Wine and Rum....

I love the vine from St.Estephe, Paulliac etc. not cheap - but you can some time find the second vine much cheeper, and sometimes they are as goos as the real vine.

 

360stimo:

Have you been able to determine the damage to the wine yet? Too bad I'm about 6 time zones from you in Asia, I would be willing to help evaluate (drink) to determine the exact extent of the losses.

Jeff

 

Ron Zacapa is my favorite sipping rum. When I am in Belize I stock up on One Barrel Rum. On my last visit, I picked up some Cuban rum. Pretty tasty, but I still prefer Ron Zacapa.

 

FYI, McCormick and Schmidt's (nice fish restaurant chain) puts Captain Morgan's rum in their sangria (wine and fruit drink). So you get what you love all in one glass.

 

My suggestions on wine would be to ask your local wine retailer what he suggests. Tell him what you'd like to try, and how much you'd like to spend. Then go home and drink it. If you like it, go back and buy more. If not, start over. The key is, buy more of the wine you like when you find it. You may never see it again. When a new vintage of a wine you like is released, try it. If you like it, buy more. Over the years you'll learn what you like and what you don't, both in varietal and vintner. If you never leave a store with fewer than 2 bottles, your collection will grow.

When I met my wife, I didn't like wine. I learned to like reds, then I slowly started accumulating. When I moved to my existing house in 1999, I had 38 bottles of wine. I thought it was a lot. I bought wine as I outlined above, and as of about a month ago, I was closer to 400 bottles.
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jimpo1,

Know that cellar creep issue well. We may be at 900 bottles now. Did an tasting event in January and way, way overbought - I had been enjoying to much of the sampling and Miriam had returned to the room when it was time to do the order forms.

Turn your temperature down a bit - should be 55 degrees not 60 on that thermometer leaning up against the rack straight ahead.

Looks like someone likes the Moet just a bit.

One of the hardest things when starting out in wine tasting is getting opportunites to taste older vintages and experience how wine evolves. To do means trying to get into different more serious tasting events. I was furtunate that at the time I was in Los Angeles and a wine/liquor store in Glendale regularly tasted older vintages in verticals and horizontals. Thise tasting cost money but were well worth it.

Jeff

 

Cellar creep! I like that term, I think I'll use it.

A few weeks ago I realized I had a lot of wine I wanted to drink, so called some wino friends and arranged a red meat/red wine dinner. 4 of us managed to get rid of 6 bottles. Good thing the cab driver didn't attend! We started with good bottles, moved to great bottles, then finished off with ok bottles. Our taste buds were dead by the end of the night anyway.

 

jimpo 1,

Understand well finishing with the lesser items as the pallet can get completely blown after a while.

We have had Harlan one time. It was at the Napa Wine Auction and the host of our table was the wine maker for Paraduxx. His wife worked for Harlan so he knew which table she was at; a ways from our table. So at nearly the end of the night he wanders over to her table to get the last drops of the Harlan from that table. We were happy to get to try some but after: lunch at Constant Diamond doing a vertical, back to Rancho Caymus where the owners had sent over a tasting table of Flora Springs, then all the wine at the big bottle ball we can't say anything about the Harlan other than it was red and in our glass.

Luckily during the Wine Auction all the police looking for DUI seem to be scarce.

OK, so during your gathering what did you go through and what was the Wine of the Night?

Jeff

 

first rule of wine:

try everything.


second rule of wine:

buy more if you like it!

srsly... that's all there is to it... except white zin... that's just NASTY!

 

About the flooded bottles...

there's a story about a well known vineyard owner during WWII in France who put his best bottles at the bottom of his pond (if the wine can't get out, the water must not be able to get in). His chateau was about to be occupied by the Germans. One morning his best laid plans were ruined when a german officer woke up and strolled outside to find the pond's surface covered in labels.