Belle Pente Pinot Noir 2007 Yamhill-Carlton District. It's my new last name.

So you'll remember how my charming, wonderful sister who is a student at Harvard (that never gets old) was so marvellous and kind a few weeks ago and brought me back FIVE wines from Cambridge. FIVE WINES! AND I got to talk to Eileen the Cardullo's wine steward on the phone so she could pick my brain about my likes and dislikes. So lucky am I! The wine came with strict instructions not to be opened without first consulting Eileen about each bottle's history, terroir etc. Well sorry Lorri and Eileen, but I went ahead and opened a bottle without permission. I figured I have enough drinking experience to wing it.

I brought the Pinot Noir from Oregon to the cottage with me yesterday. More specifically Belle Pente 2007 Yamhill-Carlton District Pinot Noir. Otherwise know as THE BEST WINE I'VE EVER TASTED. No foolin'. For reals. After all those Pinot Noirs I've sifted through, looking for one that didn't disappoint, here was perfection. Its as though Dionysus himself patted me on the backside and whispered in my ear "It's your lucky day." Putti sang heavenly music and shot magic arrows at my heart when I popped the cork from the bottle. It was so glorious, I wanted to dab it behind my ears like expensive perfume. I immediately called Lorri and ranted on my cellphone for 30 minutes about the virtues of this wine. I don't just have love for this wine, I have LUST for this wine. And how cruel that my new liquid love came all the way from Cambridge, and now where the hell am I going to find it here in Ontario? Moan! I find the Alan Rickman/Christian Rinaldo hybrid of wine and I only have access to one bottle! Denied! Unfair! Justice!

People wherever you may be, take my advice. If you love Pinot Noir and want to float on a purple cloud of ecstasy, find a way to buy this wine. Get on a plane, a train, jet skis or omnibus. Have your kind American friends smuggle bottles through an underground railroad. Hide some in your beehive hairdo whilst crossing the border. Just GO and get this wine. It's so, so, so totally worth it.

'Til next time,

B.

Late-Night Ketchup

Too long since the last post, I know. Is it because I haven't been drinking wine? No! Is it because I don't love you anymore? No! My lack of posting is entirely due to my crazy work schedule of late, which leaves me as lively as a dishrag at the end of the day. Fortunately for you, I have insomnia, so what better time to play catchup and fill you in on the wines I've been tasting.

Let's get the baddies out of the way first. I've been craving a well-made Pinot Noir lately, and have had spotty luck. If you're breezing by the Vintages section at your LCBO and come across Rodney Strong's Estate Vineyards 2008 or Mike Weir Wine's VQA Niagara Peninsula 2008 Pinot Noir, let that breeze blow you right on by. The Rodney Strong was a but thin and unbalanced to my palate, and the Mike Weir was downright bitter.

Not to be discouraged I turned to Burgundy to find a better example of that fickle grape, and came out of the store with Le Bourgogne Chanson Pinot Noir. Much better than the previous two examples, this is a nice, light-bodied Pinot Noir, with pleasing minerality and just enough acidity to make it nice and thirst quenching. Cherry and smoke were the predominant flavours that wandered up my nose.

I had dinner last night with one of my true loves, Juanita. Juanita is one of my nearest and dearest, who works a mere few doors down from me but I never see enough of. Well we remedied that by having dinner at the Explorer's Cafe last night, and what a glorious night for a sensory driven woman in her mid to late 30's! I had the pleasure of picking the wine for us (Juanita discovered she likes Viogier!). I opened up my palate with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, but the real star of the evening was the Etim Negre 2007 (Spain). Holy Hannah, what a marvellous wine! A Grenache/Syrah blend, this wine was so beautifully balanced and very round and full in the mouth. Has the unique distinction of being the only higher alcohol wine (14%) I've ever tried without tasting 'hot'. A bit woody, it had notes of blueberry and I think plum. Definately one to put in the wine rack! It was absolutely marvellous with Sardines a la Plancha and Georgian Bay Whitefish with Portabello mushrooms. We luxiouriated over our dinner for 3 hours, catching up on each other's news and talking about everything buy the blue sky. Juanita, you're a great date!

The Sandman is catching up with me, but I do have more to say, so I'll update again after I catch a few Zzzzs. I still have to tell you about the Cambridge 5! Stay tuned..

Avoid the drudgery of wine pouring..

Check out this bad MF'er...


You can purchase this mega-monster of a glass on Amazon. I love the tag line: "Just the thing for a cozy night in." What it should say is: "Just the thing for a night in of lying on the floor, crying and dialing your ex-boyfriend/ex-best-friend/that cool ex-high-school teacher that always 'got' you." And look at the ship weight--2lbs! Alternate arms with every sip and you'll have some wicked pipes in no time (although your abdomen may become distended from, well you know, the liver damage). I mean, think of the possibilities! This way, when you're filling out your Weight Watcher's food diary, you can say you only had one glass of wine and you won't be lying. When you get pulled over you'll be telling the truth when you say "Yesh oshifer, I only had one." Thank-you, I'll be here all night!

Pardon my brain...

Pardon my brain, as it is old. Well, not old-old, just older than it used to be. I used to have a mind as sharp as a tack. Now it's as sharp as a butter knife. Chalk it up to childbearing and 10 years of not sleeping through the night. My poor brain cells were bound to jump ship under such conditions. Oh well, as long as I lose my mind and stay happy, I'll be content whilst the smarts slowly leak out of my brain. If I could just figure out a way to stop losing stuff--like the sheet I filled out from my Viognier tasting--I'd be so much better off. My current strategy for not losing stuff is putting important things on the top of the pile. You can see how well this is working for me.

ANYWAY, here's what I remember from the experience: the wine was Alamos Viognier 2008. Was totally looking forward to it, as Karen MacNeil describes it thusly: " Viognier's appeal is its exotic, honeysuckle, musky fruit, it's round body, and--most of all--its mesmerizingly lanolinish texture." My experience didn't quite match up to that description. In this wine, I tasted apricot/peach and gravel. It was more acidic than I expected. I guessed the alcohol content correctly (ok--I was a half point off, but I'll take it!). Because there were no tasting notes on the bottle, I had to go online to find out what others were saying about this wine. I got the apricot and peach part right, but missed citrus blossom. I read somewhere that someone tasted banana in this wine. Sorry, I disagree. After years of feeding banana to little people--from mashed up baby food to the brown ugly things I find at the bottom of the schoolbag--I consider myself an expert on banana and banana this wine ain't. So all in all, I did pretty well, but I was not wowed by the wine. Try again? Twist my rubber arm!

Moving on, last night we had an awesome dinner of homemade hamburgers (made with pork and Italian herbs), yellow beans in butter and sour cream, Trevor's deadly amazing homemade Cesar salad and corn on the cob infused with thyme from my garden. I washed this delightful meal down with my very first Bordeaux--Chateau Cherchy-Desqueyroux 2005. Yum, yum, yum. I opened this wine and put it in my mason jar decanter about 2 hours before drinking, having read a lot about those 'structured tannins' in Bordeaux wines. Not sure if it was the extended breathing time or just the wine itself, but the tannins were soft, soft, soft, so lovely! It really made for very easy drinking and went so nicely with the pork. I wasn't paying too much attention whilst drinking as I was busy cooking and serving, but the predominant flavour to me was prune. Alcohol measures up to 12.5%, so it wasn't burny in the nose either. Definitely one to repeat! : )

Okay, that's it for me this time 'round! I've enjoyed the Bordeaux so much I'm going to see if I can get my hands on some more. Perhaps another horizontal tasting is in my near future?

Kisses,

B.

Sand, Sweaty Armpits and Dirty Diapers. Yes, those are tasting notes.

Even my crappy cell phone camera cannot diminish the beauty of this scene. I call it "Chamblaise and Chesterfield".

Indeed, I'm not describing a day at Wasaga Beach when I talk of diapers and armpits. Those were precisely the descriptors I would use to talk about wines I've tasted over the last 24 hours.

Now before I launch in, I did do a sort-of blind tasting of Viognier 2 days ago. But I'm skipping ahead a bit, 'cause I've gotta get some other stuff out of the way first, before my thoughts dissipate into the nebulous cloud that is my memory. More on that tasting to come, promise.

If you've been following my blog, you'll know that bald honesty is my new policy, and that I had a heck of a time about a month ago when my marriage seemingly went BP on me. Well I'm here to tell you that my husband and I are officially in the happy camp again. Sorry, Dan the cheese man. You'll have to use those muscular forearms to hold yourself up over some other horny 30-something Canadian woman. But we'll always have Guinness cheese, and that free corkscrew you gave me. *smooch*

ANYway, as I was saying, we're back in marital Pleasantville, doing things like going on actual dates with no children. For reals. AND we're even going to places other than the local pub. AND we're going to places that have a wine list that goes beyond Woodbridge and Yellow Tail. Pair all that up with great make up sex, and you can practically see the hearts and rainbows hovering over the roof of our house.

Last night, our date night landed us at the Explorer's Cafe in Midland. I hadn't eaten there since it opened a couple of years ago. Liked it then, but it never seemed to be open when I was free to go. But, that's a thing of the past: the Explorer's is now open 7 days. You should get your butt down there, because I had the best meal out in years. And best of all, they've got a killer selection of wine. GOOD wine.

For starters I wanted something light and enlivening, so I picked Masi Mascianco Pinot Grigio/Verduzzo. (The wine list said 2008, but when I asked to see the bottle it was 2009. Tsk tsk!) Verduzzo was new to me, and I always love tasting grapes I've never had before. Peoples, from me to you, I could drink that stuff all summer. This was a very lively wine, that even gives you a million little prickles on your tongue, as if to say "WAKE UP MOUTH!". Just a little more than medium acidity, this wine has the same effect on your mouth as Sweet Tarts (and tasted a bit like them too). Fruit flavours were apricot/peach; the non-fruit descriptor I came up with was sand. I guessed medium alcohol (13%). Num num num! This wine can be found at our puny lcbo, and almost certainly at that bigger, sexier lcbo near where you live ('cause every lcbo is bigger and sexier compared to Midland's).

Next up, Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Villages 2008. I really wanted a glass of red (for health reasons! Gotta get in that resveratrol every day!), but was having seafood fettuccine, so Beaujolais was the best I could come up with. Truthfully, not sure if this wine was spoilt or not. The overwhelming flavour, well I would charitably describe it as ripe cheese curds, and uncharitably as a Frenchman's sweaty armpit. I've always read that spoilt wine tastes like mouldy cardboard or the barn, but sweaty flesh? In amongst the cheese curds I detected violets and raspberries. I didn't finish the glass.

Lastly, a lovely near and dear friend had me taste her mils' home brew today, just for fun. Her charitable description was 'swill'. I was treated to a mouthful of something called 'Chamblaise' (apparently this is not a grape, but rather a trademarked name of some DIY wine kit company). Pale yellow. Aromas of dirty diaper. As flat and varied as tap water. Sewage aftertaste. Sweet merciful Jebus, people. DO NOT HOMEBREW! Seriously, do you think you can do better than winemakers who do this FOR A LIVING? Do you cut your own hair too? Life is too short for bad wine!

Tomorrow: Viognier tasting. Night night buttercups.

B.

Cambridge! Sob!

My sister is in Cambridge. Cambridge! *sigh* Best. Roadtrip. Ever. The company, the wine, the cheese, the photo-ops, even the weather was so perfect. It's my new Mecca; with any luck I'll get to make another pilgramage in the near future. In the meantime, I am full of the sighs, because my wicked sister just sent me a teasing message from Cambridge; she's there on her course (my sister's at Harvard! That never gets old) for the next couple of weeks. If only I could blow off real life and fly down for the weekend. *SIGH AGAIN*

So Lorri has had the pleasure of re-connecting with Eileen the brilliant wine steward and Dan the muscular-forearmed cheese man. Eileen, if you're reading, I just know you are the Diana Barry to my Anne Shirley. Or you can be Anne, I don't care. I so loved the wines you steered me towards. If my wicked sister decides to do me a kindness and bring back a bottle or two of liquid nectar, please do the picking for her! Not that I don't trust Lorri (she's got great taste. Yes I'm sucking up), but let's face it, Eileen, your wine chops are smokin'. To give you an idea of how my taste runs, on my last visit, I LOVED the Fleur Pinot Noir and Aia de Colombi Falanghina. I tend to prefer cool climate wines. Anything you pick will be glorious. Dan, if you're reading, if you could pose for a picture for my sister, that would be great. If your shirt happened to fall off right before hand, that'd be okay too.

Anyhoo, I have been trying stuff lately but not posting. Not that it matters, because I think about 6 people read this blog. But no matter--I will have new wine reviews coming shortly. Tonight I'm trying Viogner for the first time! Karen MacNeil describes this wine as a supple gymnast, so I'm keen to try it.

'Til next time,

B.

Pass the corkscrew, Rhett: the newbie tries Shiraz.

My extremely hilariously funny Aunt Nancy has this great line for dodos who ask questions with obvious answers. "Are you new?" is her version of 'duh!', and Nancy if you don't mind I'm totally stealing this line from you. "Are you new?" is what the wine gods sneered at me as I fell in love with my first few sips of Shiraz. Oh heavens! Mama's got a brand new bag!

Forgive me if you're one of those readers who hates it when people personify wine. If you dislike this trend in wine description, you should probably go read another blog, 'cause I'm not likely to stop likening wines to men any time soon. And this wine is totally my Rhett Butler. Now I've had Shiraz (Syrah) in blends before, but this is the first time I've experienced this handsome devil on its own. Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible, calls this grape 'manly yet elegant'. That description is so totally spot on.

The bottle that landed in my lap was from a winery in Beamsville called Peninsula Ridge (2008 vintage). Beamsville must be an oasis of vines and men in chaps to produce such wine. I'll book my tour presently. In the meantime, I'll enjoy this wine and its leathery, smoky scent, with a surprising berry-plum ka-boom! on the tongue on the first sip--and every sip thereafter. Such a sneaky wine, it doesn't taste like it smells! It was a bargain at $14.95; I found it in the Ontario wine section at our puny LCBO.

If you need me, Rhett and I will be cuddling on the couch.

'Til next time,

B.