Learning about wine on watchduty

A fine still day, on our way to the Azores. We didn’t have a lot to do that day, the maintenance work was just the usual, sandpapering, painting and stuff like that.

But the fun started at our night watch, from 8pm to 12pm we sat on the poop deck and we discussed about wine, yes wine. Our watch-keeper is actually a wine expert, she goes to different conventions just to taste test wines. So there we sat, on our night watch, learning about how you should hold a wine glass. Then we learned how to stir the wine in the glass the proper way so that you would get the best smell and flavour.

But the most important thing to remember when tasting wine is that your are just tasting, not drinking, so do not swallow the wine. So then we came to practice, the galley rats came up to us with 2 cans of juice and glasses for each of us, so first we practiced to stir the “wine” the proper way with a combination of smelling and tasting. You needed to do the combination of steps pretty quickly to get the best smell and taste.

So now everyone on my watch knows how to taste test wine the proper way.

We spent the rest of the watch doing yoga, that’s another hobby our watch keeper has.

Oliver

Port