Last week was my last week of work for a while, likely just for the summer, but it has been an adjustment. I’m such a busy-body that slowing down to Evan’s 22-month-old pace and reading the same board book 10 times in a row can be a struggle. The last time I took “time off” was the 3 months surrounding Evan’s birth (which was when I started Give Me Grapes). Luckily I’m not having another baby, but among the many things I plan to do during my time is to get back to writing about wine. (Another is to train for a half-marathon!)
For the last four months I’ve been working, mothering, cooking, chauffeuring, laundering and sleeping almost like clockwork. There was simply no room in the schedule to deviate from the norm. My wine club hasn’t even met since February! At least there was time to drink wine. There’s always time to drink wine.
Currently, I’m learning about “bargain wines”, as Myles and I are working our way through all the inexpensive Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods in search of the best one. White wine flows freely around here during the summer months, and while we do plan to stock up from Bonny Doon like we did last summer, even those wines are a bit pricey considering the sheer number of bottles we sometimes open each week. Now I sound like a lush… it’s really 2-3 bottles per week in the winter vs. 4+ in the summer. White wine, with its thirst-quenching qualities and lower alcohol content somehow seems to disappear quicker.
This is a nice segue back to January’s wine club. As host, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to blindly taste two wines of the same varietal, vintage and AVA against each other. The catch being that one bottle cost approximately twice as much as the other. Could we tell which was the more expensive wine? I was especially keen to see the difference between Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs. When it comes to these wines I’m pretty agreeable—never really met one I didn’t like. They’re perfect for hot weather: light, citrusy and utterly refreshing. And since they’re all under a screw-cap, you never have to worry about a bottle being corked.
I put a $7.99 wine from Kono (a Trader Joe’s stand-by that they didn’t have when I went last week) against a $19.99 wine from Cloudy Bay, a well known high end wine from the region, both from 2011. There was basically no contest. Six of seven people correctly guessed which was more expensive and also preferred the pricier wine. The Cloudy Bay wine was simply more complex, had a brighter nose and in addition to the citrus had just a touch of tropical fruit. All that being said, the Kono was a great quaffing wine, and does well when you don’t compare it to more expensive competition. It had the unfortunate luck of being Wine B, so we tasted the pricier one first.
Overall, people were generally spot on when picking which wine was pricier. What was really fascinating was then we picked which wine we liked better. The numbers did not always match up! For instance, when comparing two Sonoma Coast Chardonnays, one $13.99, the other $26.99, every last one of us knew which was more expensive. But, two people liked the cheaper wine better, and one person was neutral. Then there was me: I hated them both. The cheaper wine smelled like a piece of wood, didn’t have enough fruit or acid and was too creamy. The more expensive wine was too buttery and the finish was all woody. Ick. I will protect the identities of these wines from my stubborn opinions and stick to Sonoma Coast Chards that I like, such as Elizabeth Spencer’s.
We also compared two Spanish Riojas (the “losers” of the evening, most people didn’t prefer one over the other), which taught me to always buy cheap Rioja since one was $14.99 and the other $39.99. The last two were also quite surprising. I put a 2009 Côtes du Rhône up against a 2009 Chateauneuf du Pape ($14.99 & $24.99). We all easily identified the latter, but only two people preferred it.
The most anticipated pair of wines of the evening, for me at least, was the 2007 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. I strayed just a bit from the twice as expensive angle by pitting the Robert Mondavi Napa Valley Cab ($26 at the winery, but cheaper at K&L) against the Beringer Single Vineyard Chabot Cab ($90). I really wanted to know if those pricey Napa cabs were worth it. Two people guessed that the Robert Mondavi was the pricier wine (not me, I got it right!), and two of us preferred it. I liked it better because it was ready to drink. It had a really pleasant berry nose, it was well balanced with good fruit and it wasn’t too strong (often the biggest complaint about Napa Cabs). The other wine was good, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t ready. Too tightly wound. Maybe my preference will be different in 2017.
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