How I started on wine appreciation

Hi there,

Here is a short introduction about myself on how I started out wine drinking and appreciating it.

After graduating and coming out into the society to work, I started off with drinking beer originally. One of the reasons prompted me drinking is curiosity. Curious about how alcohol taste, from watching shows where adults would hang out after work in pubs and guzzle drinks late into the night. Thought it was quite cool at that point in time. And the main reason for choice of beer is due to low alcohol content and of course the affordability. For those who are aware, alcohol in Singapore is highly taxed and it is not cheap to drink alcohol here.

Naturally as a female, one of the concerns of this particular species of human being is that we spend part of our brain cells worrying about our figure! After a few months of guzzling beer after stressful day of work, I started putting on some weight, and to make things worse, the weight accumulated at the middle portion of my body!

This is when I started cracking brains on finding the alternative to drinking beer, and that is when I found wine. It is somewhat like a progressive step (incremental increase in alcohol content). Not to mention that wine drinking is definitely more ‘classy’ compared to drinking beer. At the mention of beer drinking, there were times that the image of uncles sitting at coffee shops in the neighborhood at tables lined up with numerous bottles of Tiger and Guinness. Definitely not the kind of image I would want to portray to my colleagues.

Wine tasting back in year 2005 in Singapore is starting to become more popular with the young working crowd. In bid to attract more wine drinkers, upcoming wine bars and shops do offer rather attractive offers for their customers. Few of the places I started off with is vino vino wine lounge opposite Mohd Sultan, Wine network at Dempsy road, Wine Garage beside Brewerkz at Riverside Point. I got decent wine tasting experience with paying $10-$20 for a variety of 5-10 types of wine across different countries in the world. It's a pity that tastings are more expensive these days with inflation hitting high at more than 8% recently. However, I'm seeing some really good offers for wine dining, companies offering food and wine. I have yet to have the opportunity and budget to go for those at this moment.

I also visited some wineries at Yarra Valley, Australia. From there, I made a friend who works in winery and shared with me some valuable tips in wine tasting and appreciation. It is through this blog I hope to go through this journey I have in learning about wine and appreciating wine, and share my experience with my readers.