“The varietal is not the star here.” That’s the biggest lesson coming out of the Uncorked Kitchen & Wine Bar’s wine tasting class “Wines of Spain & Portugal.” For many wine drinkers, particularly beginners just learning their way around, recognizing the kind of grape used in making wine tends to be the first focus

Wine appreciation is one of those skills that seems almost out of reach to the uninitiated or uneducated. Watching a master sommelier take a sip of wine and immediately ID the exact type, region, and year seems like magic to those of us who take a sip and think it just “tastes like wine.” But after many years of enjoying wine without much thought into what I liked or why, I decided to make an effort to learn about wine properly. Not to nail a blind tasting, but to just gain a better understandi