Hola!

Today I signed up to start taking Spanish classes, I should have taken a second language back at Yorktown High School. But who knew that I would need to ever speak anything besides English? I love Spanish wines and cava and I want to know more about all the latin countries plus, I love to travel but I have a real reason to learn Spanish.

Last year, I was reading about a contest in the Wine Enthusiast by Lapostolle Wines. It was called Uncork Your Passion, I thought it was interesting so I signed up. Then I had to tweet why I would be a great apprentice winemaker and get friends to “RT” (retweet my message). The winner would be decided by the amount of folks who “liked” your tweet and then the judges would then define who had the best content. I wrote several tweets and the great friends I have on Twitter and Facebook thought I was a good fit and they really rallied together and I was selected the Grand Prize Winner! I am thrilled!

Lapostolle Wines are a 180,000 case a year production winery of high quality wines located in the Colohagua Valley area of Chile. I will be there for weeks and besides working with the harvest team and their winemaker Andrea Leon. I will get to take cooking classes, visit surrounding wineries and anything else the country of Chile has to offer. Lapostolle is owned by the Marnier corporation, they make fine spirits like Grand Marnier liquor. ( I love it after dinner).

I want to understand what is being said and I want to add to the conversations. Talk about teaching an old dog new tricks but I am up for the challenge. I used Rosetta Stone to try to learn French for my trip to Rhone, France. It was helpful and while I was around those speaking French, I could figure out what was being said. But I have a thick southern accent and I only hear out of one ear so when I listen to the voices on the system, many times I did not always hear the nuances of the french accent and so I hope when I was in France I did not sound like Paula Dean. But if I did, I am sure the French folks had a good laugh and that makes me giggle to think I made their day.

So to learn Spanish I am going to take a new approach. I am going to class 2 nights a week 3 hours each night and then 2 nights a week, I get to be with a tutor and he will not allow me to speak English. We will go to only Spanish speaking places to dine and he has found several wine bars that have Spanish speaking bartenders. I am thinking I might have a good chance to at least be conversational by mid March. I will keep you posted on how the Spanish lessons are going.

So for right now I can say this…..Hasta luego Salud!