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First Time Wine Tasting? Try a Wine Festival

From my first time experience at wine tasting I have some good advice. Don’t drink everything you are given. True, the tasting amounts are small, but tasting dozens and dozens of wines can add up. Especially if you are wine tasting for a few hours.

I went to a Fredericksburg wine tasting festival this weekend (10/7/07) and there were 10 or so wineries represented. Each winery had about 10 - 20 wines each so there was a lot to taste. It pays to pace yourself and understand you are going to be sipping a lot of wines and you want to taste from each winery. Here is some good advice, once you find out what you don’t like, as in Chardonnay, then don’t keep tasting it at other booths. After the fourth Chardonnay I realized I don’t like them, no matter what winery is producing them. Luckily it only took 3 tastings to firmly convince myself I don’t like Merlot either. Halfway through I quit tastings red wines altogether. I don’t like them without food and it was giving me a bad impression so that I was afraid I was going to convince myself I don’t like red wine at all.

So I stayed to tasting just the blended wines and the white wines and was very happy with my choices.

Since this was my first time and I know nothing about wines I used it as an experience to discover what I do like. I marked down all the wines that I liked, regardless of price (the average price was about $15 per bottle). At the end of the day I have discovered 4 wines I really liked and about 3 more that could grow on me. I found I don’t like dry wines as much and I really like blended wines, which I wasn’t familiar with before I went.

Wines I bought and the wineries:

• Mandolin - Doukenie Winery
• Lake Side White - Lake Anna Winery
• DeWeese White - Hartwood Winery
• Peach Fuzz - Burnley Vineyard

I also thought it was good that I went to a festival so I could try many winery offerings. There was one winery there that I didn’t like any of the wines from, including their white wines. What a disappointment that would have been to visit that winery and not like anything I tasted. So first a first try at wine tasting a wine festival is a great way to go.

Additionally at a wine tasting festival, you can cover more ground so to speak and tasted more wine in a short amount of time. Walking to the next tent takes one minute, while driving between wineries can talk 30 minutes or more.

I did buy quite a few wines while there, including some red which my wife liked especially. See the picture and let me know if you see any you recognize. This festival was in Fredericksburg, Va and the wines were all Virginia wines.

Posted in Food Experiences, Hobby Experiences | 5 Comments »

iMovie Settings for Upload to YouTube

If this iMovie tutorial still doesn’t help, I can recommend ScreenCastsOnline. They have excellent tutorials for all your Mac products: iMovie, iPod, iPhone and so forth.

From my experience posting your iMovie video to YouTube requires the following settings to get the best quality you can. You want to send YouTube the highest quality you can while still staying within their video and audio limitations.

Of course the settings I’m providing can be used with any video editing application, but since iMovie is used by so many novice videographers I felt some specific instructions would be useful. If you aren’t using iMovie 6 for this, be sure that your application can export to a .mp4 with H.264 video. Quicktime Player Pro version can also do this.

Since YouTube upload limitations will scale the video to 320 x 240 pixels there is no point to export it at a larger size. Better to apply higher quality settings to your file size limit, which is 100 megabytes set by Youtube.

I am assuming your video has been edited and is ready for export. Follow these steps to have a video that you can upload with confidence to YouTube.

Choosing the best settings for iMovie when exporting for YouTube:

1. Under the main menu click the Share menu option.
2. Choose the Share option at the bottom of the drop down menu.
3. The next window will allow you select from a popup menu. It is labeled “Compress movie for:”. You will chose Expert Settings. Click the share Share button in the bottom right. (see image #1)
4. The next window will allow you to choose where to save the video and what to name it. At the bottom of the window you will see a popup menu labeled Export. Choose the “Movie to MPEG-4″ option.
5. Click the Options… button to the right to choose specific video and audio settings.
6. In this window choose the following setting under the video choices. (see image #2)
   • Video Format: H.264
   • Data Rate: 2000 kbits/sec
   • Optimized for: Download
   • Image Size: 320 x 240 QVGA
   • Check Preserve aspect ration using: Fit within size
   • Frame Rate: 30
   • Key Frame: Automatic
   • Click the Video Options… button and then select the Main checkbox and the Best Quality radio button. Click OK.
7. Next choose the following Audio Settings:
   • Audio Format AAC-LC
   • Data Rate: 64kbs
   • Channels: Mono
   • Output Sample Rate: Recommended
   • Encoding Quality: Best
8. Click the OK button and in the next window click the Save button and wait for your high quality video to export.

You can see the latest video I have posted using these settings by viewing my family’s Zip Line in Hawaii.

If you need more help and you like the video instruction method. I can safely recommend ScreenCastsOnline.

Posted in Hobby Experiences, Internet Experiences | 12 Comments »