Wine Reviews

In this occasional feature I am going to post my on-and-off wine reviews.

I don't drink wine. I don't know the first thing about wine. The topic of Wine has always loomed before me as a dense and impenetrable thicket of fancy jargon and improbable descriptions and forbidding price tags. Nothing about it seemed the least bit inviting, and so I stuck with cocktails, which (to me) taste better, feel more approachable, and will get you drunk much faster with way fewer calories.

But for the manuscript that I'm currently supposed to be working on (this being the as-yet-nonexistent romance project), I'm going to finally have to get over myself and learn a little bit about wine, if only enough to write characters who also don't know very much but have occasionally tasted a glass or two.

So here are some of the things I've tried, and what I thought each time.


Chateau de Montfort Demi-Sec Vouvray (2015): a "young, bright, green-gold" lightly sweet white wine from the Loire Valley, made with chenin blanc grapes.

Tastes like a springtime full of promise in someone else's life. This person probably owns a bonnet and a basket full of flowers. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney animals sing in her footsteps. She is definitely blonde.


Warre's Warrior Finest Reserve Port (2015): a "classic, elegant, ruby-red" port*.

I don't actually like George Orwell's 1984 very much; in my opinion Orwell is a great essayist but not a great novelist, and that book in particular is, IMO, overrated as hell. The one part of 1984 I *do* like is when Winston finally gets his first taste of wine and, based on having read descriptions in books, he thinks it's going to be sweet and luscious "like blackberry jam" and in fact it is HORRIBLE and he can't believe the disappointment.

That is also how I feel about wine.

Anyway, had Winston tried Warre's Warrior port instead of whatever he actually did drink, he probably would have been a lot less disappointed, because this here is a candy-coated powerhouse slammer of a wine. It is sweet and luscious and also it will bionic elbow smash your face straight into the ground after a few cups.

I'm a fan.

(* -- fn: apparently Warre's is the oldest mark of port in the world, having been in business since 1670. I did not know this when I bought it, since I blind buy all my picks for this project; my selection process was more or less "well it's not $5 but it's also not $150, cool, let's go with it.")


Antoine Moueix La Fleur Renaissance Sauternes (2013): a "yellow-gold dessert wine with notes of apricot and honey." 70% semillon, 30% sauvignon.

Have you ever dug around in the very back of your pantry and found a can of tomatoes that expired three years ago, but you're desperate and hungry RIGHT NOW and you figure canned goods are okay for basically forever, so you go ahead and pop the can and use it to make something anyway? And it has that really weird acid-y metallic aftertaste that makes you realize, too late, that you just made a terrible life decision?

I think of that as Zombie Apocalypse Aftertaste, in honor of all the zombie videogames where people are forever scrounging precious precious 20-year-old cans of tomato sauce and beans. All their food probably tastes that way. They probably think it's awesome.

La Fleur Renaissance Sauternes tastes that way too. It's fine until you get to the aftertaste and then it's all "woah wiat waht."

I dunno if this was a bum bottle or a bum year or a bum brand (could be any of those things, this bottle was $15 but other years of La Fleur go for > $40), but it was Not Good.

Appropriate for toasting your survival in the zombie apocalypse, otherwise I'd say give it a pass.


Bersano Brachetto d'Acqui (non-vintage, like it explicitly says NON-VINTAGE on the listing because they want to be real clear that this is a wine that doesn't get a number): a "sweet, frothy, sparkling wine inflected with strawberries and rosewater."

Straddles the line between red and rose. In the glass it's red, but spiritually it's cotton-candy pink, so I'm gonna call it a rose and y'all can correct me if that's wrong. (It is not wrong.)

This is a really fun wine, which is not at all the same thing as saying it's a *good* wine, because it is not. It's a powderpuff pink wine in a powderpuff pink cashmere sweater and powderpuff pink marabou heels, and if you tried to subject her to a serious analysis she would demand you stop this car RIGHT NOW, I'M GETTING OUT, because clearly you'd be making fun of her in the most mean-spirited way.

There is nothing serious about this wine. It's lightweight and low-alcohol and fizzy and pretty perfect for a summer night out grilling, because if you don't want to roast marshmallows with the kids then you can have a glass of this stuff instead and it'll be pretty much the same thing.

I think I'm going to write a wide-eyed naive minor character into this manuscript solely so that I can have her mistake a Brachetto sparkly for Champagne. Seems like a reasonable mistake to make at 17, whether you're having your first drink in 1933 or 2017. This is what Champagne *should* be, at least when you're 17.


Barao de Vilar Porto (2011): a "hugely dense wine with immense ripe black fruit and dusty tannins."

I was pretty excited for this one because it was a moderately expensive port (at $70, the second-priciest wine I've bought for this project) and got a rating of 96/100 from Wine Enthusiast magazine, which means it's "top rated" so I was all like "sweet, this one's gonna be AWESOME" and I put it aside to crack open after my Third Circuit argument.

you can see where this is headed

This was my biggest disappointment thus far. It is worse than the Zombie Apocalypse bottom-shelf Sauternes, which I actually bought with the full and deliberate knowledge that it was going to be a bottom-shelf dud. This one I expected to be good, and it probably [i]is[/i] good (I dunno, I'll ask some of my friends who actually know things for second opinions), but it is not good to me personally.

Let me rewind here: So way back when, a long long time ago, I used to be in the Conservative Party in college (yeah yeah I know). This was partly because I thought it would be an interesting sociological experiment (WHO EVEN ARE THESE PEOPLE) and partly because I had the hots for this one guy who I'm pretty sure was slightly afraid of me, which of course only made me vastly more into him.

So anyway I was the only non-white person in the Conservative Party and they had all these amazingly hilarious meetings and club rituals that are exactly what you're probably imagining they are (if you're imagining a bunch of dopey 19-year-olds hanging out in Mory's Temple Bar wearing velvet-trimmed smoking jackets and slippers while puffing on cigars and drinking bizarre concoctions out of a double-handled silver chalice then yep, bingo, you've nailed it).

And there was this one dude who was the absolute living embodiment of the Unfortunate Facial Hair Libertarian and he looooved to drink port and bloviate on his political beliefs and hit on girls (whom he clearly expected to be impressed by the first two things), and he was not good at any of those things, and also even as a dopey 19-year-old it was evident to me that libertarians were possibly the most willfully clueless political alignment you could be.

I was not a big fan of that dude. I was also not a big fan of the port he liked to ask girls to sample.

Unfortunately for the version of me that exists some fifteen years later, it turns out that guy had terrible taste in politics but pretty good taste in port (both of which I will attribute to his parents, because he had nothing developed of his own), and Barao de Vilar Porto (2011) is a straight sensory flashback to me trying to fend off a 19-year-old legacy admission with bad facial hair in the sample room of a Connecticut cigar bar.

PASS.