Programme

Documenta wine tastings.

Activity done in collaboration with: Universidad de Castilla la Mancha

Now that you are here before me, in a clear, clean glass, in a relaxing and peaceful environment, with good company or pleasantly alone, do tell me, WINE, something about yourself:

Tell me about the fields where you were grown, about the old vine stock, about the honorableness of the men who cared for you and made you, about the cold spells in winter, or the unrelenting suns of summer.

Are you white or red? If white… Straw-colored or gold? If red… Purple, ruby red, or mahogany? Transparent, brilliant, limpid, or with those little carbonated bubbles. By simply being poured into the glass, you tell us your age, your possible virtues or defects, and you prepare us for an unforgettable encounter.

Before drinking, wait a bit, to get more information out of you. First, to smell you from a still glass in order to make out those primary aromas of the grapes from which you came: flowers, honey, orange blossom, orange, violets, strawberries, cherries, currant, licorice, pepper, thyme, freshly cut grass… After a bit of stirring, as though rocking you back and forth in the glass, the smells of bread, cakes, slightly milky, wild berry... And finally, closing one's eyes we submerge ourselves in the depths and complex aromas of the vintages, such as coffee, vanilla, softly smoked, roasted, the ancient aromas of the truffle and hummus, even the complex and surprising “animal” notes and leather, so unexpected from a vegetable product.

Then comes the desired encounter with the mouth: A little sip, a sliding around on the tongue up to the roof of the mouth, awaking in your path the taste buds for sweetness at times, surprising us with something exceptionally salty, with refreshing sourness and
some balanced bitterness. We fill the senses of our mouths with warm sensations, at times stormy, at times sharp, and at others, burning or velvety. Even when you are leaving us, you send your last and most subtle messages by way of a retro-nasal smell, providing us with forgotten aromas and highlighting notes that might have gone unnoticed because of our initial eagerness.

Wine tasting is not an exhausting or unpleasant exercise. We mustn’t claim to be more nor less than what we are; it is an exercise in humility. The humbler we are and the more we let the wine we have in our glasses speak, the more we will learn to enjoy it. The key to a good wine is nothing more than, after a first sip, its invitation for us to repeat. We have to build our own “virtual personal wine collection” and to go about expanding it insofar as we can afford it. A wine taster rarely gets inebriated, on the contrary: learning about wine tasting will integrate us into a profound, centuries-old civilization running through the veins of all traditional wine-making countries, one we discover by chatting amicably over a bottle of wine.

José Ángel Amorós Ortiz-Villajos
Dr. Agricultural Scientist Professor of Viticulture (E.U.I.T.A. Ciudad Real).

Restaurante Cáscaras
Thursday the 10th at 17:00 h.