Last Updated on July 7, 2025
Home schooling with The Wine List – a wine box with a difference!
If you’ve always fancied a wine tasting course, but were afraid that you’d find yourself out of your depth amongst a vat full of cognoscenti. Or if you like a drop of the old vino but, like many, are too bemused by the plethora of terms applied to move out of the comfort zone of your trusty tipple. Help is at hand with a teach yourself kit, a “beginners guide” to wine. This is definitely our kind of home schooling!
The Wine List is a new, fun way to discover wine varieties and educate yourself in the fundamental principles of winemaking. Established by a team on a mission to empower drinkers to feel more confident with their wine choices, The Wine List has broken down the wine production process into bite-size (or rather, slurp-size) modules designed to take you on a sensory journey. Through a better understanding of the steps and elements involved in creating the wine, subscribers following “The Wine Roots” course, having been guided from smell and taste through to grape varieties, will learn how to anticipate what a wine should taste like.
Each month subscribers receive, direct to their door, two bottles of wine (a white and a red) chosen to illustrate certain characteristics. The accompanying learning materials guide you through the tasting and identification of the elements involved. The language is straightforward, the content is interesting and the suggestions for further tasting (“if you liked this, try that”) is very encouraging.
I sampled module 3, “Vessels”, which explained the impact on the finished wine of each storage method. (I have since managed to drop my new-found intelligence into a broad range of not-necessarily wine-related conversations!). The featured wines, a light Argentinian red, Cara Sucia, and a Massaya White from the Lebanon, were new to me and I thoroughly enjoyed paring suitable accompanying dishes, as recommended on the course notes, for a tasting and meal with my family. The idea is that your knowledge and confidence will grow, as you experience new wines each month so that after a period of time, 6-12 months, the restaurant wine list will hold no secrets from you.
At £39.00 per month, subscription to The Wine List is fully flexible – there’s no minimum contracts, and you can cancel or skip deliveries at any time. It’s an enjoyable way to expand your knowledge of wine in your own home and would make a great agenda for a socially-distanced online gathering with friends.
For more information visit www.thewinelist.net
My father told me that if with a wine snob, you should taste the wine, then say “Ah yes, south-facing slopes”, which apparently gets them every time as they realise you are making fun of their pomposity.