Hey Everyone!

You know how we’ve been chatting about our Sherry experience in Jerez, spending 3 days completely immersed in information about Fino, Manzanilla, Amontillado and Oloroso? Well, guess what? We, evidently, weren’t there!

I assume that you’re scratching your head right now saying, “Uh, Gabriella, I’m a little confused. You’re saying that the articles you’ve been writing over the past two weeks have been fabricated? Phony? Fictitious!?” In theory, I am, because according to Wines of Spain, a government funded organization to promote Spanish wine, we never spent any time in Jerez.

“Russian, Hungarian and Japanese sommeliers graduate in Jerez”, reads the Wines of Spain headline.

According to their article, there were no Americans present at the seminar, nor were there French, German, Dutch, British, Irish, Danish or Spanish either. Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you want to promote the amount of cultural diversity represented at the event, specially, considering that there were only 23 attendees covering 12 different countries? The numbers alone are astounding! We had the rare opportunity to share our combined knowledge with wine professionals from all over the world gathered together for one united goal: to promote sherry internationally. This is interesting. This is newsworthy. This is what Wines of Spain should be covering, but ironically, we were never there.

But the tale continues as Wines of Spain reports that only sommeliers were present at the seminar, another major editorial error. In truth, there were also microbiologists, wine teachers, retailers, writers, reporters and winemakers as well. I might emphasize that limiting your breadth of factual information is rather like shooting yourself in the foot, because although Wines of Spain is correct in saying that there were sommeliers, the highlight was that we also encompassed a wide range of knowledge and expertise.

Finally, and the tip of the iceberg, the picture they’ve provided in the article with the caption, “graduating class”, is not our class. If you take even a cursory look at the picture, you’ll notice one key point, we’re not in it. We’re nowhere to be found, nor are the other 21 participants who took their time and resources to get on a plane and travel up to 15 hours to Jerez. One might think you’d at least get the photo accurate.

Well, there you go! While the premier resource for Spanish wine has slacked in their fact finding mission, we’d love to offer our photos, our website we build specifically based on our experience, or our series of articles we’ve written on the event!