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The Wine and Culinary Center

We wnet to the Wine and Culinary Center in Canandaigua this afternoon, and the facility is an impressive one. I wish we’d been there for one of the cooking lessons, because there’s a “lab,” for lack of a better word with about $40 grand worth of cooking equipment in it. Each range is a nice, fancy stainless number with probably 15,000 btus combined heating power. Every table top is dark marble. Each station has an LCD, for video or Internet, I’m not sure. Overall, the place is just beautiful.

But you gotta pay for that somehow, and disappointingly, the way they do it seems to be cheaping out on their wine tastings. The way they organize their tastings is inventive: they’re bought in packages of three to five selections that center around a theme. This makes tasting the wine in contrast an interesting and informative process. But the problem is that they call these tastings “flights.”

Now, where I live, “flights” mean something. They’re generally beer flights and the phrase has replaced the old term, “colts.” That means they’re a fairly decent amount of beer, maybe a third of a normal 16 ounce bottle, 7 ounces or so. But in this case, the WCC’s version of “flights” barely wet the wine glasses they’re poured into, and they’re not huge glasses.

Considering the fact that we could have gone to any number of actual wineries and tasted way more wine for free, this seems like kind of a rip. Perhaps one good change might have been to rename the “flights” to something else. But either way, the tastings were way too small to be a justifiable tasting, because a single taste doesn’t inform you palate enough, in my opinion.

By Tommy Belknap

Owner, developer, editor of DragonFlyEye.Net, Tom Belknap is also a freelance journalist for The 585 lifestyle magazine. He lives in the Rochester area with his wife and son.