Students learn the wine basics in the Union

“Legs,” “marbles” and “genies in bottles”: Such is the parlance of the oenophile.

On… “Legs,” “marbles” and “genies in bottles”: Such is the parlance of the oenophile.

On Thursday night in the Lower Lounge of the William Pitt Union, Pitt Program Council helped to-nms turn 30 Pitt students into people who could use those terms seriously when talking about wine – not bodily appendages, a schoolyard pastime or Christina Aguilera songs.

PPC sponsored its annual wine tasting seminar featuring six different wines from different winemaking regions in Italy.

Before the budding wine lovers ever got to taste La Tunella Ribolla Gialla 2001, the first wine of the evening, representatives from Pitt’s Student Health Services gave a presentation about drinking responsibly, exhorting the attendees to take advantage of the spit buckets provided for them.

PPC advisor Tom Misuraca agreed, saying, “You don’t have to drink it all.”

This was both in keeping with responsible drinking and wine tasting tradition: Wine tasters traditionally drink only a tiny bit of each wine to get the full range of aromas and spit or pour out the rest in order to keep a clear head to be able to compare the many wines at the tasting.

Presiding over the tastings was Kevin Slane, head wine buyer for all the specialty wine shops in Pennsylvania west of State College. Resplendent in a blue turtleneck and khaki slacks, Slane poured six different vintages of varying ages and winemaking regions for the tasters, who sat at long tables and nibbled on crackers, slices of baguette, and pieces of melon, pineapple and strawberries with their wines.

Slane said La Tunella, the only white wine of the evening, was best tasted with piece of pineapple or a strawberry, which brought out the fruity aromas of the wine, which is from the northeastern part of Italy.

He used La Tunella to explain the concept of legs. When one swirls a wine around and watches the wine dribble back into the bottom of the glass, if the dribbles of wine run down the sides of the glass – the legs – the wine has a high sugar content, like a sauternes or an eiswein.

Of the tradition of swirling the wine around the glass, Slane said, “wine is like a genie – the swirling releases the aromas of the wine.”

But Slane was quick to tell the group that what they tasted is what was important: “You equate [wines] to what you know. I’d never tell a group what to smell.”

Veronica Parisi, a senior and wine amateur, said the white was her favorite, because “it was fragrant and it wasn’t very strong.”

After tasting the third wine of the evening, La Carraia Sangiovese 2001, a young wine that smelled like cherries and berries when swirled in the glass and was redolent of perfect blackberries in the mouth, Parisi said that though she usually drinks white wine, she figures she’ll probably like red wine better after the wine tasting since she knows more about red wines now.

Parisi appreciated the lecture as much as the wines, saying “I think [Slane] is covering a wide range of information about wines, everything from how they’re made to what to look for when you taste it.”