Students organize wine tasting 'class'

They were pretending to be cultured.

Grasping wine-filled plastic cups, a handful of students gathered in a rowhouse dining room and swished wine like mouthwash from cheek to cheek, pretending they were anything but alcohol-chugging college students.

But not everyone could forget.

"We don't play beirut with this wine?" Hopkins senior Mowry Cook remembered someone saying.

Once a week during intersession, Cook and Hopkins senior Matt Sekerke brought students together to learn about wine in the makeshift "Room 100"-- Cook's dining room.

When friends complained that they were shut out of the intersession wine appreciation course, what began as a joke became a pseudo-class: "Advanced Intermediate Wine Appreciation," taught by mock-professors Cook and Sekerke, who will be graduating this May.

"Why not appreciate wine on our own?" Cook said while laughing.

Cook wrote up the class description and guidelines online and even posted some in PDF format.

"Topics include: wine history, pairing wine to cuisine, proper etiquette in ordering wine, and special topics determined by students," Cook wrote in the class description. "Elementary cheese and cracker usage will also be introduced."

The course covered a different wine "theme" each week.

"The first two weeks were European whites and European reds," said Sekerke. "The third week was the Americas (United States, Chile and Argentina). And the fourth week, it was everything else."

For the first thirty minutes of "class," Sekerke and Cook entertained the group with a lecture, which often evolved into bantering between the two pseudo-professors.

"We talked about different varieties; how wines are made and how to taste wine," Cook said. "Wine's really interesting - it's different than a lot of the alcohol students experience."

Before the intersession course, they didn't know much about wine, which meant a lot of reading and research to prepare for the lectures, said Cook. But it was Sekerke who benefited from the most from the speaking practice, since he wants to become an economics professor.

"Matt and Mowry are natural-born lecturers," said Chris Said, a senior majoring in philosophy and neuroscience who attended most of the meetings.

After lecture, students moved into "Room 120" - the living room - to mingle with each other and taste the wine.

There, Cook and Sekerke taught them to look at the wine's color, swirl the wine in its plastic cup, smell its aroma, sip the wine and let it settle on their tongues for a better sense of taste, said Cook.?

"Then you have to say something witty and snobby about the wine," he added.

There was only one class fee for each session: a bottle of wine.

"That's a bottle of wine per person," Sekerke said. "And there were always the hardcore people who wanted to drain every drop."

Cook plans to have a class "reunion" mid-semester, but he can no longer host a wine gathering once a week.

"I had to clean up my house every week from plastic wine glasses," he said.

Cook had considered having a course project due at the end of the term, but instead he just gave everyone an A.

They learned about wine, and that's what he wanted from the course.

"I wanted to walk into a restaurant, order a bottle of wine and not be afraid to mess up," he said.