Tonight the wife and I went to the Wine Tasting event hosted by LARC, her former employer. It was a good time last year, and it was a nice excuse for her to see a lot of her former coworkers again since she’s been at her new job for about 6 weeks or so. She never had a problem with the people she worked with, but the commute was hell and the new job looked to be very promising for her in multiple facets which was why she had left. And the added bonus this year was that she wasn’t “working” the event either, which meant we could spend all our time there together instead of her having to make sure only VIP’s made it into the VIP room or taking tickets from people at the door.

This being their second year putting on the event, it was obvious they had learned some things from last year. Number one, they brought in bottled water which was clutch. Last year they didn’t have anything bottled on hand and most of the people there were complaining about the water in the pitchers “tasting funny” since it was, truly, just tap water from a kitchen in the back of the Elks Lodge where the event was held. They also brought in some beer as well, which was a nice change of pace even though I am a wine fan. One of the distributors had some Dogfish Head on hand, where I got to experience their seasonal Aprihop for the first time. WOW is all I can say; what a great brew. It’s very reminiscent of Magic Hat’s #9, only it seems to hit all the right notes even better than the #9 does it. Another “Apricot Pale Ale”, Aprihop just really surprised me and I will definitely be buying some of this in the near future.

Last year I came away from the event with two wines I simply had to pick up after having them at the tasting: I will also preface most of the rest of this post by saying my wife and I are primarily white wine drinkers, so don’t expect a lot of input on the red wines that were at the tasting. Clean Slate is a gold-medal winning German Riesling which just does everything right, and the Viognier by Pepperwood Grove really helped to turn me on to Viogniers on the whole. Neither are what you would call “expensive” either, by any stretch. The Clean Slate carries a sticker at or around $10-$13 per bottle (if you can find it at your local store – fortunately it’s easy enough for most distributors to just pick up the phone and order it for you), and the Pepperwood Grove is actually a value label produced by Don Sebastiani & Sons that you can pick up for $7-$10 per bottle. And again, the Clean Slate is a top-notch Riesling without any of the sharp or dry aftertastes that many Rieslings-gone-wrong possess, and the Pepperwood Grove stands very tall in my opinion against a lot of $15-$25 bottles.

This year if I had to pick a “top two” again, these would be my picks. The first one to catch my attention was from an organic brewing company named Organic Vintages: the Badger Mountain Riesling (~$11-$13) really was quite good and I want to pick up another bottle soon to see how I like it outside of the “tasting” environment. The second was yet another Riesling called Flying Fish [pdf] (~$12-$15), which was a little too “wet” for my liking on a daily basis but was still very tasty and I think would complement certain foods very well. I was mostly surprised that these two were two of my favorites because while I may be primarily a white wine drinker, Rieslings on the whole tend to be very “stereotypical” and have a harsh, tangy/dry aftertaste that really isn’t all that appealing to me. But these two (as well as the Clean Slate) break that mold so I’m opening up to them a little bit more. Who knows, there could be other wines out there that I haven’t been willing to try simply because they were Rieslings and they could have been extremely enjoyable if I had given them a try.

Another thing that was kind of cool was that the Flying Fish, as well as an Argentinian Malbec called High Note ($10-$14), were both only being first publicly tasted (at least locally) tonight at this event. While the High Note wasn’t my cup of tea, I still had to give it a shot knowing it was brand new on the market.

After making our way around the main area we went upstairs to the VIP room to sample some of what they had up there: a lot of red wine dominated the tables in the VIP area so it was mostly a bust for us, but my coworker (who was also there) found a cognac he fell in love with up there so I suppose the trip to the VIP area was worth something to someone in our group anyway. All in all it was a good time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 12:04 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.