It’s not too early to plan for the 2010 holiday season. At least that’s what D.C.-area entrepreneur Heidi McLain thinks. She is preparing to offer something you could put under the tree next year. But you also might use it before then to prepare for next year’s holiday parties.
McLain plans to launch--and is currently seeking financing for--the To Your Taste! Wine Party Kit. This wine game takes a new approach to wine appreciation: it teaches players about bad wine! This may sound odd, but many wine consumers cannot recognize defects in wines that warrant returning wines to retailers, such as taint related to the chemical TCA.
Such fault identification is a critically important skill. After all, do you really want to serve guests a wine that has gone bad? And this skill is ignored by other wine education products. Even some wine educators have problems identifying faults!
McLain developed her game concept while working as sales representative at Corridor Wine, one of Maryland’s largest wine retailers. Her clientele found her “staff picks” reliably delicious, but periodically, a client would express disappointment. After some probing, however, McLain discovered that defective bottles were usually the problem. A member of the Society of Wine Educators, McLain then found herself educating shoppers on wine defects, preventing them from dismissing great wines because a single bottle was “off.”
To Your Taste! makes that expertise available to a broader audience—anyone who eventually gets the game. And McLain’s other goal is to ensure that players have fun. To Your Taste! uses a unique scrapbook approach with detailed directions on how to taste and blank pages for host and guest notes.
To Your Taste! offers three games that focus on evaluating and enjoying wine rather than memorizing terms or trivia. The fault game includes an aroma kit that enables users to recognize odors related to defects that include things like "cauliflower," "barnyard," or "glue."
Game two teaches players how to rate wines like the experts do. McLain explains that if consumers understood what goes into ratings, they might be able to understand the limitations and learn to evaluate better themselves.
The third game is the lingo game. Here’s where wine drinkers might get silly by the end of the evening. In this game, hosts and guests learn how to write short wine reviews/descriptions. The goal is make players laugh and no longer take wine descriptions so seriously.
The kit also includes some other accessories such as wine glass holders that clip to plates to facilitate reception style parties. Instructions are kept simple; and a DVD helps make that process even easier.
You can learn more and keep up to date on the product release by becoming a fan of To Your Taste! on Facebook and by checking out the website.
When asked about her favorite wine, McLain told the D.C. Wine Shopping Examiner that she likes them all and rarely buys the same wine twice. For her, wine is always an adventure to taste and learn. Hopefully, her game will help others do the same.
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