Now the dust has settled (and I’ve written up the individual days!) I thought I’d give a few summary thoughts on Wine Week.

I drank over 50 wines throughout the week. Only one of them was actually bad. Several were stunning. I found a lot of new places I’ll definitely be going back to for both food and wine in the coming months. It was a great week.

That being said, it felt a bit smaller this year. I’m not sure if that’s because a lot more places were doing the ‘Sip and Snack’, which with one exception we avoided. The places we did go were also less busy. In previous years they’d been stacked with people doing wine week. This year some of the places even looked puzzled when we asked. There was an ‘oh, yeah, we are doing that’ vibe.

On a personal note, I definitely prefer the wine flight to the sip and snack concept. This isn’t because the sip and snack places tended to be more expensive than the wine flights (which they usually are). I want to taste LOTS of wines. The sip and snack doesn’t facilitate that so well. My other moan of the week: The lack of the book. It was app based this year. The App wasn’t great. It was useful for finding nearby places when out and about. Neither it, nor the website, were anywhere near good enough for planning where to before hand. Looking at everything in an area on one page and going “Yes. Lets go there” was way easier than having to navigate the app and work out where was doing what.

Anyway. Back to the positive. The winners this year:

Chardonnay. I’m a massive chardonnay fan. I must write about it someday. A lot of people aren’t. I managed to persuade one of our drinking companions for the week of its brilliance.

Which brings me to… nicest wine of the week. It was a South African chardonnay called Jordan. We had it at High Timber restaurant. It was an amusing experience as the sommelier was confused that we wanted all nine wines between three of us to share. He came round to the idea very quickly when he saw us working our way through them though. They were all good, but the chardonnay was the star, both of the venue and the week.

Next up: Best wine dude. The wine dude at Riding House Cafe. Not because of the extra little taster of the other orange wine they did (although it helped). The enthusiasm for wine and talking about wine that led to that was great, in a week where a lot of people were less excited than they should be given wine week.

An honourable mention also has to made for Union Street Cafe. It was the only snack and sip we went to during the whole week, but it was a lovely venue. It also, despite my anti-S’n’S bias, came a close second for both best wine [another Chardonnay] and best wine dude.

I had a lot of fun trying many different wines this week. I also had a lot of fun Instagramming the week. I don’t think I’ve gotten Instagram right yet, but I enjoyed it, which is what really matters.