I pay $9.00 a bottle for imported Italian Sangiovece and Tuscan, don’t tell my winesnob friends how cheap it was, and listen to them rave about how superior it is to their $50/bottle Californian wines. $9.00 is pretty much the magic number for imported Italians (at least the brands the wine steward at our local Haggen brings in). Anything cheaper and it’s pretty raw. More expensive stuff tastes good too.
Barefoot is Gallo of Sonoma’s low end wine, kinda in line with Redwook Creek, etc… From what I hear from people it’s actually pretty decent for the price. A pretty decent Pinot Noir at about the same price ( if you want to try one) is Lindemans Pinot, they also make a pretty decent chard too.
I’m not a wine drinker, but I just tried a decent 1.5l wine the other day that I loved, Stone Cellars Chardonnay. Smooth as hell with a nice apple taste to it, not earthy at all. Surprised me seeing it’s a 9.99 bottle. But again, I’m not really a ‘nose’ or anything.
One red I also tried that was also great was Frei brothers Cab Sauv, dark berry with a bite that wasn’t bitter at all. $20ish bottle that went great with a pizza :)
And just to answer the OP’s first question (sorry if you didn’t mean this exactly), but temperature for wines depends on the type. Reds:Zins, pinot noirs, merlots, cabernet sauvignons, Syrah/shirazs should be at room temp. Not a hot room temp, but ‘sitting in your cool cellar’ room temp. Whites: White Zin/merlots, Pinot grigios, sauv/fume blancs, Guwertz, rieslings, chardonnays should be cold.
Some reds need to ‘breathe’. Sounds funny, but pouring some reds and swirling it around in your glass for a bit can actually help the taste some. And most importantly, matching a meal to wine can improve the taste 10 fold. A good petite syrah and pork? Mmmm…
Yuri, I missed your first question, and it’s a pet peeve of mine when restaurants get it so wrong.
Whites are meant to be served cold. About 46-50 degrees. Most fridges will keep your bottle just below 40, so it’s always a good idea to take it out and let it sit for about 10 minutes before serving.
Reds, as croman points out, are to be served at cellar temperature. I’ve been to restaurants and ordered a red, and I swear they heated the bottle with a blowtorch. One very, very nice restaurant I ate at last week had a gorgeous wine display in cases…and the whole thing was lit up from the inside of the glass and wood doors with 50-watt halogen bulbs. Cooked wine, anyone? No? Yuck.
Cro is also right about letting a wine–especially a red–“breathe”. You know how wine glasses have a bowl-like shape to them? A full pour into a traditional Bordeaux glass is to the widest point in the bowl, so the wine can get oxygen. With reds–especially tannic, fuller bodied reds–they taste “tight” out of the bottle. That is, you can taste hints of complexity and wonderfulness at first sip, but they’re only hints, buried under the bitter tang of the sugars, alcohol, and tannins. Let a little oxygen hit it for a while, and the wine opens up, and all the flavors and bouquet come out.
On a related note: what’s a good way to learn to “taste” wine? I mean I know I like some wines but not others but I have no idea how to describe it.
First, find a wine or two that you like. Whatever they are should be fairly simple and not complex blends or anything to start. I recommend lighter wines as well for this, but that’s just my preference because I don’t get as overwhelmed with the weight of the drink. Then, whenever you have a glass, read the label. See where it lists all the flowers and herbs and fruits of the area where it was grown? Before swallowing, swish it a bit and try to pick out those tastes and flavors. Smell it while you tatse it (nose all the way in there, like Giamatti in Sideways). Can you smell certain flavors while you taste others? And so forth. Smell is underrated by the way, don’t forget it. I’ll usually smell deep from the glass even during a regular meal to remind me of why I picked X wine with Y dinner, and how does it change when my senses are filled with fish or steak or pizza.
Write it all down in a little 3x5 spiral notebook. What did you like? What did you not like? Use regular food adjectives like spicy, sweet, fruity, or zippy if you want. Note the smell of the first glass before you had tasted any, the first flavors right as it went in the mouth, lingering flavors as it sat, and aftertastes or other lingering things after swallowing. Swish it in the glass; does it seem to stick to the walls like a light film of oil (sweet and/or thick) or does it run back down like water (dry and/or light). When held still, does it cling high to the glass on the edges like it is trying to climb out? How colorful is it? Does it bend and color the light or block it totally when you look through it?
That helped me start anyway. I can’t pick a tasted wine out of a list or anything but when I taste one now I can point out some generalities (fruits and flowers, not so good with the herbs). I can also think about them when reading labels at the store. This helps me determine what I will like.
For me, I needed a PC gamer’s approach–I was curious and wanted to get in and “play” with wine, but I’m a donk and wanted to RTFM.
I’d recommend if you really wanna learn some things AND learn to taste wine and appreciate it, this is actually not a bad place to start:
The big thing to remember about wine is that it doesn’t have to be snobby and snooty and mystifying. It should be fun, and for me at least, the more I learn, the more I enjoy and understand why I like what I like, and how to find other wines like the ones I particularly enjoy.
As a New Zealander we’re required by law to enjoy wine because we make a lot of it, and we’re getting good at it.
Here are some tips…
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Buy New Zealand wine so we can send our kids to school and get some more wells and clinics! :D
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It’s ‘Marlborough’, as in Duke Of, not ‘marlboro’ as in, cancer stick :D
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Go to some wine tastings! If you’re near enough to some vineyards, get someone to drive you around while you taste everything. You’ll find having a few different wines at once will make you go “o that’s good! Oh, I don’t like that so much”. It’s all about personal taste… and the contrasting tastes will highlight what you enjoy and don’t enjoy much easier than just trying one bottle one week, another another week and remembering what’s different.
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Don’t overchill your whites and don’t let your reds be too warm. New Zealand whites can be served quite cold, because we’re cretins here and used to shove everything in the fridge until icey and thus our wines have evolved to be vinted in a very fruity and strong flavour to make up for this. Whites should be served chilled at most, ie. Cellar temperature. I like to pull the white out of the fridge and let it stand for 20 minutes. Reds should be served at cellar temperature too. Shove it in the fridge for 20 minutes, open, let stand a bit to breathe, then serve.
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If you’re not near a vineyard, go and buy half a dozen bottles and try them all! Merlot, Sav Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir; all good places to start with.
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I love desert wines. Give 'em a go. “Stickies” like ice wine, muscats, ‘noble’ reislings (grapes that have gotten the ‘noble rot’ which makes 'em shrivel up and go sweet, lovely).
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Match food to wine. I’m not good at this… but it does make a difference. I can’t tell you how to do it exactly (obviously, white with white meat, etc, but there’s more to it than this)… but it will make an ok wine taste even better.
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Find out what wines will keep well. Buy a few bottles and try one every year. The flavours will change back and forth over time.
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Enjoy!
Ugh, Barefoot.
Wine is really, honestly and truthfully an acquired taste. Once you become a wino, things like Barefoot taste inferior. If you are not a wino, then Barefoot, Little Penguin, etc. taste as good or better than expensive Bordeaux or Cabernet.
I have a theory about wine that relates to bitterness etc. - if you drink coffee, black, then you’ll probably enjoy full-bodied wines. I have no evidence to back this up, of course, but it makes for a nice conversation starter.
When it comes to wine you’re either in the snobby club or your not, and no amount of education will make a whit of difference in the end.
It’s not a bad theory.
Black coffee, Islay malts, dark beer and powerful reds are my drinks of choice… I can enjoy a cool chardonnay, but it’s not something I’d usually pick myself (chilled reds - of the right sort and to a point - goes with fish as well, so there’s no need to drink a white you don’t enjoy)
I think one of the best ways for me was just going out and doing tastings. I was lucky in the fact that, when I wanted to do this, I was living very close to Napa/Sonoma etc. So I hopped in my car one day and went driving, stopping at wineries and trying everything.
I did the same thing here in VA a summer or so before I moved here. The thing that is charming and amusing about the VA wine country is that it’s just starting, compared to California. So some of the tasting rooms are much more … “down home country” by comparison. There was one place I stopped by whose tasting room was part of their converted barn, and they had dogs and kids just lazing about in the sun. That wine was actually far better tasting than the fancyriffic place not further down that was modeling itself after a typical Napa tasting room.
My only real problem is my boyfriend doesn’t really drink all that much, so if I want to enjoy a bottle, I gotta do it all myself. And that’s trouble!
I tried a wine called Rosemount Estates (I think this one was a Cabernet, 2005) recently that was very good. I believe it was around $9.
If you like strong black coffee, it stands to reason that you’ll like bold, fuller-bodied reds. It’s all about the tannins, and black coffee and cabernet are stuffed full of them.
I know, I lived in Toronto before here. I miss the LCBO and Beer Stores. God, shopping for beer here sucks. The only thing you get is crap at the supermarket. And if there’s no TV commercial for it, they don’t carry it.
And wines… fucking place. I can’t get any of the good Canadian wines I liked here. There’s almost no Australian selection either (where most of my favorite reds are from).
There are Canadian wines!?
What about South African?
I used to be all about the Australian reds, but after a visit to South Africa I developed a taste for them as well.
Here we have no local production to protect, so we get the best from all over the world in every small supermarket.
Yes BC has wine and it is predicted to get better as global warming increases.
More wine is produced in Ontario than B.C. Imports to the States are tiny due to tariff barriers. Ice wine is the only common Canadian export to the U.S. I’ve noticed.
Wine labels are way cooler in shift6’s universe.
I actually liked a lot of the Ontario wines. There’s a lot of good stuff that comes out of the Niagara region.
Northern California, brah. Seriously, even our 7-11 type convenience stores carry wines with decent labels displayed with nice layouts and “authentic” wooden boxes and so on.
Also: if you’re into Syrah, try an Australian Shiraz also. They’re basically the same grape but those Aussies put a little zip into it or the region is better or something. I much prefer an Aussie sparkling Shiraz to any American Syrahs I’ve had.
IIRC, Shiraz and Syrah are the same thing. Just a different spelling/pronunciation.