A tasty sweet wine that’s hard to pronounce

One of our favorite recipes is best paired with a sweet wine, which often means either a sweet Riesling (Rieslings can be either sweet or dry) or a Gewürztraminer. A few nights ago we had our favorite tortellini and prosciutto in a parmesan cream sauce and paired it with a 2006 Maryhill Gewürztraminer with good success.

Gewürztraminer is a tasty wine varietal whose name probably prevents more people from trying it. Pronounced “ga-VERTZ-trah-mee-ner” -- or the shortened “ga-VERTZ” -- it is a white wine that is very easy to sip. Gewürztraminer grapes are actually light purple instead of green, and they grow best in colder climates (like its origins in Germany). Gewürztraminers typically smell very fruity and aromatic and taste lightly sweet. They go great with Asian and spicy foods.

The Maryhill Gewürztraminer was very nice. This prominent winery in Washington State along the Columbia River Gorge is known for making solid wines at affordable prices. We found it well-priced at $10 on sale from a local grocery store.

The 2006 Gewürzt’s smell and taste were well-matched, both screaming of apricot. The nose (smell) also had just a touch of a woody or oakiness, and the sweet fruity taste lingered with a nicely long finish. Not only was this a tasty wine with our dinner, it was also great for sipping after our tortellini was long gone. If it erred either direction, it might have been a tiny bit too sweet for our dinner.

One note: it was very important to keep this wine chilled. As it warmed up, it lost some of the crisp fruitiness. Your Two Wine Nuts are not terribly fancy people so we do not own an ice bucket for chilling our wines. However, we do have several very handy cooler sleeves that can be purchased at places like Bed Bath & Beyond or online at Amazon (search “wine chiller sleeve”).

We keep the sleeves in the freezer and pull them out whenever we have a bottle that needs to be kept cool. Simply slide the bottle in the sleeve and voilà. They typically cost less than $10 and are well-worth having on hand.

A Pizza Wine Zinfandel

In a previous post, we recommended a Cabernet Sauvignon by Black Mountain Vineyard. We found online reviews supporting their Zinfandel so we decided to give it a try. Verdict: So far you can’t go wrong with Black Mountain!

The 2005 Black Mountain Vineyard Cramer Ridge Zinfandel was a fun, everyday wine. It had a dark ruby red color and lots of cherry flavor. We picked up some black pepper taste somewhere in the middle, and the finish had a slight sour cherry flavor. It wasn’t a particularly complicated or bold wine. It was young and tangy and easy to drink.

Like its Cabernet brother, the Black Mountain Zinfandel would be a great pizza wine. It would also be a great wine for those folks who want to drink one glass of red wine a day for health without breaking the bank. For just $6 at Trader Joe’s, the Cramer Ridge Zin is a great buy.

New to us: White Merlot

Some of our best wine finds have been as a result of eavesdropping. Our first was when we overheard some people in a restaurant raving about a Cabernet Sauvignon called Silver Oak. Being very new to wine, we did not realize as we scribbled a note on a napkin that Silver Oak is a rather upper-end trophy wine that is not for beginners. Tasty indeed but very much a special-occasion wine for people who have been around the stuff for awhile.

So with a good track record and a sense of adventure, we waltzed over to Wal-Mart after overhearing a nearby diner rave about the White Merlot to be found there. We had heard of White Zinfandel but not White Merlot so we were very curious.

A word about these white wines made from red grapes. Yes, Zinfandel comes in red, too! Actually, Zinfandel is traditionally a red wine but it was made commercially famous in the white (or, more technically, pink) version. How does a red grape make a white wine? It’s all in the skins.

Grape skins give wine its color (among other things). After grapes are picked and the juice is squeezed out of them, the winemaker decides whether to toss away the skins that are left behind or let the skins hang out in the juice for a while. When making white wines, the green skins are tossed away almost immediately. When making red wines, the red skins may linger with the juice for several weeks. So what about these pink wines like White Zinfandel or Rosé or White Merlot? The red grapes are pressed and the skins hang out with the juice for less than a day. Just enough time to give some flavor and a hint of reddish color, resulting in that pretty rosy pink.

As promised, Wal-Mart offered a 2006 Beringer White Merlot. How did we like it? We didn’t. But, we need to say we are not big fans of White Zinfandel either. If you like White Zins, you might like White Merlot.

The White Merlot’s color was its best feature; we should have taken a photo before we opened the bottle. It was a pretty, light red color similar to a cough drop. The nose (smell) was sweet and a bit alcohol-y. It reminded us of a drugstore perfume. As for the taste, it was very thin and did not have much of a finish; the taste did not linger at all. The flavor was sweet like a flat wine cooler. And in fact, that might be how we would most enjoy this White Merlot – mixed with 7-Up as a wine cooler or sangria for a patio party. At $5.49 at Wal-Mart it was a fun experiment but we won’t be going back for more.

A nice red blend for under $10

Thanks to a recent wine class, your Two Wine Nuts discovered a new everyday red that will go with a variety of meals.

CMS by Hedges in Columbia Valley (Washington) is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah – hence the C-M-S name. According to the back label, this 2006 red is 52% Cabernet Sauvignon, 44% Merlot, and just 4% Syrah. This is pretty typical for blends, in that one or two varietals are dominant and the rest are marginal additions to help add color or flavor or body.

The back label also has an unusual explanation. It says: “This wine may occasionally show a deposit of natural tartaric acid crystals, a result of Hedges’ winemaking philosophy of less intervention, and less filtration of naturally occurring grape components. They are totally harmless.”

As hobby winemakers, we can tell you we had these crystals form in our early vino efforts and had to offer similar explanations. The crystals look like little floaty things and they will somewhat disappear if you shake the bottle a bit before opening. But that is purely for aesthetics. The crystals won’t hurt you nor will they impact the flavor of the wine. However, your Two Wine Nuts view the presence of these crystals as more of a sign of cheap (on a commercial scale) wine making and less an indication of organic, green methods. There is an easy way to prevent the crystals from forming. The wine simply needs to be cooled considerably (close to freezing) for a week or two during the winemaking process. This causes the crystals to collect at the bottom of the container/vat allowing the wine to be siphoned into a new container leaving the crystals behind. Homemade efforts may not allow the space or resources to stabilize the wine to this level. However, we feel commercial wines should.

That being said, we like this wine! At $9.99 at Trader Joe’s, CMS is an accessible wine for sipping or a casual dinner with friends. It smells primarily like a Cabernet Sauvignon – berries, some cherry, some plum. Taste-wise, it is not as heavy and full-bodied as a Cab but it is easy to sip for folks who consider themselves wine drinkers. However, this wine might be too astringent for the occasional wine drinker or for those who much prefer whites over reds.

A white pizza wine

While flipping through the Sunday supplements last weekend, one of your Wine Nuts came across an ad for the newest wine marketing ploy by Cost Plus World Market. Seemingly interested in joining the Trader’s Joe bandwagon of store-specific wine offerings, World Market is now touting three varietals creatively named as fun twists on said varietals. Being dedicated wine tasters – and suckers for a good marketing scheme – we dutifully purchased the three offerings and will review them as we sample them. Tonight our dinner suggested a nice Chardonnay was in order so we opened up our newly acquired bottle of 2006 Chard-on-yeah!. Here’s what we found.

In short, this wine is a great example of a white pizza wine. By that we mean an affordable, drinkable, unassuming, inexpensive wine to enjoy everyday. No special occasion needed. Typically, since pizza has tomato sauce, our favorite pizza wines are red wines. Tonight we found the white equivalent.

The label defines Chard-on-yeah! as “…an expression of joy upon discovering the pleasures of unoaked Chardonnay!” Since your Two Wine Nuts are not big fans of traditionally oaked, buttery California Chardonnays, we were hopeful that we’d find lots of crisp fruitiness in this unoaked version. And upon sniffing, that’s exactly what we found. But upon tasting, we were left sort of wanting more. While it definitely lacked the heavy butter and oak we tend to steer away from, this 2006 Chardonnay from Monterey County was largely flat and limp. It had some hints of fruit but mostly this wine was unobtrusive and inoffensive. It showed a bit more interest when paired with our pesto chicken, but mostly it was just a casual easy wine that didn’t get in the way nor distract from the conversation or the meal.

Would we buy it again? Probably. At $9.99, it’s a good wine to keep on hand for casual meals that call for a white wine. But we’re unlikely to bring it out when we have company or when we want a good example of a nice, fruity, complex, unoaked Chardonnay. Certainly worth a try but keep your expectations in check.

A Good Introduction to Whites

As mentioned in a previous post, we recently picked up two bottles of wine while shopping at Target. While we weren’t that jazzed about Folie à Deux’s red version of Ménage à Trois, the California White Table Wine version turned out to be OK.

The first thing we noticed about the white 2005 Folie à Deux Ménage à Trois was its color. It was a very pretty, clear light yellow. It looked a lot like pear juice. The smell was very pleasant, too. It smelled sweet, like apricots and orange blossoms. Before looking at the label, we thought the wine smelled like a Viognier or a Sauvignon Blanc. Actually, the three grapes that comprise this ménage à trois are Chardonnay, Moscato, and Chenin Blanc. The Moscato and Chenin Blanc grapes explain the sweet smell.

Moscato is a grape typically used in light, sweet dessert wines. Moscatos are often just a hint fizzy and frighteningly easy to drink. We’ll review one of our favorite Moscatos as it gets closer to summer. Chenin Blanc wines are also a bit on the sweeter side, although they are not dessert wines. The first wine one of your Wine Nuts started drinking way back when was a Callaway Chenin Blanc. It was just sweet enough to be drinkable for a Wine Nut in the Making. And this white Ménage à Trois shares that characteristic.

Overall, we would describe the taste of this wine as a bit watery, bland, and lacking pizazz. It’s not offensive; there’s just not a lot to it. On the plus side, it is not harsh or acidic or alcohol-y. For this reason, we think this wine would be great for someone who is new to wine. It’s just sweet and easy enough to be enjoyable if most wines make you pucker your lips and say, “Yick.”

We think this wine is a little steep at $10. For $5-$7, we would keep it on hand for guests who aren’t Wine Nuts but want to join in the fun. Like its red brother, this Ménage à Trois can be found at Target and World Market. And it’s a better buy than the red.

A Red that Misses the Target

Last week while we were at Target, we spotted some wine from a winery we used to know. Folie à Deux used to be a fun boutique wine whose winery was a small farm house on a side road in Napa. Now that we can find their wine in Target and World Market for $10, we’re not sure how boutiquey Folie à Deux is any more. Hoping for the best we picked up a bottle of red and a bottle of white. Last night we opened the red version of 2005 Folie à Deux Ménage a Trois. We were disappointed.

“Folie a deux” is French for “a madness shared by two” or “a shared fantasy.” We won’t bother to define “ménage a trois” other than to say in this context it means the wine is a blend of three different grapes. This “California Red Table Wine” is a blend of Zinfandel, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. It sounds promising, doesn’t it?

The look and smell were what we’d expect from of blend of those three grapes. The wine was a deep, rich, purple-red, and it smelled like a nice heavy Cabernet – some berries, some oak, a tiny bit of chocolate or coffee. But the taste was disappointing. It was sweeter than we were expecting, almost like one of those jug wines from long ago. It was also rather light and the taste disappeared very quickly. We expected a lot more flavor and interest from a Zinfandel-Merlot-Cabernet blend, even at $10 a bottle. In our opinion, you can do a lot better for $10 – and probably even for $5-$7.

We still have the white to try. Stay tuned.