More on Wine, Foodography and Winter Classes
For the last few weeks I have been travelling around NZ running a series of Wine Tasting Competitions for the NZ Sommeliers and Wine Professionals for which I am chair. It's been fun putting together a selection of 40 classic wines and preparing sets of questions to test our teams of winelovers.
We have used Kahoot! which has been enormously successful as a electronic quiz platform in these Covid times. It adds the results instantly and takes away the risk of calculation errors plus the backend provides detailed analytics on who got the answers to how many seconds it took to answer correctly. We know that of the 24 teams the highest scores were 75% correct with over 8 teams achieved above 68% correct. I can see we will use this platform for sometime!
It seems that interest in wines and spirits programmes is also bounding upwards and we have had record enrolments for all our wine classes including WSET Wine and Spirit Education Trust from UK.
This week I had the results of the latest WSET Level 2 Certificate in Wine and with a class of 20 students, 60% gained distinction, a pass of over 85%. Exciting.
Our NZQA Certificate in NZ Wine Micro-Credential is also going for strength to strength and we are about to start offering Corporate & Team Building wine options so that you can get together a group of 8 people and we will run a private programme.
New Zealand wines are much more diverse that most people imagine and it's a great thrill to be able to share lesser-known wineries and underrated regions with our participants as they taste through the wine selection. For more information, email admin@foodandwine.co.nz.
Coming up we have the Winter Forage with Riki Bennett which provides an opportunity to explore our native flora along with innovation around urban hāngi kai-cookery techniques. The FOODOGRAPHY Dinner is back and this year our theme is a Midwinter Christmas Dinner. Both events are part of Auckland's Elemental Festival.
On Sunday 1st August, we host the NZ Sommelier of the Year Awards along with wine tasting events and a Gastronomic Dinner prepared by Chef Finn and our students.
Ngā mihi,
Celia Hay
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Workshop: Sewing Machine Parts & Maintenance
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Auckland Library of Tools (ALoT) in collaboration with Repair Cafe Aotearoa NZ (RCANZ) are excited to bring you free 1st Thursdays repair and maintenance workshops at Hackland Makerspace, just behind ALoT! Koha is appreciated, to help us continue to bring you repair cafés and workshops.
Thursday November 7 will be a basic sewing machine parts and maintenance workshop. Come learn the parts of a standard sewing machine, what they do, and how to care for them so they run smoothly for years to come. No need to bring your machine, but you are welcome to bring it if you want to get hands-on!
There will be nibbles and tea on hand, but contributions of food and beverage are always very welcome. Koha always appreciated.
Getting here:
Bus stops on Ponsonby Rd (InnerLink, 20, 105, 106, 866), Great North Rd (11T/W, 18, 20, 195), and Karangahape Rd (WX1)
We are also near the northwestern cycleway.
Limited free parking is available in the lot next door (nevermind the signs) or on side streets. There is no parking in front of ALoT/Hackland.
These workshops are part of the Repair & Share project, a weekly repair cafe hosted by ALoT, RCANZ, and Hackland and supported by Auckland Council.
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If you would like to help out at any of our workshops or repair cafes, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You do not need repair skills to get involved. Send us a message to see how you can help. We look forward to it!