First, for the old year! Late December we decided to branch out in our white wine consumption and purchased a Riesling – J. LOHR 2005 Bay Mist Monterey County White Riesling to be exact. (I have no explanation for why we hadn’t had a Riesling in so long, since it’s one of my favorite whites!) It was fabulous – light and fruity with just enough flavorful punch to it! Will be getting this one again, for sure.
And now for the New Year! Okay, technically we drank this on New Year’s Eve, but it was already 2007 in most of the world when we opened the bottle, so it counts. I’d never really had a ‘good’ champagne before so we made sure that we tried it in the store before we bought it. (There was a champagne tasting going on in the store, otherwise I probably would have skipped it. My first champagne experience was a cheap brut extra extra dry that had been sitting outside during a hot summer day, but luckily I wasn’t scarred for life.) This was Chandon’s Riche Sparkling Wine – not very dry at all, which is what we were looking for. It was nicely sweet and bubbly but not excessive, with just enough crispness to give it an edge. I’m pretty certain that sparkling wines pack more of a wallop than an equal amount of non-sparkling wines though – either that or the timewarp of flipping to a new year caused some unanticipated havoc with my brain cells. Perhaps more experimentation is in order. In any case, we declare the Chandon Riche a success as well.
[Tags: wine, riesling, champagne, California, 2007]