Pulp Wines: Home Wine Tasting Subscription
Keep reading for a 50% off voucher code further down the post…
The concept is very simple. Once you have signed up to the website, you will eventually get a little rap at the door, and a delivery guy will drop off four half bottles of wine. When you’re ready for your tasting, you log on to the Pulp Wines* website and access your lesson, where you will compare two wines at a time. Tasting two wines together is a really excellent way to help you understand the differences in grapes, styles, colours and flavours.
As you can imagine, The Boy and I were very excited to receive our wines and get tasting. Sadly, this took longer than anticipated as they use Yodel for delivery and so our first parcel was apparently damaged in transit and the second took several days longer, despite Pulp using a 24 hour delivery service. Naturally that’s no reflection on Pulp Wines’ service at all – although if I were them I’d consider changing carrier!!
Glasses at the ready, white wines chilled and we were off. We started with the whites and opened our lesson. This was the Grape Fundamentals introduction, comparing four of the most popular grape varieties in the UK. The first thing I noticed is that the website is optimised for mobile and looked terrible on my laptop. So I shut my laptop and moved over to the phone. There was still a bit of hyphenated text squeezed in there which annoyed me a little, but that’s probably because I’m so picky about website layout and isn’t a concern for the normal person who is less retentive than me!
The lesson is very simple- its a great introduction for those who would like to know a little more about wine without tonnes and tonnes of detail. They give you a little sentence or two on the grape and where it comes from, and then encourages you to look out for key features within the colour, aroma and taste.
Well, at this point I could tell you about the wines, but I think that would rather steal their thunder. We tried a Pinot Grigio against a Sauvignon Blanc from the same winery, and a Cabernet Sauvignon against a Syrah which were from different wineries. If you want to know my opinion, then track me down on Vivino – the rating system on the Pulp Wines website only gives you a smiley face rating system so I put a couple of quick notes on my Vivino account as an aide memoire.
I’ll be honest and say that I thought the white wines were the weaker of the set – if I was choosing wines that really typified what to expect from those specific grapes I would have perhaps chosen others. They were a little light on the nose and some of the key points to look out for in the lesson were a little bit masked, even when we’d left the wines to open up in ambient temperatures for a little while in case they were too cold.
The red wines were much stronger and the notes in the lesson were really easy to apply. The half bottle serves are really, really generous between two – you could definitely have 3 or 4 people there to enjoy the experience – we still have some wine left over to finish tonight!
I did think that the lesson had some room for improvement. I was expecting a little more detail, although perhaps for complete beginners it is just the right amount. I would be interested to try one of the more advanced pairing lessons to see the amount of information that is included. I also thought that the lesson could be broken down a little more, to encourage you to try and discuss the colour, aroma and flavours you could identify before giving you the ‘answers’, although even though it is right in front of you all the way through we still found plenty to discuss between ourselves. Perhaps some more encouragement of areas to discuss and question would be a nice addition, and maybe a short introduction to things like aroma wheels to give tasters an idea of the variety that is out there would be helpful for the beginner.
Just follow my link – this one* – and at the checkout put in the code LAURA50. I haven’t been given an expiration date on the code, so I presume there will at least be a few months on it for you guys to try it out. And come back and let me know how you enjoyed your Pulp Wines experience in the comments below!
* Disclaimer – the link is an affiliate link from Pulp Wines which tracks the traffic this blog post sends to the site. If you subscribe having used this (and the discount code!) then I get a little financial reward. I was also paid £20 to write this post. However, I have not been told what to write and my opinions are my honest assessment of the service provided.
