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?