I love a challenge, but I was recently put to the test when I was asked to pick several red and white wines to pair with six dinners on a seven-night cruise made up of passengers with a wide range of wine sophistication. The tricky part was that I had to select the wines before I had even seen a menu for a single dinner. In sailing terms, that’s an order as tall as a mainmast. But given that the assignment also came along with passage for two as the ship sailed through the Black Sea, I was determined to rise to the occasion.
Of course, picking wines for that many palates demands quite a bit of research, which, in turn, required that a few bottles of wine had to be opened. But first, I had to come up with a theme. Since the cruise originated in Athens and ended in Istanbul, I initially thought that it would be interesting to feature wines from the different ports of call along our route. Unfortunately, finding wines to sample from Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was more difficult than I anticipated.
