I was lucky enough to be able to attend a Wine Board event at the Enowine wine bar in the IFSC on Saturday, thanks to a great giveaway at Sour Grapes. I brought my friend Clairey along. We were both suffering from what Clairey called ‘wine flu’, which we seemed to have somehow contracted the night before, so were feeling a little shaky. But the event at Enowine turned out to be very civilised and relaxing indeed.
Enowine has a really unusual set up – their wine bottles are hooked up to a dispenser system (called Enomatic), which doles out dainty little tasting samples of the wine of your choice. On arriving, we were each handed a card with €25 credit on it, and we used that in the Enomatic system to purchase our glasses. You could choose to spend as little as 65c (from a bottle that costs about €12), or as much as €17 (from a bottle that costs €350!). Most of the samples were around the €1-€2 mark, meaning that you could try a really wide range of wines for your €25.
It’s a great concept, as it allowed us to sample wines from bottles costing up to €70 (my usual spend on wine would be something very, very far south of that figure). There was also a delicious array of cheeses and antipasti laid on for the event. The only downside really is that after about the 9th sample, it became impossible to pay attention to the names and varieties of the wines I was drinking…although that could be as much down to my poor decimated attention span as any flaw in the concept.
I did manage to pull myself together long enough to jot down some names of some of the nicer and more affordable wines that were available there:
- Phillipe Rainbault Sancerre 2008 – €18.99
- Sybille King Reisling 2003 – €24.80
- Bourgogn Aligote 2005 – €24.95
- Capriche 2007 – €17.50
The normal price for tickets to this event are €45, and can be booked through the Wine Board. Keep an eye on Sour Grapes as well, as more giveaways are promised there!