More upside-down than "Sideways"

Recently I was lucky enough to have my sister, Vanessa, come visit me for a week. Despite the fact that she finds wine barely tolerable, she really wanted to take a wine-tasting class (no objections from this side of the room). I found one at the Rex Hill Winery that wasn't too expensive and was supposed to help us cover the basics, so we headed down to the Willamette Valley to get our drink on. We were model students, eating all of the tasty cheese pastries that were placed in front of us, and drinking every last sip of wine. Observe our progress:

Lesson 1: How to Look Pretentious While Sniffing Wine:

Clearly, we nailed that one.

We also learned how to tell the difference between older wines and younger ones, between wines aged in oak and un-oaked wines, just by looking at them! We tasted, we picked out hints of chocolate and eucalyptus in our Syrahs (or at least other people at the table did), we played the "tannin-versus-acid" game (our job was to say which one won). By the end of our two-hour class, we were bona fide winos. We were so good, we dropped the pretentious faces and graduated to Confident and Classy:

 

Cheers!

(For those of you who are super observant, you'll notice we're not actually sniffing wine. I'm sniffing star anise, and Vane is nose-deep in vanilla beans.)