May 23, 2026 · Red Wine Exploration Board No. 01
Château Giscours Vertical
Four vintages — 2015 through 2018 — around one table, with dinner built to give the wines enough time and space to change.
The idea
This evening became the first prototype for what Wine With Pete now calls the Red Wine Exploration Board: a repeatable gathering format built around comparative tasting, shared observation, food, and conversation.
A vertical tasting can become technical very quickly. The point of this table was different: let four vintages of the same wine become a shared object of attention, then let the evening unfold around them.
The bottles gave everyone something concrete to notice together — age, structure, fruit, texture, preference, surprise — without turning dinner into a classroom.
The menu
What stayed with me
The wine worked best when it stopped being the subject of the evening and became part of the table's rhythm.
That became the lesson worth repeating. The Exploration Board can provide enough structure to help people notice together without turning the table into a class. The archive will eventually hold the full photo sequence and printed tasting material from this evening; for now, this note preserves the first version of the format.
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