City Wine Tours Delights (plus, a special treat for my readers!)

I could probably create a whole blog post with pictures of me drinking wine, sangria and other girly concoctions around the world, but I thought I’d start with this one–in Portland, Maine this summer to set the tone. Ahhh…set.

I’m admittedly not a huge wine connoisseur, more of a wine bandwagon kind of girl! I go into wine shops or restaurants, and quickly search for the cheapest wine on the menu, typically the one that sounds most familiar, and go for it. Rather then explore and give my taste buds a peek at something new, I shy away from the culture around wine it seems so foreign to me…so intimidating. But, it’s really a lot more tangible than it looks, and it’s right in our backyards.

Enter: City Wine Tours! You don’t have to head to Tuscany to get a educated about wine. There are fun, easy and intimate wine tours, right in Beautiful Boston. City Wine Tours reached out to me to go on one of their weekend tours, and I was so excited. Wine, Boston, Tour, Food, Wine…really they had me at wine. 

My bestie Emily, sampling some champagne!

I took the South End wine tour because it’s the one neighborhood in Boston I hardly ever get to explore. I know there’s an up-and-coming restaurant scene there too, so I thought it was the perfect choice. City Wine Tours also offer wine tours in the North End, Back Bay and Harvard Square. The neat thing about this company is that they partner with local, delicious restaurants–many of which I’ve heard of but have never gotten the chance to try. During the tour, a small group of 10 or less move around to a few different restaurants to guzzle taste test wine and snack on a sampling of their signature dishes. I brought my bestie Emily along for the sipping (pictured above).

And…there was wine. Lots of it. You test up to six different wines throughout the tour, which equals out to 2-4 glasses of wine. It may at first sound light in the span of a few hours, but it’s not. Let’s just say we felt good!

We started at Gaslight du Coin, then moved to Cinquecento, then over to Masa. Along the way, our tour leader gave me some great tips. Here are some useful wine fun facts I picked up:

• Never order the cheapest or second cheapest wine on a menu. Typically they mark this wine up by 200 to 300%.
• Go for Spanish wines: Argentina, Chile–they have great prices and aren’t marked up so high.
• The best place to get wines in Boston: The Wine Botega in the North End.
• Torrentes is a “Sexy grape” that comes from Argentina, in the Vitner province.
• “Cheap bubbles are fun” – our wine tour guide, Melanie.
• Cupcake Red is delicious. (The name just speaks to me!).
• The more specific you get on a label, the more expensive that bottle will be.
• For cheaper wines, look for broader labels such as “California Wine.”

All in all, City Wine Tours was a fun and unique weekend activity, plus a great chance to explore a new neighborhood in Boston. It’s a perfect idea for a date, birthday party or girls day out. And really, who doesn’t love wine?

And now for the fun part! 

I Love Love Readers can take advantage of an exclusive offer to receive 15% off any City Wine Tour in Boston, using discount code, “CityWineLove”.

About City Wine Tours:

City Wine Tours hosts weekend wine tasting tours in several Boston neighborhoods, plans corporate and private events, and encourages learned debauchery. Visit us on: www.citywinetours.com, Facebook or Twitter.

Disclosure: I was provided with two complimentary tickets from City Wine Tours for review purposes. All opinions are honest and my own.