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A Year of Re-Skilling

How to Drink

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We began the workshop with champagne, and it was immediately my favourite Renaissance Women gathering. Everyone oohed and ahhed at the table set for 14, almost covered in shiny wine glasses and 14 place settings.

“Wine appreciation” made it onto our list of skills to learn sort of as a joke, but it easily topped “kill a chicken” in the voting round and Sheila wasted no time in organizing the event. She brought us to the home of Alfons Oberlacher, the Vancouver Island Sales Representative for Free House Wine & Spirits Ltd. Alfons’s friend and neighbour Mike Gelling, a sales representative for International Cellars Inc., was our co-instructor.

With 14 giddy women seated, we began our “lesson” with five different white wines: a grigio (Italy’s gris), a New Zealand sauvignon blanc, a riesling, an ehrenfelser (I’d never heard of this before: it’s a cross between silvaner and riesling grapes) and an oaked chardonnay.

Step 1: smell with your nose

(I’m not being a smart ass: apparently you can also smell through the back of your mouth, when air hits your sinuses. That came later.)

I’ve consumed a lot of wine in my decade of drinking, but I’ve never taken the time to smell five individual glasses of wine. The grigio smelled of freshly-cut grass or hay. The riesling brought back memories of cheap wine downed for the buzz as my girlfriends and I primped for the bar in our twenties. Maeve smelled the ehrenfelser and exclaimed “cheese!” It smelled like brie. Mike and Alfons explained that chardonnays are flavourless, bland wines until the winemaker struts his/her stuff: a chardonnay is a blank canvas that can be manipulated, like this one had been, with its oak barrel. Strangely, it smelled of cigarettes.

Step 2: sip

This is when our workshop instructors blew my mind. I’d learned about the different tastes back in high school, but I wasn’t drinking wine in high school. Alfons and Mike reintroduced us to the five tastes: sweet, bitter, savory (also called umami), salty and sour. They challenged us to move the wine around in our mouths to see what we tasted, and also to “smell” the wine by breathing air on it while tasting.

Wowee. The grigio was the most explosive when tasted this way: it was like fireworks in my mouth. Patti described it as sucking on one of those sour fizzy candies. Some wines were consistent (e.g. the sauvignon blanc, the riesling). The chardonnay was a crowd pleaser.

Step 3: eat and drink

Alfons served us chantrelles and onions, and a romaine-beet-feta salad. Tasting a bite of something, then drinking one of the wines, was an illuminating experience. I’d never understood the concept of wine pairings, but some of the wines definitely tasted gawdawful with the food, while others were excellent.

At this point we drank or dumped any leftover wine into a pitcher. I can’t talk about this because it makes me sad.

Step 4: repeat with the reds

Our glasses were refilled with five reds. By this point, we were all very happy.

We huffed an oaked pinot noir with its black cherry, ripe raspberry smell. We tilted our glasses and held them up against a white background: an orange tinge means the wine has been aged, or aged in a barrel. When we eventually drank the pinot noir everyone made puckery noises: it dried out our mouths. I love grenache (or “garnacha” as I pronounced it to a liquor store clerk once: I was drinking Spanish bottles then), but the grenache-shiraz smelled “punky” and dried my tongue.

The zinfandel from Cline Winery in California was a favourite, with its clean fruity smell and taste. It’s my new default wine to bring to a party or serve with dinner: it was lovely with the pork and chicken Alfons served us.

The malbec smelled like cotton candy (Patti’s description), while the syrah reminded me of campfires. The latter tasted heavy and dense, coating my tongue and teeth with fur. We all felt warmer after drinking it: it would be an excellent wine after a day outside in the winter. I gave it two smiley faces in my notebook, but I was a little drunk and possible reckless with my grading scale.

In Vino Veritas

Seriously, wine appreciation? Is that justifiable as a re-skilling workshop? We joked that, in the event of an apocalypse, we’d learned exactly which sections of the liquor store to loot first. Invaluable life skills.

This workshop was really about slowing down. It took us 2.5 hours to drink two glasses of wine and a glass of champagne. A glass of wine can be an experience (and an adventure) in itself, if we take the time to smell and taste it. Re-skilling is about re-learning how to do basic things – and what’s more basic than eating and drinking?

A Year of Re-Skilling

A Meeting of Minds

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I was so nervous before our first meeting. There would be speaking in front of a group. This group was comprised of some of the most remarkable women I’ve met in my three years in Duncan. They were all superstars. I didn’t want to be in charge, to tell them what the rules were and the lofty achievements I expected from them as participants. I wanted it to be a collective effort, a shared experience.

They were so gracious and supportive, reclining on the cosy couches of Affinity Guesthouse, sipping their Teafarm tea and praising the bizarre food I’d brought them. Green tea cookies, baked an hour before. Sprouted wheat bread — “manna bread,” as Vanessa called it. Garlic scape jelly that Cindy had made and given me. Cheese made from yogurt, a byproduct of the whey extraction necessary to make the fermented sodas that they bravely drank. The kombucha in a pickle jar. The menu theme was “things I learned to make in 2010.” Not-so-subtle inspiration for our year ahead.

I lurched through the notes I’d made, explaining what I thought the group could be, the commitment I was proposing, the guidelines that I thought would keep us on track. Heather K. nodded encouragingly, Maeve backed me up on the “women only” rule. The two requirements for our group were:

  1. commit to learning a new practical skill as a group once a month in 2011, and
  2. commit to sharing your experience through your art, whatever that may be.

I’d invited writers/bloggers, two photographers, an audio artist, jewellery makers, print makers, and numerous Jane-of-all-trades, or “dabblers” as Vanessa self-identified.

A print by Tanya, Renaissance Woman

We brainstormed the skills we’d always wanted to learn: how to milk a cow, how to make bread from a sourdough starter, how to shoot a gun. How to back up a trailer. We used up all the poster-sized sheets of paper I’d brought, taping them to the large windows along the North wall. Who knew there were this many skills to learn? Most of us are in our 30s: what have we been doing with our lives?

Then we voted with markers, “x”ing or checking or smiley-facing 10 skills each. I felt powerful, selecting what I would do over the next year. Literally choosing, with every smiley face.

By this point we had become a group. I didn’t want to interrupt the conversations that had started. Many of these women had heard of one another. Some knew each other, but mostly superficially. In our introductions we’d shared our names, what kind of art we did, and any practical skills we had. It was an inventory of superpowers, and we were a powerful bunch.

Eventually I read out the skills that had received the most votes. These were our top 10 skills, and would be our priorities for the months ahead:

  • make, distill and use essential oils
  • make fermented sodas and other fermented drinks (kombucha)
  • make yogurt
  • milk a cow/goat/water buffalo
  • cheese making & wine appreciation
  • sew from a pattern
  • identify wild, edible plants and mushrooms
  • use sourdough starter to make bread
  • make ice cream, without an ice cream maker
  • make soap

We also had four “runner up” skills that would be our back-ups, in case we couldn’t find a cheesemaker teacher or get together enough sewing machines:

  • beekeeping
  • build a cob oven
  • make paper
  • kill a chicken & process it

With five vegetarians in the group and only four votes being cast in favour of learning the skill, the chicken workshop was relegated to the bottom of the list.

Some of us then volunteered to organize a workshop: our February meeting now depends on who confirms a workshop first.

At some point in the discussion the name “Renaissance Women” was suggested, which was generally adopted despite my inability to spell it without help. I promised to set up a group emailing list to facilitate private group communication and a Facebook Page to share our experiences with our friends.

And so: whew. I made it through our first meeting thanks to two cups of herbal tea, a cookie that Katie had brought, and a piece of Heather K.’s amazing olive oil, rosemary and chocolate cake to calm my anxiety. Now that the ship has launched, I can relax on deck and get to know my fellow passengers. And I will have to start writing again.