Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

Learning how to taste wines is a straightforward adventure that will deepen your appreciation for both wines and winemakers. Look, smell, taste—starting with your basic senses and expanding from there you will learn how to taste wines like the pros in no time! Keep in mind that you can smell thousands of unique scents, but your taste perception is limited to salty, sweet, sour and bitter. It is the combination of smell and taste that allows you to discern flavor.

Okay, I would like to pretend that the paragraph above came from me, but unfortunately, I just picked it up from a website after googling some information on the basics of wine tasting. I wish I could say that I am that well versed about knowing wines, but I’m a just a writer.

I’ll leave Wine 101 to Tondi Navarette-Bolkan, as after meeting with her one rainy Sunday afternoon at GV Cellars in Green Valley, Fairfield, I realized that my knowledge about wine was limited to just taking a bottle and pouring it.

"I was taking up Neurobiology at UC Davis," Tondi explained and added, "I come from a family of doctors. But during my internship on my senior year, I saw a drop of blood and I almost fainted."

Quite honestly, that explained why she’s not made to be a doctor. But moving on to be a wine maker? Tondi said that after going to a career fair in UC Davis, she inquired about Vinology—and ten years after, she has never looked back.

Winemaking is a science, she said. So after her years in med school doing science projects, Tondi said, "I am now making my own science projects."

Those projects? Tondi Bolkan’s Merlot and quite amusingly, a Muscato labeled as Pinay.

Wine 101

Tondi does know about wine, I’d give you that. Making her wine at GV Cellars, owned by her good friend Salvador Galman, she admits that she only makes small batches.

"As a winemaker, I’d give out the directions on how I would want to make my wine," Tondi said and added, "In the ten years, I am fortunate to make a wide variety." She went on explaining the process—from picking the grapes, pressing, fermenting in cold tanks and aging.

"Wine making is labor and capital intensive," she said and explained further, "It takes four years from harvest to fermenting the wine in barrels, then another year to age it (in bottles). You won’t be able to sell it until after six years."

"It is challenging, because of the amount of time watching everything (the process)," she mused. Then Tondi went on to explain the chemistry behind it—from spoilage, and how microbes can turn your wine into vinegar, to monthly testing for ph levels. At this point, I got lost in wine translation.