I’m not a big fan of French wines. But my wife was grilling out steaks, so thought this might be a good pairing. Unlike many “Old World” Cabernets, this wine…
I love Rioja wines. To me, it is Spain in a bottle. I like it is a wine that appeals to all types of wine drinkers. I love they let it mature in the barrel. When you open a bottle, it just needs to breathe a bit; it rarely needs decanting. To quote the late great Orson Welles, “Good wine”–<heavy breath, the dude was wicked overweight>–“takes time.” –<dramatic pause>.
I love great “value” wines. For a wine drinker, there are few things better than buying a low-cost bottle of wine, opening it, and having it surprise you, outpacing its cost with good flavor and quality. The 2016 Block & Tackle Cabernet Sauvignon did exactly that for me. I bought this wine at a local wine shop (shout out to Sunset and Vine in Blowing Rock, NC for this selection. Support your local wine shop!). My wife was grilling out some spicy jalapeno burgers. My cab stock was low, so I picked up this bottle for $16 to pair with our meal.
It has been a while since I did a wine review. Like everyone else, life happens, so my time to indulge in both drinking wine AND researching it for a blog post has been limited. So I have just been drinking and skipping the research part!
While I haven’t been posting many wine reviews lately, it hasn’t been because I haven’t been drinking any wine. God forbid! No, I’d been drinking down a lot of my Spanish Tempranillo stock for the last few months. But as this year draws to a close, the Missus and I decided to open a bottle of the prize of my (admittedly) meager wine collection, a 2013 Sea Smoke Southing Pinot Noir. While I hoard my bottles of this wine like Smaug in the Hobbit hoarded dwarven gold, after a crappy 2017 I thought it might be nice to end the year on a high note.