John's Blog Updated. Originally posted here: http://travel.reservationkey.comLatitude: 20.691867 Longitude: -105.293009

Tonight we finally got around to tackling one of our hardest projects - figuring out which wines will make the cut to bring with us to the South Pacific. In order to accomplish this difficult task, Bruce set up a blind tasting in which we compared eight different wines. Each bottle was wrapped in foil and numbered, and then poured into numbered cups. We then filled out a grid in which each wine was compared to all the other wines. To come up with the winners we counted up how many times each wine appeared on our grid.

Of our top three selections, Bruce and I matched on two out of three. Pascale we think matched on one out of three, but not sure since she kind of lost track of how her scoring was going. Like I said, this was not an easy task, especially to be able to maintain concentration with over 24 tastings. On the wine Bruce and I did not match on, he had it as his number two choice and I had eliminated it all together.

The most interesting part came when the names and prices were revealed. The wine that Bruce and Pascale had previously thought was one of their favorites ranked very low in our tastings. That wine also happened to be the most expensive at 144 pesos. Bottle number four, the clear winner, happily turned out to cost only 69 pesos (about $6 USD). It was really shocking how much better number four was compared to all the other wines, and that it was still so reasonably priced.

The final task of the evening was to combine the opened bottles into a \"house blend\" and start filling our reusable plastic bags. We have 60 of these bags which each hold just a bit more than one bottle. These bags store much easier than bottles, plus we don't have to worry about glass breaking. Tomorrow we will get started on sourcing our favorite wines and filling up our bags. Bruce also found some additional spaces on the boat, accessed by cutting out some wood panels, which make great wine cellars.

The other job of the day was installing a netted storage space under the salon table. I brought this net with me thinking of creating a hammock type storage for clothes, but that turned out to be unnecessary. This looks like a great alternate use of the net.