S3E2 Grape Expectations-Where schooling you is FUN!

You can enjoy a nice bottle of wine, but once you know what REALLY goes in to making wine, you can truly appreciate all of its nuances.  Well, we couldn't call ourselves true students of wine without exploring what it takes to make our own now, could we?  Although we believed that anything we made would likely be barely drinkable, at best, we still felt the need to pursue this noble craft! 

How surprised and delighted were we to find Grape Expectations in Henderson, NV, a wine making school with genuine winemakers from Vegas Valley Winery professionally caring for your barrel! Throughout the process Patty Peters and her team make sure that all of the steps are adhered to, to make a great tasting wine!

 So the gist is you and 20 of your closest friends get together 4 times over the process and choose the grapes you want to blend.  Class 1 is crushing the grapes.  Once crushed we add the yeast and some other goodies for fermentation.  Exactly one week later, in the 2nd class, we press the grapes and barrel the wine.  Now we wait for about 3 months to meet our barrel mates again and for class 3, we rack our wine, which means we pump our wine into a stainless steel vat (all with the help of the Grape Expectations team), rinse the barrel of all the sediment and yeast, so the wine has better contact with the barrel, then pump the wine back in.  We taste the wine in each step and can tell that it is coming along nicely and starting to develop a very nice flavor!  Then sit back and wait a few more months for our last official class where we bottle and label (with labels that we design) our wine.  Each barrel produces about 20 cases of wine, so for the price of our class we take home a case of our very own wine!  What an amazing way to learn! 

Now after our wine is bottled, Grape Expectations has an amazing "release" party, called the Bacchus Awards, which is also a competition amongst our peers and fellow wine makers who made their own barrels.  We are judged on the wines and the labels at an enormous, rowdy party typically held annually at the Orleans hotel.

We give this adventure a huge thumbs up!  If you can't come up with a team of 20 (or enough people to buy all of your cases), Patty will get you on a Social barrel team, so there is fun for ALL!  So much fun and so much knowledge and appreciation gained!  To get a hold of Patty and to learn more visit the website grapeexpectationslasvegas.com or email her at [email protected].

FB: GrapeExpectationsLasVegas

Insta: grapeexnv

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