Hi y'all! My name is Nora - and I'm from Chicago. My goal with wine right now is to taste and start to memorize more of the old world regions - so I can stop googling every time I walk into a wine shop. 😅 *searches "typical wine grape from Minervois"...* My death row meal is three courses because decisions are hard - - 1st course - shaken margarita (no salt) + table-side guacamole - 2nd course - old fashioned + crispy fried cheese curds dipped in ranch - 3rd course - Burgundy Pinot Noir + wood fired Margherita Pizza Looking forward to learning with y'all!

Hey ya’ll, headed to Milwaukee the weekend of 6/23 for husband’s bday. Any food/bev recs would be greatly appreciated, especially for Sunday since lots of places are closed. Open to all food, but think more cocktail/beer for bevs since he’s not super into wine (unfortunately). Thanks in advance!

I went to an Austrian wine tasting a few days ago hosted by Skurnik (one of my favorite importers and can be found on the IMporter PDF in Module 1!) and was blown away by the selections and quality of the wines. I've always been a fan of German wines and I felt like Austrian wines were a bit more of the same without being too different. Although they do share a lot of grapes and climates, I found myself loving the St. Laurent (a classic grape for Austria, somewhere in between a Pinot Noir and Syrah in flavor and body) from Familie Reinisch and the sweeter Rieslings from Schloss Lieser. What sort of questions did I ask the producers? I'm particularly interested in climate change in these colder regions and asked questions about how they're handling the warmer and more unpredictable weather patterns. In short, lots of people just do more work: harvesting grapes over a few months as opposed to all in one go, which means more aggressively checking brix levels (brix determines the sugar content in grapes and therefore helps determine picking the grapes) and praying there's so insane weather. More producers are simply losing more grapes, which they don't have a clever answer to it right now. Let me know what you've been drinking lately! I see some people sharing already and racking up points for the leaderboard (@Leah Poulliot coming in hot!!). I'll see y'all in the Q&A today!