Wine tasting party for the local village

Winetasting party? Well, "wine tasting riot " would be a fairer description.

A friend of ours organises local events and for many years now we have wanted to something for the local community. So the other weekend we held a wine-tasting lunch / seminar for about 30 of the local people.

I chose 6 wines, 3 whites and 3 reds from 4 countries to taste, buying all of them at local supermarkets. All supermarkets and indeed most convenience stores sell alcohol in  Japan. The average price per bottle was about $10. This was done on purpose as perfectly good wine is available at this price here and I wanted people to be able to easily find again anything they liked.

Wine is still viewed as something rather special here. It what you drink if you go to a fancy French or Italian restaurant and is not a part of everyday life as it is in Australia.

So wine consumption per capita is comparatively low in Japan, about 2/l per person per year. The figure for Australia is about 22 liters.

The wines were carefully tasted one by one for about an hour then we had a large lunch

Members  of the local band were there and after lunch I was drafted to play keyboard with them. So we played music for about 4 hours, so enjoyable.

Songs  I knew or had heard once or twice before we fairly easy to play. The problem, and of course the fun, came with the other songs I had never heard before.  They would throw the sheet music to me and say, "Page 47!" . you can see me squinting at it all in these photos.






Japanese popular songs tend to weave around a lot more than Western ones. You get quite a few key changes to and from  odd places and indeed quite often the Eastern pentatonic scale is used. Also of course the lyrics are written in Japanese making them at times difficult to follow along to,.. to say the least.

A challenge, but terrific fun.