Monday, November 24, 2008

Wine Class at RH Phillips

Sunday afternoon I headed up to RH Phillips for a fun wine class. The employees who work in the tasting room were required to be there, but as a chef I took the class for fun and to learn a little more about our product. And honestly, we have some great product! I feel thrilled and honored to be working for the company.


One of the chefs with whom I work prepared some snacks for us while we were tasting. This was a simple roasted chicken with Thai Peanut Sauce. We also passed around a vegetable tray, some crackers with brie, and some turkey cranberry crostinis (pictured below the chicken skewers) paired cheese-topped crostinis.







The instructor and the class was fun and informative. It was set up for us to taste/smell/sense the characteristics of wine; tannins, alcohol, fruit, body etc, and then we went on to blind taste about 10 different wines; at least 5 some the RH Phillips catalog, 5 others to contrast. The main point of the class was to help employees of the tasting room become familiar with our products and learn better ways of describing the wines to consumers. It was a course on what to say besides "this wine is good", or "this wine is fruity" (statements that have different meanings to different people) and use statements that truly describe what you are trying to sell, such as "this wine is light to medium bodied, has notes of asian pear and pineapple, and would pair nicely with any sort of cheese tray."

That said, our wines are a fantastic accompaniment to your holiday dishes. My favorite is our Shiraz, but we also make a Meritage, available in the tasting room. I know our most popular is our Chardonnay, available by the vat at your local Costco. I highly encourage you to come up and visit us and find out which one you like best. We are open today until 5pm, so you can still pick something up to drink with the turkey.

This Sunday, November 30, our chef Cory will be conducting a class on Christmas cookies. It's $15, and begins at 11am. For more information, call (530) 406-2445.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You forgot to add that you had a handsome and charming date and that you made record time on the drive there... ;)