Follow your nose: Regina woman leads unpretentious wine tasting class

Valerie Bradshaw is a whisky-loving, cigar-smoking wine connoisseur who has been sharing her love of life's finer things for years.

Later this month, Bradshaw will be teaching a class on Argentinean wine at Regina's Lifelong Learning Centre. Bradshaw didn't really get into serious wine tasting until she was in her 40s. As she did so, she realized there was something about the sensory experience that led her there.

She recalled how the flavour of one wine made an impression.

"When I smelled the violets from that wine I immediately went back to my childhood," she told CBC Radio's Saskatchewan Weekend. "That's how I knew that I had been carrying this love of aroma and the love of the sensory since I was a child."

It's also something Bradshaw believes most people don't utilize.

For drinking wine, go ahead and have the biggest glass you want.- Valerie Bradshaw

"We tend to forget about using our noses to sniff things ... and wine manages to bring that to the forefront because most of what we taste comes through what we smell," she said. "Wine lets us make that link. It's that perfect bridge between aroma and flavour."

Bradshaw isn't a so-called wine snob.

"When people are drinking in wine, they're drinking that wine because they enjoy it," she said. "It's not up to us to make the decision on whether it's good wine or not if we're just in a social environment."

She said there is a spirit of adventure to wine tasting, but it doesn't have to be pretentious.

"When you're going through tastings, there are the steps that we take that kind of look pretentious, but only if people want to think of them as pretentious. They're actually a ton of fun."

Bradshaw's Argentina Wine Appreciation class runs every Wednesday at 7 p.m. from May 25 to June 8. There is room for 20 participants and the course fee is $130. All the wine and snacks are provided.

People who take part in the course are expected to purchase ISO standard wine glasses, so they can properly practice wine tasting.

"[Such glasses are] not for drinking wine," she noted. "For drinking wine, go ahead and have the biggest glass you want."