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The Sipping Point
Go 'Offline'
Kathy Fisher (in green), Cathy Kilcoyne (in pink) and Penny Price (in black) channel their inner Lucy at Oasis Vineyards in Hume, Va.
(Mark Finkenstaedt Ftwp - Mark Finkenstaedt Ftwp)
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The seven people sharing six bottles of wine at a candlelit table in Cleveland Park were intimates before they introduced themselves.
Everyone knew that Doug Klapec worked in forensics, that Bill Delaney was fiercely patriotic. They knew who was partial to Bordeauxs and who preferred Barolos.
They didn't know that their organizer, the one with an encyclopedic knowledge of Italian wines, would turn out to be a 25-year-old, only in town for a summer internship. And no one guessed that the man they knew as Rajiv was a blond white guy.
Cyberspace, it turns out, has its limits -- not least of which is the inability to capture the teeming bouquet of a '99 Brunello.
And so, to the world beyond flat-screen monitors and half-hearted emoticons. Or, in the parlance of wine geek devotees of Internet bulletin boards, to "offlines," where Zinfandels are slurped in real time and bad jokes are told in person.
For years, the Internet has been the anointed medium for sophisticated oenophiles to debate the merits of their favorite varietals. But increasingly, regular members of online wine communities are moving their conversations to less, uh, pixilated settings.
"Lately I've been a little leery of California wines -- they're a bit over-the-top," Bill Delaney said at his group's inaugural offline, held earlier this month at Dino on Connecticut Avenue. "I hate to make blanket statements, but . . ."
The rules: One person acts as the host. A theme -- usually a year or a style or a region -- is chosen in advance. Everybody brings a bottle to share, and a taste of each wine is offered to the restaurant's owner.
Awkward pauses and pre-dinner jitters are tough to avoid -- it is, after all, basically a big blind date with extra libations. The Cleveland Park offline, for instance, was the culmination of almost two years of near-daily Internet exchanges.
But over gorgonzola appetizers, wild boar entrees and glass after glass of meticulously chosen Italian varietals, the seven, ranging in age from 25 to 41, roll their chatter from choppy pleasantries to dreamy-eyed stories of their first great bottle, before finally, sheepishly, revealing the secrets of their online monikers.
Rajiv, it turns out, just seemed like a cool name at the time.
Offlines often spring from popular Internet bulletin boards, such as http:/
