Introduction

Was very interested to learn more about these red wines from the aspect that I can't find them easily in Chicago or I would just not normally buy them. In the end, it was well worth the cost ($30) for the event and I learned a lot about the Northern Red Wine growing regions of Europe.

As expected, the wines were light-to-medium bodied wines. Germany dominated, Austria was OK; Swiss did not really have much to talk about. But I was told that very little Swiss wine output makes it to export, less to the US, and even less to Chicago (I think the folks at the tasting were trying to tell us that better wines exist....they just don't make it stateside).

Flight 1 - Swiss Red Wines (5 notes)

Flight 2 - German Red Wines (5 notes)

Flight 3 - Austrian Red Wines (11 notes)

Closing

Well worth the learning experience and the ability to speak with hands-on experience in these little known and seldom ventured areas of red wine.

Webster Wine bar is a classic place in Chicago - totally unpretentious, but they could have organized the event better. They lined up the bottles on the bar, had 30 attendees, 1 bartender, and people crawled over each other like rats in a bucket to get to the bar. One might have guessed that some of the attendees never had wine before. In the end, exercising some judicious and not-so judicious use of elbows and loud shouting I accomplished the last 3/4's of the wines by shoving and grabbing the bottles and pouring my own (instead of endless waiting for the bartender while he espoused these wines as some of the greatest and under-appreciated out there). I am proud that I made it through 20 wines in about 2 hours.