Our monthly meetings are
held the 3rd Sunday of every month at 7:30 pm GMT.
Current download
available
here!
The Virtual Wine Circle is
an online-wine circle which meets one a month
using a
chatroom available through the
winesathome forum (you must be a member of
winesathome to join). In summary, we provide the
Virtual Wine Circle members with exactly what one
finds at a “real” Wine Circle: Talks on different
aspects of winemaking (with the use of our own
youtube videos) with a following question and answer
session, wine tasting (a low-cost wine which is
available at any grocery store in the UK), questions
and answer sessions about difficult ferments or
fermenting in general, wine swaps and even some
organization of grape pressings (once a year with
imported grapes, otherwise known as
GrapeFest).
We extend a warm welcome to anyone who wants to
join, and encourage you to do so if you are just
starting to make wine, have been making wine for a
while and would like to improve your skills, or even
if you're already a member of a local wine circle:
please feel free to use our discussions and youtube
videos to make your "real" wine circle even better!
Our youtube videos can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=virtual+wine+circle&aq=f
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The venue at The Spa
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
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Our Competitions
For
more information
about the current competition, click
here.
In August of 2009 we
organised our premier “Virtual Wine
Circle Competition.” This was an open
show, no one had to be a member of the
circle, no one had to worry about wine
snobs looking down on their wines, no
sending of heavy, 750 ml glass bottles
that may break in the post and no
personal drop-off was required.
What we did was the following: We went
straight back to the basics, keeping
only a few aspects of current UK
wine-show rules in ours. Our motto was
“Anything Goes!” Since our wine circle
is a virtual one, we did not expect our
members to come to the competition. We
offered 250 ml PET bottles with purple,
plastic tops at cost, the entrant could
enter in as many bottles as he/she
liked. No costly shipping or fuel
charges, and smaller, newer homebrewers
had the chance to enter small amounts of
their wines, without making a huge dent
in their cellars. Labels were provided
free of charge.
Furthermore, we decided to employ the
UCDavis System to our judging, i.e.
judging the wine against itself – a
radical difference to conventional
standards in the British home winemaking
competition world. We used UK National
Judges who were trained to use the
UCDavis System. Each entrant received
comments free of charge posted back by
mail, but the wines were not returned.
We felt this was a
huge success, as did the Yorkshire
Federation of Amateur Wine and
Beermakers (www.yfawb.co.uk).
We have now our own Section at their
annual meeting and competition held at
the Spa Complex in Scarborough in June
of 2010 .
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