Can you pass a blind tasting?
 Maison Moderne Studio

Can you pass a blind tasting?  Maison Moderne Studio

It’s no secret that life is too short to drink bad wine. And when you live in a wine-producing country, surrounded by other wine-producing nations, it would be bad manners not to raise a glass from time to time.

When the choices are so vast and plentiful the trouble is selecting the right bottle to pour from. Luckily, Luxembourg offers many places to discover wine year round, outside the traditional celebrations of grapes in autumn and of wine in spring (no one in the Grand Duchy ever misses an occasion to celebrate “bottled poetry”!).

One of the easiest and also safest ways to start out is locally with the “wine tasting with friends” formula.

Log on to www.winetasting.lu and you’ll find a list of around 30 Luxembourg winegrowers who will open their doors and invite you in for a tasting of the national treasures. They are also all partners with transport firm Emile Weber which means you can book a minibus (minimum eight people) to bring you home if you’ve done too much “tasting”.

You can read up on Luxembourg wine and grapes beforehand on www.vins-cremants.lu, which offers a complete and easy-to-access guide.

For an in-depth view of Luxembourg production and its history, visit the Musée du vin in Ehnen--just be sure to plan your tour on a day where there’s also a tasting!

There’s no denying the hypermarkets in both the Grand Duchy and across the borders are well endowed with wine and a favourite place for wine-lovers to shop, even the most expert of them. These stores also hold regular wine “festivals”, with tastings and good deals, most of which are advertised well in advance on their websites.

In the Belle Étoile shopping centre in Bertrange you’ll even find a wine club. Members get invited to tastings, wine discovery trips, wine dinners and, of course, get offers on good deals regularly.

The club also has its own wine school, with lessons available both for beginners and advanced connoisseurs (in French).

In fact, you’ll find that many of the smaller wine shops in Luxembourg also organise wine tasting sessions regularly as well as lessons (in English too).

Attending these will make a big difference in how you enjoy and choose your wine in the future (for once you’ll be swinging around your glass and sniffing it knowingly).

The best thing is to enter every wine place you come across and sign up for their newsletters. You’ll then get notice of all the activities they hold and can spend the winter in a warm place no matter the weather.

As Galileo Galilei said: “Wine is sunlight, held together by water.”