San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition & Wine Tasting Recap

Last weekend was the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting. This is the culmination of the world's largest wine competition that this year judged 4,913 different wines, a world record. While there are lots of wine contests, we had been advised that this is definitely one of the events to compete in. We are proud to announce that we secured silver medals for the two wines we entered, the '08 Tres Blanc and '07 Epi Telos.

The Fort Mason Center hosted over 500 different wineries who poured their medal winners for over 6,000 tasters. Unfortunately, my camera decided not to cooperate so to get a sense of the mass of humanity, check out http://www.winejudging.com/event_tickets.htm. Dave and I poured wine for four hours to a very diverse group of imbibers. Some were definitely on a mission to taste as many different wines as possible. Others were much more selective seeking only a particular varietal. Many came prepared with their notes and actually had a strategy to try only the wineries they had never heard of or only from a certain region or only those with the highest score.

Most rewarding for Dave and me where the comments like, "this is the best wine we've tasted all day," and "I can't believe this only won a silver." Many tasters were in small groups who returned to the table with their friends encouraging them to try the wines. There were lots of folks asking how to buy the wine so we gave out hundreds of cards with instructions to order online. Everyone took brochures of the B&B promising to call for reservations. We'll see how much this enthusiasm on a wine-induced Saturday translates to actual sales and visits. We are definitely the "wine glass more than half full" types and are convinced people will come.

Regardless of the net wine results, we had a fun get-away in a beautiful city. Dave and I had fantastic meals, caught up with some old friends, met new ones, walked from the Ferry Building to Fisherman's Wharf in the rain and behaved like total tourists. I finally got to ride a cable car!