Looking Back on the Noble Grape Challenge

After a couple weeks off, I’m back and excited for another year of geeking out over wine and beer. I spent about a week at my parents’ place eating and drinking all the things before coming back to my cozy little apartment to recoup and recharge from the holiday chaos. I spent a quiet New Year’s Eve in and had a very busy and eventful re-entry into my work world. It feels truly back to reality at this point, and I’m glad to kick things off for 2018 with a final look back at the Noble Grape Challenge.

For anyone jumping in at this post, the Noble Grape Challenge was created by Wine Folly as a way to learn the spectrum of flavours and characteristics found in red and white wines. Over the past two years I have slowly tasted and shared my journey, learning about the key characteristics and flavours of each grape as I went. Now that it’s over here are some thoughts on the whole process.

It took forever!

Holy crap, this thing took a while! Granted, I wasn’t trying to motor through it, but it still took me almost two years to complete. If you’ve been with me the whole journey I sincerely thank you and hope you got as much out of it as I did.

I’m glad I made it through the whole thing, though. I learned a lot about the wines and learned a lot about blogging and my personal style along the way, which is exactly what I was hoping would happen. Thank goodness for hunches that turn out!

I didn’t know what I didn’t know

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a challenge. Every post pushed me to learn about the wine and really know what I was talking about so that I brought you right information. And there were still some pretty choice facepalm moments.

I’m still embarrassed to say I didn’t realize that Nebbiolo is the main grape in Barolo until after writing that post. Yeesh. I also got a little too wordy and flowery, especially in the beginning. Finding your voice is hard!

Each entry also shows how my knowledge and palate has progressed (thanks WSET!). I feel much more confident now when drinking and buying these wines, and I hope you do too! I definitely recommend this challenge if you’re feeling curious and want to expand your knowledge as well as your palate.

So, what now?

I like to have a project, something to work toward, so when I came to the last entry in the Noble Grape Challenge I wanted to come up with something new to work on.

Enter 2018, and the year of Wine WTFs.

Wine WTFs will be a year-long series that explores wine terms, regions, and stories that are slightly lesser known. WTF do people care so much about Bordeaux? WTF is MLF? Why TF should I care about oak? You get the idea. I’m looking forward to jumping into a new project and hope you are too.

Is there anything about wine that confuses or intrigues you? Lay it on me and maybe I’ll write a Wine WTF about it!