A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I have no idea what we poured and the page where I would have posted it is long long gone. But based on that blurry early-edition iPhone picture, it looks like it was a clairette from Provence, a gelber muskateller from Austria, and a Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blend from Margaret River in Western Australia.
Originally published on May 17, 2009.
I’m fond of a good debrief. It’s a holdover from my corporate days. My last debrief followed the madness that was New Year’s Eve. This one involves the semi-madness that is the Taste of Tribeca.
For those who don’t know…and are too finger challenged to click on the link, here’s the mini-debrief on that: Taste of Tribeca is the annual fund raising event for P.S. 234 and P.S. 150, the neighborhood’s original public schools (there are more that have/are popping up, but that’s not a subject for a wine store blog.) Parent-planned, parent-run. Most of the restaurants in Tribeca (which include some of the very best restaurants in the city) set up tables along Duane Park. Customers buy tickets to sample tastes from each of those restaurants. 1 ticket = 6 tastes and you can purchase as many tickets as you like.
This year, in addition to the food, there was a Wine Tour led by wine and spirits educator Steve Olson. At the first stop, Tribeca Green Market, you tasted New York State wines. At Chambers Street, Stop #2, they poured sparkling wines. At Frankly Wines, Stop #3, we featured light white wines. At the next stop, full-bodied whites, then light reds, then full reds, then dessert wines. Or something like that.
On to the debrief part:
1. 25, maybe 30 people is about the limit of how many bodies can comfortably fit into the store. And that’s if they’re generally standing in one place drinking wine. 30 people actually trying to shop in the store, no way.
2. I can actually use the big, white wooden boxes as reconfigurable display settings, tables, a serving station. All sorts of things. Just like my architect said!
3. At an event like this, it is really hard to generate sales (people are hitting so many wine stores, it’s tough to carry bottles around with them). I knew this from last year’s tour and tried to have order forms ready, but the best approach is to have cards with the wines being poured so people can remember what they had. And to get the wines up on the web site…which I’ll do right after my debrief!
4. I can talk a person’s ear off about wine if they let me. (This is not a new learning.)
5. Given the right wine, people who “don’t like white wine” probably do, if they can just get over the fact that they “don’t like white wine.’
6. Three wines is the perfect number of a tour like this. You can choose three obviously different styles that make it easy to compare/contrast. More than three wines, it’s tough to clearly explain how they’re different. It starts to turn into an exercise in hair splitting.
7. A sign that you’ve picked the right 3 wines: there’s no obvious favorite among the crowd. Very few people will actually like all three of them. Even if they appreciate all of them and understand why all of them are well-made wines that represent where they came from, it was rare to find someone who really liked all of them. (Except me, but I’m a bit of a “wine slut”.)
8. Chilled bottles are really drippy. Next year, more cloth towels.
9. People never use the spit buckets.
10. 2/3 ice. 1/3 water. Lots of salt = very cold bottles very quickly. We tell people this all the time. Yesterday we proved it to ourselves.
What did we pour? You’ll have to go to the Frankly Wines web site to see.