Tuesday Dec 6
Carnival Wine Cruise 2005
Tuesday was an "at sea" day as we sailed the long way around Cuba to get to Grand Cayman. For some people this meant a relaxing day of lounging by the pool. For the wine club members, it meant a VERY full day of tasting wine.
I only got a few hours sleep from staying up late the night before, so the alarm's ringing at 10am was way too early for me. Note this was our own alarm clock we had brought - there isn't a clock in the room. Bob brought me a breakfast plate, and by 11am we were in the Golden dining room for the first event of the day. This was a Portuguese wine tasting run by Peter Spann. It featured two ports, which I *love*, plus a vinho verde (white) and two Portuguese reds. It was a great tasting, notes on that will be on the wine site. We finished up at 12:30 - but it wasn't time for lunch yet!
Now Bob Dickinson, the president of Carnival, sat down with us for a full hour, answering questions and discussing wine and his cruise line. It was a fascinating discussion, and we learned about his extremely large personal wine bottle cellar. Far more wine than a person could drink in a lifetime :) We finished up with that at 1:30pm and had an hour break for lunch.
We went up to the buffet area and saw that Indian was the featured flavor of the day. I *love* Indian food and was thrilled. Really, though, there weren't that many choices. There was a meat patty, a lovely potato and pea samosa, some papadum bread, and another dish or two. I found the tamarind sauce to be very bitter. Having gotten it, though, I hated to waste it. I could have of course gotten something else I liked more, but I ate it - Bob had a stir fried lunch that he enjoyed greatly. We ate on the more "casual" part of the deck because I wanted to have a window seat. The Emiles indoor seats were all taken, so we went to the back of the ship with the plastic woven seats and the mosaic tables. We could see Cuba off the side of the ship, very hazy in the distance.
In no time at all it was 2:30pm and we were back in the Gold dining room for the Riedel wine tasting. This was the highlight event of the week and was PACKED. You had to be a wine club member to get into this event, and every member was given four Riedel glasses for attending. This is a pretty expensive present! They had to set up more tables and glassware sets while we all found our seats. The aim here was to explicitly demonstrate for people the amazing difference that wine glass choice can make in the flavors of a wine.
For those who haven't done this sort of experiment - think of how beer tastes in a frosted glass mug. Then think of the same beer in a cheap styrofoam glass. The glass makes a difference in how you taste the beer. For this tasting, we had 4 different types of Riedel glassware plus a standard wine glass. Everyone in the room agreed that the different glasses made huge, easily noticeable changes in how the wine tasted.
By now it was 4pm and we got 2 hours free before the main tasting began. We headed back to the room to discover our door decoration fish were missing!! Odd. We got freshened up, showered, changed. Bob had found our room steward and mentioned that the water was backing up in the shower (to the point of flooding the bathroom floor) and apparently they had gotten that fixed. On the other hand he mentioned to them that the door was really sticky - to the point that you could barely get it to close and lock - but this is still a problem.
Then it was back down to the Victoria Lounge for the main tasting. There were winery reps set up by the stage and along the back bar area of the lounge, pouring a great deal of Champagne, sparkling wine, still wine and port. This was 2 hours straight of drinking wine, talking with the winemakers and enjoying the event.
Soon it was 8pm and we were very lucky that the Silver dining room was just one flight down the stairs. Bob and I still had the half bottle of Shiraz from two days ago that had been saved for us, so that was presented for us. My not-great-luck with food today was still going on. I was STARVING with all this wine we'd tasted and no food, but service was very slow tonight. We put in our orders, but we didn't start seeing food until after 8:45pm.
We started with prosciutto with thin eggplant and melon slices - mild, very thin :). The salad was also very simple. The main dish, veal picatta, was something that pretty much everyone at the table ordered. I'm the only one who finished it, because I was starving. It was really more like breaded veal cutlets, on the dry side. Several people commented that it was not picatta at all. In fact this was a dish discussed by several people for the next few days as an example of "let downs" in the dining room.
The waitstaff did a "Shake shake shake" latin style musical number for us, dancing around in the room. Now it was dessert time, and I ordered 2 to try to feel more full. One was the signature dessert - a caramel ice cream in a merengue shell. I also ordered the 'black/white' pudding that pretty much everyone else got. We all lamented that we couldn't have the melting pot dish from last night. Well, the black/white was rather like bread pudding with vanilla pudding in it, very little chocolate. It was VERY hot. The merengue/caramel was very simple and plain. So neither really struck my fancy as fantastic. I guess that's the way it goes sometimes.
I shopped by a fellow wine person's table to chat and got a sip of a port they'd brought along with them, a '94 Graham. Quite nice! I was impressed that a vintage port could be brought onto a ship without the sediment stirring up in it. Someone'd been asking about the cigar bar, and we discovered that this was just the "Cabinet" - the wood parquet lounge we walk through when we finish dinner each evening.
We considered going to see the fiddler, but dinner had taken so long that it had pretty much started already. Also, we were going to swim with the stingrays tomorrow morning, and it involved tendering. I'd heard quite a number of trouble-stories about tendering from previous cruisers, so I wanted to be sure to get off the ship early so we didn't miss our excursion. Plus, as scary as it might seem, we still had 2 bottles of wine back in our cabin that we hadn't even opened yet. So we headed back to the room, where we found that most of the fish had magically reappeared. Only one was still missing. We opened up the Niepoort LBV '98 port, and settled in for writing up our trip notes.
Photo Collection from Tuesday
Carnival Liberty Winecruise main travelogue page