Gentle Giant

Today was our visit to the vineyards in Franschhoek, South Africa, which was about a 45 minute ride from where we're staying. The countryside and the landscape were beautiful. The forecast was iffy but it ended up being great weather while we were there. This particular vineyard actually receives the most precipitation per inch than any other vineyard in South Africa as it rests between two mountains. To switch things up a little bit from last year, they organized an unorthodox way of wine tasting. They split us into teams of about 8-10 people and we had different stations where we had about five bottles of their different wines and the competition was to create the best blend and bottle/name it and the winners got a free case(12) of their great tasting wine. We started passing around the glasses and tasting the different types of wines from the merlot, cab, shiraz, petit, and a desert white wine. As a group we decided their petit and merlot were the best tasting so we used a majority of that in our blend. My roommate Brooks took it very serious marking down the stats of how we individually ranked each wine and then wrote down the ratios of how much we would use of each. While creating our masterpiece they brought around their signature wine Gentle Giant and each table received a bottle. We were presented with an opportunity to purchase a package of three bottles of their best stuff for 200 rand which is around 40 USD and it was discounted about 30 percent for us from retail price. I bought this package to bring back to the states to share this great South African wine. After some deliberating and much thought, they were ready to announce the winners. They counted down from 6th place and we made it to the top two and they still hadn't said our name. They announced 2nd place. It wasn't us. So our group went crazy as they announced "Elephant Walk" wine as the winner. We then took our group photo and went into the little town and ate pizza. Just woke up from my nap and I think we are going to have a laid back movie night.