Featuring a winery I can stand!

So, over the past several months, I’ve been shoving my nose, mouth, and any other applicable body parts into glasses of wine.  I haven’t had much of a direction or plan, per se.  Rather, I’ve been imbibing whatever gets put in front of me at the requisite “let’s learn about our wines by drinking them!” meetings.  This should be heaven, but remember that key element of this entire blog: Wine confounds me.

My bar did have a special wine-tasting a while back that featured the St. Laurent winery from Washington state.  Even the winemaker himself, Craig Mitrakul, came in person to present the wines.  That, in and of itself, lends him an air of awesomeness in my heart.

Mitrakul poured out five different wines: a riesling, the Lucky White blend, a merlot, the Lucky Red blend, and a syrah.  According to Mitrakul, the mentality behind creating the white and red blends was not about the snooty pontification on chemical makeup, soil, water, acidity or any other “blah” details like those — instead, he simply said, “We just wanted to make something that tasted good.”  Finally, simplicity in a winemaking mentality!  I just about planted a big, sloppy wet one on him out of gratitude.

It turned out that I was probably the only employee who liked the Lucky White.  I liked the smell of it (flowers….?), and I liked that it tasted sort of sweet but not cloyingly so.  Everyone else loved the bouquet but didn’t care for the actual taste.

Oh well.  That just means there’s more for me to drink, because this writer needs to keep the DTs away somehow.

That darn ‘$10 bottle of wine’

So apparently there’s this ever-present odyssey to find the mythical $10-bottle of wine that’s so awesome, so amazing, so darn desirable that it will sexually favor you and then even snuggle afterwards.  I guess, during these days of inflation and the like, maybe that should be upped to a $15-dollar bottle of wine, but what do I know.

In any case, it’s really an epic search.  You’d think that, the way these girls rabidly read the latest update on “This Season’s $10-Bottle,” that it was a gold-plated key to the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant and Hugh Hefner’s long-lost virginity.  I’ve sampled bottles in the $10-$20 range, and none of them have really blown my skirt up.

First off, I got a bottle of some Paso Robles … thing … for $10 on sale.  It tasted like, well, a red wine.  I can’t distinguish between reds, unless it’s flavored with something really significant, like pepper, asphalt, or dead baby.  We paired it with some venison, and the boys I was eating it with thought it went well with the meat, but wasn’t anything overly fantastic.  I just thought it needed something stronger and better in it, like vodka.   Or, hell, even a damn dead baby.

… I’m really doing badly at this whole process of learning to like wine.

Next up, I gave Thorn-Clarke’s Terra Bossa Shiraz a try.  The bottle costs around $17, and it’s a wine that comes from the Barossa Valley area of Australia.  Before I gave it a good try, I read up on it first.  Nothing in my readings gave me any suggestions for pairings, except for the marvelously vague “goes well with full-flavored meals.”  Thanks, jackasses.  But reviews did repeatedly mention a dark-chocolate aftertaste, so I took that and ran with it.  The wine did end up going well with a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark.  (At least, that’s what other people told me.  I still had a mouthful of red wine I couldn’t identify.)

Maybe diving head-first into red wines was a bad idea.  No, wait, scratch that — I didn’t dive; I hopped in like a flailing kid on uppers.