In another 4 days, we’ll be having another wine taste, so again I need to do a blog for the previous one (I really should’ve gotten this done much earlier) Maybe I should simply blog while we are having the wine. But then I’m not sure if there will be space for my laptop, with all the wine glasses and food on the table. This GINI time we had a pretty good turn out; 11 people were drinking this time. However, unlike previous meetings we had, this time we didn’t have a specific type of wine to try. Instead, Vincent W picked a few from the newly releases from LCBO. So we tasted 4 different wines, 3 of them are red and one is white. And since they are so different, we didn’t bother to cover up the label, or ranking them as well (although I think majority of us like the white wine a lot) And because the wine are so different, Vincent W suggested us to try them in a particular order, basically the stronger the taste, the later.
First bottle is a Chianti. In the past, I posted whole bunch of information of each bottle. But now, I’m slowing migrating all those information to Flickr, a photo web site. So if you click on the picture above now, it’ll open up another window to Flickr and the page with that photo. We found this one quite fruity, but also tasted like wet leather (not exactly everyone’s favorite taste)
Second bottle is from a region called Madiran in south west part of France. You can find more information here on this region. All Madirans must contain 40-60% of the local grape Tannat. I have not heard of this wine region, so it’s neat to have another geographical lesson. This bottle has a distinct taste, we thought it tasted like something out of a open bamboo shoots can. Only us Chinese can describe taste that way. Again, not exactly our favorite taste coming from a wine.
The last red we tried was a Shiraz called the Dead Arm; maybe it’s describing arms of the people after picking all the grapes. It’s definitely not as spicy as the usual Shiraz we tried before. In fact, I thought it was a little meaty, taste I find in Pinot Noir.
Finally we tried the lone white wine, a Pinot Gris Vendange Tardive, and it has this great apricot aromas. Good thing we were saving this for last to try. The French words “Vendange Tardive” we see on the label actually means “Late Harvest”. So we can expect it to be quite sweet and it was lovely. Every one of us like it almost like a dessert wine, but not that sweet. Interestingly, we tried a Pinot Gris from the same label earlier this year, and we liked that one too.
