So to clarify a little on the title - I'm a bit of a wine enthusiast (love my food too, but have a particular soft spot for good wine). The other day I was thinking an interesting challenge would be to try a wine from a country from each letter of the alphabet from A to Z (where possible). Some letters may be a struggle, but the goal would be to try and find unusual wine-producing countries that I have never tried before (Lebanon, Georgia, Kazakhstan! e.t.c.).

Then I thought how about take it a little further and try and find a place that has the corresponding food and match them together. It would be a good exploration of some culinary corners of Sydney that I probably would not have gone to otherwise.

Then I thought there may well be other like minded people who might like to come on this journey with me. The basic concept at this stage would be to pick a regular date like the last or first Thursday of each month, get a list of the countries to try and then choose wines and a place to enjoy them. The idea would be we would tackle one letter at a time and only one letter (so just one A, one B, once C e.t.c.), So for say January a group of us (4-8 people lets say) all enjoy some Argentinian wines with Argentinian food. The next meeting in February would be B so that could mean a trip to a Basque restaurant with some Basque wines, or maybe a Bulgarian restaurant with some Bulgarian wines.

I know there are cultural community centers that are often quite happy to arrange something like this too, for example we have a basque community group here in Darlinghurst that does an amazing 3 course Sunday lunch of traditional Basque food and wine for just $30.

I have no idea if there would be any interest in this so I thought I'd just put it out there and see what the response would be. Comment in here if its something that you might like to do and if there is enough interest we can start to thrash out the finer details. I'd certainly be more than happy to do the lions share of organizing it all....

EDIT: ok it seems there IS a bit of interest! I will make a sub tomorrow for anyone who is interested in following along and joining us. I will post details here tomorrow. Now we just have to decide if we kick off with Austrian, Argentinian or Armenian - if it was down to me it would be Armenia as I’ve never tried an Armenian wine but I’ve got no idea where I would find one…..

I am going to work on the first Thursday in November as the kick off night….