WINE-TASTING: Love of grapes parlayed into one juicy job
Donna Nebenzahl
Province
Sandi Marques demonstrates her wine-tasting technique. — CANWEST NEWS SERVICE/MONTREAL GAZETTE
MONTREAL — How does one turn a passion into a thriving business? In the case of Sandi Marques, one glass of wine at a time.
The 33-year-old sommelier and wine educator started her business two years ago in Ontario — after 14 years working in restaurants and hotels. Six months later, she moved to Quebec with her husband, a sales trainer for Novartis.
It seemed the right fit for a woman whose strongest childhood memories involve crates of grapes being delivered each year to her Portuguese household in Cambridge, Ont., where her dad made wine.
Marques chooses a glass of Quinta do Portal 1999 from the Doro region of Portugal.
She holds the glass at a 45-degree angle.
“Look,” she says intensely. “Look at the colour at the rim and the centre, the core. There’s a slight hint of brown/yellow tinge at the rim, because of contact with the barrel.”
Then she takes the glass by the stem — “this is how we find its legs” — and swirls it enthusiastically. Clear streams of
glycerine wash down the sides, and, depending on its age and quality, the streams will be thicker or thinner to denote alcohol content. She’s spot on at 14-per-cent alcohol.
“First you look, then swirl and finally you smell,” she says.
Smell is the most important sense for the wine-taster, whose abilities are so refined, she’s able to use words like vegetal, earthy, dark plum, black pepper or
coffee to describe a particular aroma in the wine. All that takes is practice, Marques says.
“The best way to get the vocabulary for wine is to smell things. Smell pepper, melon, canned and then fresh peaches,” she says. “Pay attention to smell and you’ll see that you can apply that to a glass of wine.
“Most people, when they start appreciating wine, use generic words like fruity or woody. What gets you to become a better taster is the nose. And research suggests that women have better noses than men.”
The last thing is taste, the last of Marques’s three Ss: sight, smell, savour.
To taste, first the sip of wine is swished all around so it makes contact with all parts of the mouth. “Like you’re gargling,” she says. “Then take in a little air, to help the olfactory meet the tongue.”
She swallows. “Nice wine, medium-bodied, good level of acidity. The wood barrels have infused into the wine, and it has a medium finish [finish being how long the flavour lingers].”
This wine, she decides, would be lovely with the tiered duck and potatoes with apple being served as a first course at her Flavours of Portugal wine tasting next week.
It’s another element of her quietly growing business, Cork and Karma: the occasional dinner with wine — in this case, a three-course gourmet meal paired with four wine tastings — she plans to hold.
Marques, mother of two small children, has been well schooled in both food and wine, with a commerce degree in hospitality and tourism management from Ryerson University, a culinary diploma from George Brown College and her sommelier’s licence from the International Sommelier Guild.
She named the company, she says, after the cork trees in Portugal.
“And I added the karma because I believe that the reason we’re here is to give back.”
Her dreams of wine are bigger than a business that now includes a 200-member wine club, wine tastings and seminars, a wine-cellar subscription service that offers would-be collectors advice on stocking their cellars and a newsletter.
She is in the growing stage of her business, pouring all her revenue back into the company.
“Growing a business takes time,” says Marques.
© The Vancouver Province 2005