Verde wine sampled at the event as a Casal Garcia.
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