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...