Wine Blogging Wednesday is being hosted by Vivi's Wine Journal and the topic is wines to drink with barbecue. This was a good theme for me since we were planning to do some sipping and barbecuing on Canada Day anyway.
The afternoon started with the tasting of a honey wine. My sister took some pictures of this, and the looks on our faces speak much louder than words, so here they are. The captions on the photos are examples of polite phrases to use when tasting wines that one is not overly fond of. One must never say anything negative when in the presence of the winemaker, so one can choose from a whole slew of ambiguous phrases such as "Wow! That's really something!"
Once we determined that the honey wine was not going to provide a suitable pre-meat hot-day sipping wine, we opened up some Merridale ciders and Phillips IPA instead. (I like to drink local cider and beer, given that the local wine...leaves something to be desired.)
When we were ready to eat, we opened up a bottle of Peter Lehmann that my uncle bought for us last week, claiming that it was his current fave. It was the Barossa Shiraz 2003 and everyone liked it. It had a nice blackcurrant flavour and there was a little hint of caramel. It was a lovely compliment to the meat we were chowing on. We had grilled some Galloping Goose loukaniko sausages (pork and lamb), a New York steak, and a bison steak. So, pretty hearty stuff, and the Shiraz really stood up to it.
Then, something terrible happened (we ran out of Shiraz) and so we were forced to open a bottle of Juan Gil Jumilla. We tried this wine at a class on Spanish wines a couple of weeks ago, and it was the favourite, even beating out a much more expensive Rioja. It's 100% monastrell grapes, which is a varietal that I hadn't heard of before. I see from the World Wine Weblog that monastrell is equivalent to mourvedre, which I've only tried in blends, never alone. The author of that blog seems to like the Jumilla as well. I note that a commenter says he found the 2002 much better than the 2003. Well, we were drinking the 2003 and liked it, but wish I could try the 2002 and see the difference for myself.
Interestingly, the label calls the wine Jumilla, which is the name of a region, and, as I understand it, is the typical way for Spanish wines to be labelled, BUT, the website calls it Monastrell, after the varietal. Maybe the PR people at Bodegas Hijos de Juan Gil have clued in to the fact that varietal labelling is easier for North American consumers.
Like the Shiraz, the Jumilla/Monastrell was a good match for the meat, and we greedily finished off the bottle. I asked the other three people at the table to give me a brief synopsis of their experience of the Juan Gil and here are the results:
Appearance
Randal - burgundy
Tobias - garnet
Jeff - ruby
Nose
Me - chocolate, bread
Randal - lilac, blueberries
Tobias - floral
Jeff - blueberries
Taste
Randal - cantelope (!)
Tobias - raspberry
Jeff - cedar
I enjoy drinking wine outside, but there is one problem: glassware. We are at the point now where we have some glasses that we really, really like. Tobias bought me some Spiegelau Bordeaux glasses as a gift when I gave birth to M'hijo. Sahsez bought Tobias some Riedel Riesling glasses for Father's Day. We are simple people, and feel that a set for reds and a set for whites is enough, no need for us to buy separate glasses for chardonnay, syrah, gewurztraminer, etc. . But the problem is, neither of us is willing to take our nice glassware out of doors and risk having it break. So, all outdoor wine drinking is done in our other glasses, and man, it is not nearly as nice. Surprisingly (to me), wines really do taste better in the nice glasses.
Epilogue: Just as things were starting to wind down at our Canada Day barbecue, an awful thing happened: our cat was hit by a car. She's fine, thank goodness, but I didn't know that at the time and this clouded my judgment slightly when I returned from searching for her (she ran off after being hit and we couldn't find her) and Tobias offered me a glass of Mission Hill Reserve Pinot Noir. "This tastes like shitty juice", I said. Clearly my distress was showing, since I didn't call upon any nicer phrases like "Hmm, sweet and light!" to show my dislike of the wine. Now that the cat is back and healthy, though, I should probably give that pinot another try.
