Saint Louis Wine Therapy

It all started over Memorial Day last year. I got a phone call, saying to be at a certain location at 8:00 pm. Bring two bottles of wine, and cover them up. Price point, varietal, country, etc didn't matter. I walked into a room with 6 other people that had been given the same directions. Little did I know that I was being thrust into something that would change my social, and wine drinking, life forever.

That night, the Saint Louis Wine Therapy group was born. We didn't know it at the time, but since the original meeting of those 6 fuzzy minds, the group was about to take on a life of its own. The group has now swelled to about 8 couples, records are kept, we meet once a month, there are themes, and sorry- you can't come unless you are invited.

The intention of this group is to get together to blind taste wine. We often have a varietal (this weekend, for example, the varietal is grenache) for either red or white, then the other color is a "wild card". Price points don't matter, we have had people bring everything from two buck Chuck to bottles costing hundreds. Once the wine is poured, we try to determine vintage, varietal, country of origin, and retail price point, just by swirling, sniffing, sipping, and guessing. The cool thing is that we have gotten beyond just drinking wine together. The people in this group I now consider good friends. We laugh, cry, celebrate, and mourn together. One gal is pregnant, another couple is moving. We have inside jokes, and we even have gotten better at guesing what a given wine is- simply by who brought it and knowing their proclivities.

If you want to start something like this, it's easy. Just call up your friends, buy some brown paper bags to cover the wines, and break out the glassware. Trust me, you'll love it!

Let me just say emphatically that I love the Saint Louis Wine Therapy folks, and I'm glad we all got the phone call that inauspicious Monday night.