The History of the Tuscaloosa International Wine Club The Tuscaloosa
Wine club was born out of a 1980 continuing education class
given at The University Club. Our founding Mother was Barbara West. She
offered her home as a meeting place and was an enthusiastic proponent of
continuing the education we had started at the wine class. We had several
organizing meetings before we officially began the club in November 1980.
We
decided that meeting every week would be too often, and once a month not
often enough, so we opted for bi-weekly meetings. We settled on dues of $10
per month and have budgeted $75 per program to purchase the wine. To
encourage attendance and to insure a fairly steady budget, we agreed that
members should pay their dues whether they came to a meeting or not, unless
they took a sabbatical. We generally have a good turnout. Over the years we
have had a free flowing membership and have attracted members from many
foreign countries, so we can legitimately call our club "International".
The
one common thread has been a love of good wine and congenial nature.
Our programs tend to have a theme, such as wines from a certain region or
a
grape varietal from different regions. The person who volunteers to do the
program has total control of which wines to present. Usually, they are wines
we'd like to try but aren't in our personal budget. We've had wines from
most winegrowing regions in the world as well as places you'd never expect
to
find wines. We've tried Flower wine from Scotland, Cleopatra wine from
Egypt, and wines from Romania and Greece. We've had members bring back wine
from as far away as South Africa and New Zealand.
The wine club has special events like cookouts, Christmas parties, and away weekends .
Once we had a special "Dream" wine program. It was a once in a lifetime
opportunity to drink wines that we had heard of and never tasted.
Over Twenty-five years later we still find pleasure in simply coming together and sharing new wines. The joy and fascination with wine has increased exceedingly over recent years, particularly for Americans. Americans are thinking about, reading about and drinking more and better wines than ever before. The Tuscaloosa Wine Club is way ahead of this growing wave. We've been tasting with dedication since 1980.
