Spirit tasting

I have so much wine blogging to catch up on, that I thought I'd start with the easy topic. During a recent wine tasting course, we studied and tasted spirits - vodka, rum, gin, cognac, sherry, etc. Throughout the wine topic portions of the course, I had been rather pleased with myself and my previous knowledge gleaned from hands on tasting experience, paying attention to what I drink and lots of wine reading. For instance, I know that a Chablis is actually Chardonnay (duh!), but I had wondered how the course would feel for someone who doesn't know too much about wine to start with. After doing the spirits portion, now I know.

I felt the awe of realising how little I knew about the distillation process or how you could actually make alcohol out of nearly everything it seems (fruit, potatoes, barley, etc). I also realised how little I knew about how vodka differs from gin, for example (very little is seems. Gin isn't much more than flavoured vodka where the predominant flavour must be juniper berries). And then, on the test, I probably got most of the spirit-related questions wrong. I couldn't remember the colour of reposado tequila, or which ingredient was the basis of rum.

All of this on my wine blog is to say that it's true that the more you learn about something, the less you realise you actually know. For now though, I'll stick to the topics I already have a head start on...