2005 Foreau Vouvray Moelleux

So... Stephen and I decided to open a wine tonight and thought we'd clear out one of the older ones we have had for awhile. So we looked and this 2005 french vouvray looked delicious and seemed like it was getting too old for a white. We opened it and loved it! Decided to look it up online and HOLY COW this was an expensive wine! Of course we didn't even notice the sticker on the bottle that said it was 64.99, so here we are drinking probably one of the top 5 most expensive wines we own for no reason. We got it so long ago we didn't even remember. *sigh*

Oh well. Anyway, now that we are drinking it, the wine really is delicious. As I said, we looked it up online and it got 95 and 96 points from wine spectator and wine advocate. It is a sweet white wine with peach and honey notes and a heavier texture than I would expect. It's creamy and very fruit forward. It is a full alcohol wine at 13.3%, but very, very soft and not at all alcoholic tasting.

This is an overall fantastic wine, and although I do not blog often, I had to get on here right away and do this nice wine some justice.

Pictrues to come.

Port Slush

Stephen and I wanted to try something new, and he had this idea to blend wine with ice to make a slush. It was a good idea, but since wine is so low alcohol, our blended drink would probably need some kind of vodka or other mixer to make it a little stronger. Ugh, not a big fan of vodka. So then we had a brilliant idea - let's use port! Port is about 17 - 20% alcohol, so it's perfect! We went to Specs and asked for the cheapest port that was still tasty, and left with a bottle of $5.99 port... yep... that cheap. This is obviously not the $30/bottle kind of port you sip and savor. Then, we poured in half the bottle with 1/2 a bag of mixed berries, a squeeze of lime, a ton of ice and viola! Instant port slush!

I rate this drink an A! It's cheap, very tasty, and I feel like it might be healthier than other mixed drinks you could drink filled with tons of sugar. It tastes very fruity and pretty much like a fruit smoothie. The huge glasses we made were about 2 drinks worth of alcohol. I recommend trying this at home!

Birthday Wine

The day before my birthday, I had some free time so I went to go do something that I love - shop for random wines. I figured it was an early birthday present to myself. I really like just browsing and looking at all the wines, and then buying a completely random one. I went to the Costco liquor store because believe it or not, they have a really good selection of interesting wines. It was fun to look around, and I ended up getting a Vinum petit syrah, which is a wine I'm interested in learning more about.

I haven't had too many of them before, and they are usually used just in small quantities to balance out other wines - its less common to see a bottle of 100% petit syrah.

Another reason I got it was the description: "It is a rich, pomegranate scented monster of a wine which packs a punch yet finishes soft, with concentrated plum, blueberry and supple tannins. The finish is generous and fires on all cylinders, fruit, color, concentration and silky oak tannins at the end." 


The wine was pretty good, but by no means amazing. Other wines I am interested in trying 100% wines of are cabernet franc, and ESPECIALLY petit verdot. I don't think I've ever seen a 100% petit verdot, is it just better as a mixing grape in small quantities?

Ok so I got one more wine too because it was only... wait for it... $3.33. Yes, I had to try it and see how it was. I actually asked someone who worked there what the deal was with that wine and she said it was not bad and many people are come back looking for it again.

So there's really nothing to lose in trying it... it might be ok and if not I'm only out $3! Actually I have been interested in trying super cheap wines lately, so will make a post about that shortly. How can they even PRODUCE wine for that cheaply? I mean, doesn't the bottle and label and other packaging total at least a dollar or two? I'm curious!

Actual Wedding Anniversary

So Stephen and I technically have two anniversaries - one when we signed the papers and became officially married, and one when we had our big wedding/reception. We already celebrated the paper signing in June with our trip to Mikado, and now we are celebrating our "big" wedding anniversary! We had a groupon for Hudsons on the Bend, which is a pretty nice place, so decided to go there.

Our coupon was for two 3 course tasting menus, and there were 2 options for each course, so we decided to just get the exact opposite of each other so we could try all 6 dishes. Here were our appetizers:

a mixed salad with pecan crusted goat cheese and blueberry vinaigrette

and duck breast wrapped in bacon in a dipping sauce.

 

The salad was awesome! SO delicious! That ball of crusted goat cheese was to die for. Then it was time for the main course.

trout with mango jalapeno aioli with ancho paint (???)

and prime tenderloin in a jalapeno hollandaise

The trout was absolutely delicious, and while the beef was also good, the portion size was very small! On to the desserts...

caramel pecan pie dipped in belgium chocolate, 

and peach cobbler.

I am usually a huge dessert fanatic, but neither of these really were that amazing to me. I got the chocolate thing, and just read pecan and chocolate but didn't realize it was a PECAN PIE dipped in chocolate. Those aren't my favorite, and it was very very rich. The peach cobbler was pretty good, but also not my favorite.

Then we came back and opened a bottle of wine, since we didn't get any at the restaurant. Since we used to be members of the Chisholm Trail wine club and had quite a few different bottles, we decided to open one of those. 

This is the 2006 Diablo. It is 70% syrah and 30% lenoir. This wine was pretty good, but not great. I looked online since I forgot how much we paid for it, and for wine club members it is $18. It tasted a tad on the sour side to us - not enough to think it was corked, but just a little weird tasting. It was good overall but it wasn't too interesting nor did it have any defining characteristics. I'm not sure I would buy it again for $18, but I think we actually had 2 bottles of this somehow lol, so I will get to try it again some other time. Anyway, the night was fun, and we played a new game we had, called Quirkle - very fun and just the right amount of thinking for a night like this.

J. Rickard Wine Party

My friend Kris graciously decided to have a bunch of his friends over for a little wine tasting of some of his favorite wines, all from J. Rickard winery in California. He had amassed quite a collection, and we got to try several vintages of the same wines to see how they compared. It was very interesting, and he had some great wines to share!

Of course there were lots of delicious snacks also - here is a close up of the cheeses!

My favorites were the goat gouda on the top rights, and the herby goat cheese on the lower left. A surprisingly good cheese was the goat blue in the middle on the bottom. It was DELICIOUS on crackers and with the wine... oh my goodness I could eat that all day. I'm sure you can tell that I love goat cheese.

On to the wine. The first trio we tried was J. Rickard's 2008, 2007, and 2006 old vine zinfandels (in that order). The 2006 was definitely my favorite (B+) and I said it was very soft and fruity, unlike the other 2. The 2008 (B-) tasted too alcoholic and the 2007 (C+) was very harsh as well. Opinions varied, as they always do, and it seemed like everyone had a different favorite. Stephen thought the 2007 was the best and said it was "tasty, spicy, and challenging", and Kris liked both the 2006 and the 2008 better than the 2007.

Then, we moved on to his 2008, 2007, and 2006 Meritage wines, which are a blend of the 5 bordeaux grapes (cabernet sauv, merlot, cab franc, petit verdot, and malbec). I liked all of these better than the zinfandels, I guess zins are not really my thing? I gave the 2008 meritage a B+, the 2007 a C- (maybe 2007 was not a good year for my tastebuds!) and the 2006 got an A. I do want to say that if I had tasted any of these 6 wines on their own, I probably would have thought they were all good and worth drinking.

Overall, I learned that the older wines were smoother, fruitier, and easier to drink. The younger ones were a little too tannic and alcoholic for my taste, but I bet in a few years they would be better. Something about the 2007 wines was strange to me, maybe the barrel they were aged in, or the weather, who knows.

To top off the night, Kris brought out his Los Ninos Perdidos Port, which was really delicious. I gave the port an A, and I think it was loved by everyone who had some. Also, a fun moment of the night was at the very end when Kris shared some spread that looks like peanut butter but tastes like COOKIES! It was so incredibly yummy!

The night was a lot of fun!

Wine Ice Cream?

I found this article from the Huffington Post about wine ice creams that you can buy and also make!

Wine Ice Cream

What a wonderful idea! :o

Electra Orange Muscat

I gave this wine to my mom for Christmas, and since I went to visit my family yesterday, we decided to open it. It is a very light wine - only 4% alcohol, and a small half size bottle. We thought the wine tasted like pear and it was very sweet and delicious. Because it was so low alcohol, it was very drinkable and I did not even feel any buzz or other effect. It was more like a yummy fruit drink!

Specs Wine Tasting

Last night was Spec's Wine Wednesday and I must say it was not their best. The theme seemed to be wines around the world, since only 2 of the 20 wines were from the U.S (8 were from Italy alone!). Most of them were very dry and had all sorts of weird smells and tastes. We had a wine from Israel that smelled like a certain grass, a wine that smells like corn on the cob or ketchup depending on who you asked, a wine that tasted like you were drinking a glass of Big Red soda and also smelled like cheese, and one that tasted like green pepper. Overall, it was certainly an INTERESTING night. Unfortunately, a full 12/20 wines got x's from me. :( The only wine I ended up liking enough to give a check to was the Marchesi Incisa Moscato d'Asti from Italy.

Oh well, I ended up buying a cheese at least!

Anniversary Sushi

For our 1 yr anniversary, Stephen and I decided to go out for some sushi! Sushi is probably our favorite food, and we had a gift certificate to use and the night off so we headed out to Mikado.

We were staying for a while, so we decided to get some drinks out, which is something we usually don't do at restaurants. But, it was a special night and interesting drinks so we went ahead. Stephen got a small sake (which was terrible to me) and I tried a plum wine, which was great! It was very sweet - a little too sweet, like a dessert wine, but it was a very low alcohol wine. Then, our food came!

I love seaweed salad so much!

The sushi was REALLY great and it was hard to pick our favorites. I believe we got an eel roll, california roll, soft shell crab, and spicy tuna - all of which were amazing. To go along with our sushi, we decided to each order a flight of different flavored cold sakes. Each flight had about 2 ounces of 3 different sakes.

My sakes were pear, apple, and lychee flavored. The apple was by far the best, and the lychee tasted really strange. Pear flavored things are never really my thing, but they all were very interesting to try.

I'm not sure how to really tell Stephen's sakes apart, but there they are! It's cool to see how different sakes can taste. Here they are in case anyone is interested...

Flat Creek Winery

One thing from the past few months that I have to write about is our trip to Flat Creek Winery. We went on May 29th to celebrate Stephen and his mom's birthdays. I always love visiting wineries because they are always so beautiful and the people there are usually so knowledgeable about the wines they make there and it's fun to talk to them.

We shared a tasting of 9 wines, and most of them were very good. Our favorites were the syrah and their meritage, but the super texan was also a big favorite. At the tasting room, the parties sit at small tables and are served by a server. Our server was very nice, but she seemed a little too busy to really chat with us and explain the wines fully. It was still fun though.

After our wine tasting, we decided to have lunch at the small restaurant they have on the property. The food there was really good, and we split a bottle of wine with our meal - our favorite from the tasting - the meritage.

The view was very pretty, and overall it was a really fun and relaxing afternoon. 

Posting again!

Ugh, it has been SO long since I posted, and I am going to try and catch up and keep up with my blog now. The last few months have been so busy with the end of school and the start of summer that I just haven't been thinking about it too much. However, that does NOT mean that I have stopped drinking wine. From now on, I'm going to try to do a better job of keeping up!

Wrongo Dongo

Stephen went out of town for about a week, so I decided to open a bottle just for me while he was gone. When I looked though our collection though, I couldn't find one that I thought he wouldn't care about missing, so I just decided to stop by Specs and get my own thing. I kind of miss buying random wines, since most of the ones we end up getting are ones that we have tasted before either at Specs or at a winery. I had planned on buying a completely random wine, but as I was browsing, I came across this Wrongo Dongo. I have had this wine before a couple years ago and remembered that it was a pretty decent wine at the shocking price of only $6.

I drank this wine over a few nights, and I must say I was not too impressed. It was very harsh and alcoholic when I first opened it, but did soften up a little later on. Still, it was not very good. :( It wasn't terrible, and if I had to buy a wine again for only $6 I would consider it over some of the other $6 wines I had, but overall it is probably better as a once every few years thing.

Campbell's Rutherglen Muscat

Ok, so that 1994 corked wine was absolutely disgusting. Since that bottle was a bust, we treated ourselves to a delicious dessert wine to wash the taste out. This was a 1/2 sized bottle of honey-like muscat. It retails for about $17, but we got it during a Grapevine closing for about $11 I think. This wine was intense! It is very sweet with brown sugar, honey, and raisin flavors. It feels thick and syrupy in your mouth. Surprisingly, it is 17% alcohol, but very drinkable! The sweetness overpowers the alcohol. I think a half size bottle is plenty for this wine, because it still turned out to be 2 small glasses for each of us. Overall, I think this wine was delicious but a little too sweet and syrupy for me.

1994 Chateau Musar

Back in December, our family went to a Christmas Party with some people from Madison's school and had a white elephant gift exchange there. We spotted a few bottles of wine, but the most interesting one was a red wine from Lebanon! I don't think I have ever tried a wine from there, and even though it was from 1994, we snagged it. Well, a few weeks ago we opened a bottle of wine from 1994 and it was terrible! So, we thought we better go ahead and try this one to see what it was like.

Here is what we saw when we took off the foil...

Uh oh... bad news! We had to try it anyway though, and so we poured tastes. The smell was very strong, like raisins. I took a small sip and held it in my mouth for a few seconds. So far it tasted a little weird and I contemplated spitting it out, but figured I should get the full effect, so I swallowed it. NASTINESS! I cannot describe in words how disgusting that liquid was, only that it had obviously turned to vinegar. OH. MY. GOODNESS. In good news though, I have finally tasted my first corked wine, and WOW what an experience. Needless to say, we poured the rest of the bottle down the drain.

Moscato and Peach Liquer

We all went to visit my parents this weekend. My mom has apparently gotten adventurous with her wine drinking and got some peach liqueur to mix with moscato! The moscato was Rocca Cerrina, which is a VERY light (5%) slightly sparking wine. The peach liqueur she had was amazingly delicious, very sweet and a bit syrupy.

I poured about an ounce of the peach liqueur in each of our glasses...

... and then I filled the rest of the glasses with the moscato.

This combination turned out to be delicious! Even with the 18% liqueur, this little drink only has about 1/2 the alcohol of a regular strength drink. To be honest, I could barely taste the peach flavor until I made myself a second glass and added just a splash more. I might actually have to get a bottle of that stuff and experiment to see what else it is good in!

Woodrose Wicked Red

Stephen and I bought this wine a few years ago when we visited Woodrose Winery for the first time. It was a special wine that is normally only available to wine club members, but for some reason we had special attention from one of the owners.

I had this wine with a dinner of steelhead trout, a broccoli and chicken dish, and some peas. It was DELICIOUS! The wine was amazing from the very first sip, which usually doesn’t happen. It is a blend of about 2/3 merlot and 1/3 cabernet. The interesting thing about this wine is that it is only 11.8% alcohol, which is very unusual for a bold red. Most reds are 13 – almost 15% and it shows. This wine is smooth, incredibly tasty and not at all harsh or alcoholic. I think this wine was around $25 and it is well worth it. I would definitely buy this again, although I’m not sure if I could find it anywhere!

1994 Kruger Rumpf Riesling

Yes, you read that right - this wine is from 1994! Stephen picked this wine up at the Grapevine sale a few years ago (wow, time flies...). I think he couldn't tell if it would be bad, because it's 15 years old, or maybe that it would be delicious because it has been aging. I guess we have been hesitant to open it, not knowing what to expect, but it was finally time. An interesting thing appeared when we tore open the foil on top...

I don't know if you can see the cork that well, but there was some definite funk or gunk going on! Gross! We opened the wine up anway and tried it and it was not terrible as I expected. But, it was not really good. It tasted pretty flat, a bit sour (although not vinegary), and just overall unappealing. I was a little concerned that the wine had gone bad and would make me sick, although I'm not sure if that actually happens. In the end, we tried to drink it but ended up throwing out most of the bottle :(. There is really no need to drink unappealing wine.

Fredericksburg Trip

Stephen and I went to Fredericksburg last Friday to pick up our February wine club shipment from Becker Vineyards. Along the way we stopped at Texas Hills Winery, which is probably one of my favorites in Fredericksburg. They have a really great kick butt cab, orange moscato, and shiraz. They have a $5 tasting fee, which is refunded if you buy any bottle, so we usually end up doing that. This time we bought a half sized bottle of moscato that I thought my mom would like.

We also stopped at the Lost Creek tasting room, where we met a very nice guy who knew a ton about wine. He was the buyer for the tasting room and his job was to visit all the Texas wineries and decide which wines to sell there. How amazing is that! We ended up buying a somewhat expensive bottle of wine from Perissus, which I had never even heard of. It was SO good, more on that in a later post. Ok, already we have bought 2 bottles and we haven't even picked up the 3 we came for!

Whenever we go to Fredericksburg we try to find a new place to try, so this time we wanted to check out the William Chris winery, which is somewhat new. Apparently one of the guys from Woodrose Winery works there now and when we walked in, he actually recognized us! We ended up not staying and tasting their wines because they were 4 tastes for $10. Who do they think they are? Napa?

We also stopped at Pedernales Cellars, which is another place we had never been. This place was a little pricey too, at $12 for 9 wines. Honestly, there was nothing amazing there and we ended up just wasting our money :(.

We decided to save Becker for last, so we went into town to our favorite store that we call "the sample place". I don't even remember the name of this store but there are seriously HUNDREDS of samples of mustards, jellies, dips, salsas, hot sauces, etc. We filled up, checked out another wine store in town with samples, and then headed back out to Becker to pick up our wines.

(here is a picture of us in front of Becker 3 years ago! Wow!)

The cool thing about being in the Becker wine club is that you get to taste their wines for free when you come. Usually, there is a $10 fee for 6 tastes, so we end up getting $20 worth of tastings for free. We share each tasting also, so that way we each get to taste 12 wines. I was a little disappointed to learn that although wine club members save 20% on their wines, there is a $5 processing fee added on to each shipment. Also, we get 3 wines every 3 months, and I am usually charged between $50 - 70, which seems pretty high for only 3 wines. What they usually do is put on of their expensive ones in there and then a medium priced one and a cheaper one.

Here is what we got in our February shipment:

We got an albarino (meh), a barbera (yum!) and the dark one in the middle is a reserve merlot. I was a little disappointed again, because I probably would not have picked those wines and yet I had to pay for them. On our way back home Stephen and I discussed probably quitting the Becker wine club, since we have tried everything they have multiple times and are getting a bit tired of it. Also, we have just accumulated so many wines over the years that we want to only be adding wines that we truly love.

Printhe Shiraz Viognier

This shiraz is from my Christmas wine pack. We have really not kept up with drinking one a month, but at this point we will just stretch it over 2 years instead of 1. I was very excited to try this wine, because Printhie makes a chardonnay which is one of the ONLY chardonnays I like. Just like the chardonnay, this shiraz has some viognier mixed in (5%). I liked this wine a lot, but I couldn't taste the viognier at all (no suprise, really). I immediately thought it had a creaminess to it, and an almost vanilla flavor. It was pretty sweet as well, and an overall pleasure to drink.

One interesting note though: this wine had a ton of sediment! Look at all this sediment when the bottle was finished...

Battle of the Blancs

So I decided to do a side by side tasting and open 2 bottles of sauvignon blancs at the same time and compare them. We decided on 2 random bottles we had, a Kato New Zealand one and a Cameron Hughes wine from the Russian River Valley. Stephen poured us each a small glass of both and we tasted them. The interesting part is that I didn't know which glass was which. Here were my thoughts:

Wine #1:

• pale yellow
• bad smell
• watery flavor, not very good on first taste
• more of an alcoholic burn
• more drinkable though, like a watered down lemonade
• could possibly be confused with a pinot grigio
• after drinking it a bit, I prefer this one since it's simpler

Wine #2:

• dark, bright yellow
• green pepper smell
• very strong taste - maybe too strong with food
• very distinct sauvignon blanc
• smells like a pickle, vinegary

Wine #1 turned out to be the Cameron Hughes wine, and Wine # 2 was the Kato. I definitely liked #2 a lot better, which just goes to show that not all Cameron Hughes wines are terrific. I must say though, that we both tried these wine a day or two later and I thought the CH one was better than it was on the first day. 

Joh. Jos. Christoffel Erben Riesling

I'm not even sure if that is the official name of this wine, there are so many things on the label! We originally opened this wine to use a little bit in some cooking, but it turned out to be sweet and not dry like we thought. We didn't know that much about it, and just got it at the Grapevine sale a year or so ago. It turned out to be very yummy! It seems a bit heavy and sweet, which is not how I'm used to rieslings tasting. It has a very honey like flavor, and is very rich. It is only 9.5% alcohol and very drinkable. I believe this was a bit pricey although I have no idea this long after we bought it. When I looked it up online, the only place I found said it was $40 which means we prob bought it for $25 or so. Although it is pretty good, I definitely would not buy it for that again.

Cambiata Tannat

My best friend in the whole world has moved back to Austin! I am beyond excited, and so I went over to his place to hang out. We are both big wine lovers so we decided to share a bottle. He showed me his collection and we decided on a wine I had never heard of before - a tannat. Apparently this wine is pretty hard to find, and only a few places carry it. He warned me that it would be intense and I almost wanted to wait and try it with food sometime, but we decided to forge ahead and try it. This wine was very good! I am writing this review after the fact, so unfortunately I don't remember specific flavors. However, I remember it being very bold and rich definitely a new type of wine I would like to try again!

Nautilus Sauvignon Blanc

Now THIS is a wine. I have had this wine a few times before, once at McCormicks and Schmidt, and another at a wine bar. Perhaps even a third time at House Wine, I don't remember though. I finally bought Stephen a bottle for his birthday last May and we just got around to drinking it. To me, it is the perfect sauvignon blanc. Sauv blancs are tricky, because sometimes they taste like the infamous cat pee, or green peppers, or water, or occassionally a wonderful blend of citrus. This wine has wonderfully balanced fruit flavors and goes well either with food or completely on it's own. For $17, I will definitely be getting this wine again.

Texas Hills 2005 Syrah

Stephen and I have had this wine for probably 3 years or so and decided we really needed to go ahead and drink it. Texas Hills is quickly becoming one of our favorite Texas wineries, since almost all of their stuff is so delicious.

My thoughts on this wine are that it is VERY good. I thought it was highly acidic, which I like, and has a bit of a tomatoey flavor. Almost a little V8 like, and I don't actually like V8 but I loved this wine. It was also a bit herby. Overall it was just so so good, and Im pretty sure they don't sell the 05 anymore, but I've tasted the more recent syrahs also and they are very good as well.