December 2006 Activity -- Champagne Tasting

Sunday, December 17, 2006

7:00-8:30pm

Best Cellars Clarendon

Arlington, VA

Cost: $22

What a fitting way to end the dilettante year -- a champagne tasting that combines our loves of dilettante activities and boozin' it up.

We began the evening with tapas at Las Tasca in Clarendon. We reminisced about the year as dilettantes, talked about what activities we could plan in 2007 and generally just discussed why we are so much fun. Amanda then presented each of us with a fabulous dilettante gift -- Dilettante brand chocolates, a silver "D" ornament and customized postage stamps with a picture of one of our dilettante activities. Of course, her packages were wrapped beautifully and the bows had tons of "oomphy poomphy."

After dinner, we walked up the street to Best Cellars for the sparkling wine tasting. We immediately noticed some scha-weet looking gift bags on the counter and assumed they would be ours at the end of the evening. This was looking promising. When the tasting started and we saw that there would be a total of seven samples from many different price ranges, it also looked promising. Then, we received our glasses and our first (very generous) sample and knew we'd made a nice choice on this activity. In addition to very generous samples, there was cheese, crackers and olives to munch on and pitchers of water available to cleanse palates.

Because wine descriptions are hilarious, we selected some of our favorites from the sheet that was provided. To wit:

• gossamer soft and a whisper on the riotous side of sweet
• a superb gift for anyone who appreciates pink-pleasure in their mouth (go ahead...insert your own husband's name here, as we all did)
• boasts a rare level of refinement and powerful finesse
• want to garner red carpet-worthy attention at your next party? pop the top of this fun, flirtatious fizzy and we guarantee you'll be the center of attention (ridiculous, right? guess which bottle every last dilettante bought? This one, a Fox Creek Vixen Sparkling Shiraz)
• a darker note of ripe red fruit bringing up the rear

The woman providing the commentary for the tasting knew her stuff and had lots of good information. We tasted some really interesting sparkling wines...including one that went well with "small nuts and salty things" (sheesh...they make this so easy for us).

The only downside of the evening occurred when Amanda sneezed and a woman next to her moved about four feet away from her as though she were Typhoid Mandy. Amanda was all like, "oh no she di-int" and we were all like, "oh yes she did" and then we decided that we'd be mature and just lick her gift bag before handing it to her.

Gift bags included mulling spices, a big jar of raspberry caramel sauce, chocolates, wine biscuits and a coupon for $5 off a purchase at that Best Cellars, which each of us used for the Vixen wine.

And so a bunch of happy dilettantes went on their way.