Dinner Blog 4: Boudreaux's Wine Wednesdays

Earlier this semester, my wine adventures took me to Boudreaux's Restaurant right on Main Street here in Blacksburg, Virginia.  This was one of the more off-the-path wine dinners that I've had, not focusing on a particular region or cuisine of wine, and instead just trying to have different flavors of wine with all different kins of foods! This restaurant even touts itself as "Blacksburg’s favorite Cajun Restaurant"

One of the cooler things that I noticed about the menu, right when we sat down, is that their wine menu starts off with "a few words about screw caps - obviously a trend that is on the rise, and that we have discussed in class.  If you have found yourself perusing their wine list, a majority of them do use screw caps and not corks.  It is actually technically called a Stelvin closure, regardless of the brand, and is quickly becoming a standard around the globe.  This is not inferior, as some older wine snobs would lead you to believe, because of the fact that it allows no air at all to get into the wine. Some would argue that no manner of removing the cap with the grace of traditional cork pulling has yet emerged. But, although they were traditionally associated in the US with extremely inexpensive jug wines or even "skid row" wines, the screwcap is making a comeback due to concern about premature (or sporadic) oxidation and cork taint. 


 So, enough about corks. We sat down and looked over the wine list, and tried our best to pick out some wines that we thought would go great with the options of food presented to us - there were about 6 of us so we figured we would each get a separate appetizer, and each get a separate wine, and all trade dishes/wine combinations. :) We actually ended up having even more wine and food than we typically get at the Zeppoli's tastings! And luckily, we decided to go on WINE WEDNESDAYS when the bottles are half off!

The wines we tried were:

Electric City Merlot, 2008, Washington, $$ Bottle 21 Glass 6

 


Just like a lot of the other wines that I've tried this semester, this one comes from Columbia Valley.  I learned from Exploring Wine quizzes last week that the Columbia Valley AVA lies mostly in Washington state, with a small section in Oregon.  I thought that for the price, this wine packed a pretty nice kick. It had a really fruity nose, but tasted more like pepper and it definitely had the "Oak Monster" that Gary V always likes to talk about! I think it went well with this spicy chicken tenders that we got - and it actually enhanced the peppery spiceness of both items (both the wine and the food).

 

Garnacha de Fuego, 2010, Spain, $$ Bottle 20 Glass 5.50


My first and only "Old Vines" wine of the semester, and what a taste one it was! I'm not ever sure that I've had a wine made for the garnacha grape either - it was definitely good, and i looked up what old vine necessarily meant, and I learned that it's made from grapes from vines that were atleast 65-85 years of age - that's pretty old! A glass-coating opaque purple color, it offers up aromas of pure black cherries, that's almost all that I got. It was pretty dense on the palate and remarkably rich for its cheap price, but after all that's Wine Wednesdays for ya! :)


Bridgeview Oregon Riesling, 2009 (But I already reviewed this for a tasting blog separately, so I will focus on the other three.) But it definitely went the best with the crab cake croissant that one of my friends got.




 



Lastly, I requested the Simonet Blanc de BLanc, Nonvintage from France at $20/bottle but they were out. :( Instead I got this lovely gem: in the bargain bubbly category, it’s hard to beat Cava, I've come to learn over the course of this class. It is basically Spain’s answer to Champagne. I’ve tasted many of these over the course of the semester, mostly informally and at government functions in Richmnd, but I've rarely have found one I didn’t like. To paraphrase Animal Farm, “All Cavas are good. Some are more gooder than others.” This year, I found one of those that excels: the Kila Cava 2009, from famed Spanish wine broker Jorge Ordonez. Not only is it a delicious vintage-dated, estate-grown Cava, but it tastes more expensive than its $10 price tag would suggest. It's definitely a great steal - I was surprised that it was involved in Wine Wednesdays because it was somewhat strongly carbonated, but definitely still delicious!

Calimari that we tried with just about all of the wines - definitely went best with the Spanish Garnacha de Fuego.

Emily and I!

Alligator Bites! I didn't like the texture of these - they were extremely gummy. So I only had a a piece or with each one and basically thought that every single one was quite dreadful.

And some pictures with friends to round out the blog post. :)

This is the last blog that I have to make for class, so I would definitely like to thank you all for reading, and I hope you have enjoyed your trip through a small glimpse of wine culture here in Southwest Virginia at Virginia Tech. #boyerwine. :)

Dinner Blog 3: Zeppoli's (April 15)

Aprul 15^th saw the last of the wine tastings I would do as an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, and it was definitely bittersweet. And by bittersweet, I mean delicious.This week, we tried both red and white wines, and I was joined by some old friends - friends from Freshman year, and classmates, Kristin, Sinclair and Melissa. :)

The foods to accompany the wines that we had this week were the same as the previous tasting, but were just as delicious as well.   This week that old addage of 'drink what you like' definitely rang true for me. Matt stressed this throughout the tasting, and really explained to us that it's not about the price or the grape or really even the rating that these wines get - that we should really just go after what we know that our pallates preper. 

So, we began by walking in, and seeing this brand new chalkboard sign which was quite lovely - and a shamless promotion for virginiawine.org. :) I was surprised to see boyer wine on there, instead!

This is Melissa, Sinclair, and Kristin drinking some water and beginning to wait for the tasting to start. We actually got there early that week, unlike most weeks!

This was some crackers, red pasta, and garlic/olive oil bread that we tried ahead of the wines - mostly to check out the flavors of the food. I loved this bread last time, also, and there really is just something to be had in drying out your mouth with that bread but then coming back and having a fantastic, fruity, tasty wine to moisten your mouth and attack your pallate all over again.

 So, overall, I ended up a little buzzy after this tasting because we tried NINE different wines. I am only going to highlight the ones that I appreciated the most, though. The first that I would like to mention was the Muscanti NV Brut Sparkling Wine Penedes Spain. With an alcohol content of 11.5% The flavor of the wine was very citrusy and appley - something like a large lemon combined with a granny smith apple within the wine itself.  The wine was a spanish sparking wine, and thus was not actually a champagne (because it is not from France). The flavors of the wine seemed a little less earthy than a majority of the wines that I have drank so far in my life.  It had a bit of a tart, tingle-like bite at the end of the flavor, and Matt told us that this was attributed to the fact that it is not made in the traditional methode champenoise, which is used for carbonating wines. Instead, it was made with Cava grapes, which are known to have that crisp, acidic bite.

Matt did a great job this semester of leading, organizing and puttin on these wine dinners - this was probably my favorite one so far due to the variety of wines that we were able to try.

As I previously mentioned, the quality of the food was fantastic.  There really is something fantastically intentional about the blending of Italian foods with Italian wine.  Everyone loves Italian food and naturally wants to pair Italian wines with this cuisine. What are the best pairings of Italian wine and food? I'm not really sure but these were fantastic.

 This was my second favorite wine that we tried, and of course it was a Cabernt Sauvignon. This was the San Elias 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon, at 13.5 percent alcohol content, and only eight bucks per bottle.  For some reason the number one word that jumped out at me when I tasted this wine was SOAP. BUT, for some reason, I didn't dislike that, as oddly as that sounds! The scent was very strong, and tasted a lot like strong cleaning product.  After a little bit of research, I discovered that the San Elias Cabernet is the product of Vina Siegel, a winery founded by Alberto Siegal, a Chilean man with German roots. SO that would probably explain my pleasure with the wine - I'm not a big fan of Spanish wines, but I do love a lot of German wines, both white and red.  Today, Vina Siegel has a state of the art winery surrounded by 450 hectares of vineyards, ideally located in the Colchagua Valley. Many different varietals are grown, but their Cabernet Sauvignon stands out from the rest. It's bursting with rich aromas of black cherry and cassis, which lead to a fruit forward palate blended with notes of smoke and spice. Sweet persistence, soft tannins, and pleasant acidity make this wine an excellent pairing for pasta, red meat, and a variety of cheeses - just like what Zeppoli's gave us!

Here is a look at every single wine that we tried on the 15th of April at Zeppoli's Italian Restaurant in Blacksburg, Virginia. 

 The last wine that I would like to go into detail about is the Mars and Venus Merlot 2007 Central Valley Chile, at 13.5% alcohol, and only nine dollars per bottle. This wine was extremely hot - as I think that most Merlot's are. It is actually the house Merlot for the restaurant.  It went particularly well with the cheese ravioli, which I thought was a bit sweet, and it went a step toward balancing out all of those flavors. 

The pesto pieces were delicious, but they ran out of that paste and the bread, so we had to settle on a salad to accompany our final wines. 

Another picture of the Merlot from Central Valley Chile next to the one from Sonoma (Trentadue 2009 Block 500 Merlot Sonoma County California, $18.99/bottle, 14.6% alcohol).

Kristin and I at the end of the night! :)

Tasting Blog 5 (Week 13)

Masquerade 2010 Chardonna - Attimo Winery in Christiansburg VA
Moscato Provincia Di Pavia Castello a Poggio -
Flip Flop Left Coast American Riesling
Meridian Vineyards (California) Sauvignon Blanc 2010
Moda' Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (Italy)

Dinner Blog 2: Palisades, New Zealand Wines

The flag of New Zealand.

This week, we went to the Palisades in Eggleston. What a fun little restaurant! I went with my friends Kristin and Sarah, both students in our class, and I really enjoyed the food that they had there, and the venue seemed like something you would find in rural southwest Virginia. But I'm going to start this blog post off very bluntly - I thought these wine's sucked. :(

It was situated, kind of awkwardly, right next to "Hardware and Farm Equipment...



But the entrance to the restaurant itself was very quaint and something that was actually pretty inviting!





The wines that we tried were particularly from the Marlborough region of New Zealand.



The notes given to us by the waitress, Cara, noted that wine making and vine growing go back to colonial times in New Zealand. James Busby was the first to produce his own wine in the area, but due to economic, legislative, and cultural factors, the spirit of beer and spirit drinking int he area was a marginal activity in terms of economic importance.

In the late 1970s, Marlborough produced a lot of different grapes, and the strong contrast between hot sunny days and cool nights helped extend the ripening period for the grapes. The majority of Marlborough's extensive vineyard plantings are around Renwick, Blenheim, and Cloudy Bay in the Wairau Valley.

On the menu was:


Lamb with Apricot Sauce


Tuna with Sweet Potato Cake & Mustard Butter


Kiwi/Strawberry Gelee



And additionally, I got a Caesar Salad


My friends also got an Artichoke-Red Pepper Dip that is pictured later in the post.

All of the food was delicious - I enjoyed them all infinitely more than the wines, actually. I tasted each wine before the food came out, and I actually enjoyed the wines more with the food, really driving the point home that wine is supposed to be accompanied by food.

The three wines that we had were (from left to right):

Lawson's Dry Hills Sauvignon Blanc, 2011
Spy Valley Risling, 2009
Ponga Pinot Noir, 2010

The Sauvignon Blanc was very florally, and the color was really white, almost like water. It literally tasted like a flower, and to be honest, it was sort of gross. I don't like passion fruit so that could have been why - that was one of the descriptors used in the description of the wine, along with lime zest, stone fruit, and floral aromatic notes - all of which I don't think sound very appealing.

The Riesling was not as sweet as most. It was slightly carbonated, which was very refreshing. It was slightly sugary, but not as sweet as most Rieslings, more like a Chardonnay with a bite of a bit. It had more citrus flavors, and no real florally or apple scent, which was welcoming. There was no real change after tasting the food in the taste of the wine, but it definitely went best with the dessert layer, and went well with the creamy and almost chessiness of the roasted red pepper and artichoke dip.

The pinot was my favorite of the three, by far. It was very much like a pinot noir in the flavor of the grape, and was fairly alcoholic tasting. One of the flavors used was this - A Kola Nut. whatever that is hahaha



It tasted a lot like wild berries, and was even sweeter after the food pairing, especially with the lamb. The Gellee was like a sweet jelly relish. Played well with none of the wines, I realized as I saved the gellee for my last course. It also had strawberry puree which was extremely tasty - until the frozen bottom, which just tasted like frozen juice concentrate. :(

So, overall, the New Zealand wines had more flavors than those of the Italian wines, and are fantastic examples of the fact that wine really was made to go with food. The flavors of the wine were altered by the flavor of the food, and not vice versa - which was something that I experienced in a negative way last week at Zeppoli's while trying the Italian wine collection.

Here are the final pictures of the after-effect of all of the wine and food pairings. :)