It’s two weeks before Susie and I fly to London, followed by our trip to Crete. The jitters have started, and the countdown is hard to avoid. Of course, we want time to slow down. However, Tempus Fugit has never been as accurate as it is now. Before we head out, I plan on shooting a couple of YouTube episodes featuring Greek wines. Greece is one of the oldest wine-producing countries in the world. Their culture and way of life have been influenced by their involvement in wine and winemaking. I’ve been reading a book entitled “The Wines Of Greece,” written by Konstantinos Lazarakis, a Master of Wine. It is quite an intriguing book that goes into the history of winemaking in this country and the many unique grapes (basically unique to Greece) grown there and made into wine. Grapes called Mavrodaphne, Assyrtiko and Agiorgitiko. I look forward to presenting some of these wines on my YouTube channel and looking deeper into their winemaking culture when Susie and I go there. There will be lots to talk and write about.
I’ve been using TikTok quite a lot lately to document what I do on a daily basis at my job. It’s been fun, and a lot of people have been interested in what I do at the store. I will use TikTok extensively on our trip to Greece. I love to share what I learn, and this avenue, along with Instagram, is an excellent tool for sharing my adventures. It’s interesting that many folks my age do not understand or use social media. For some reason, they are fearful or just don’t want to take the time to fool with it. Everyone has an interesting life in one way or another. Sharing what you are going through is intriguing and many of you would be surprised at the people who will watch, either out of curiosity or because they like you and want to see what you’re up to. Our community here in the San Juans are huge Facebook users. I like to tap into that as well.
There are two things I am going to focus on over the next few months. Increasing the readership of this blog and growing my YouTube channel. People are very interested in the wine world but love to have the information delivered in a style that is not snobby or too technical (maybe that’s redundant, I’m not sure). If you’ve watched my channel on YouTube, you will find it genuinely blue-collar in terms of delivery. You will also find that my pronunciation (primarily of French wine names) can be, at times, classified as horrible. Believe me when I tell you that I try my best. Phonetically, it’s a challenge for me. Sometimes I wish I had some cool accent that could hide many of my bloopers. Unfortunately, I have your basic American slang and a knack for getting foreign wine names wrong. I guess there may be some charm to that and I hope my viewers don’t hold it against me. I will continue to hone my abilities in this regard and hopefully limit my vernacular blunders to a minimum.
This is the first time in a while that I’ve stumbled upon my wine pick of the month early. I put on a wine event at the local Yacht Club, and it was at this tasting I found an amazing red from France that knocked my socks off for only ten bucks. That is a challenging task. Ten dollars is a stupid price for any wine that can deliver as this wine does. Of course, I’m not letting on what it is until the first of October. What’s interesting to me is that the sales rep who suggested this wine for the event had no intention of presenting it as an option for my pick. It happened entirely by chance. I think it should be a goal of each rep who calls on me to bring a wine that will nail down that spot at the front of the wine aisle where I place my pick for each month. My criteria for making this choice is what I refer to as the eighty percent rule. What does that mean? I will write an article about that in my next post.
Cheers!
Stan The Wine Man
