Introduction

My name is Courtney Duke, and I'm a Senior Communication major at Virginia Tech. After college, I want to be a journalist, a wife and mother, and a world traveller. Not necessarily in that order. My personal experience with wine is very limited, but that only makes my desire to learn about it even stronger. I come from a Irish and Italian family, with some catholicism thrown in the pot for flavor. The only thing those three really have in common is wine.

Ninety percent of all the wine I have had in my life so far consists of my underage self taking sips family members' glasses of whatever (they never bothered to tell me the specifics) or my underage self taking sips of the blood of Christ. Since I turned 21 in early November, I've had three glasses of wine: a Pinot Grigio from a box, an officially licensed "Hokie Red," and a mystery red that tasted like a leather shoe. Needless to say, I'm ready to expand my horizons.

I have no interest in being drunk. I do have an interest, however, in developing a palate and learning the language of wine connoisseurs. Basically, I want to have enough sophistication and knowledge to back myself up when I decide to go Chef Ramsay on the next unfortunate soul who hands me another bad wine.

The rest of this blog will be used to document my future attempts to familiarize myself with wine, with the added bonus of giving me a legitimate excuse to take more pictures of my food.

Cheers!

(Photo credit: Tomas Castelazo, Creative Commons)