Boozy McGuzzles

BOOZE TYPE: Wine
PRICE: $7.99 at Astor Center
RATING: B

I’ve actually bought this wine twice, but only been able to drink it once. For, you see, tragedy struck. When I was home visiting family in Nashville last November, my mom and I swung by her favorite liquor store (where, once, when we were buying several bottles of wine, the clerk said, “Now, y’all want a bag for that or you just wanna drink that here?”) so that I could use my budding wine snobbery to buy a couple of nice things for my family. (My family are more often beer and booze-soaked than wine-drenched, and have taught me respect for cruising the half-off bin and the value of quality box wine.)

I have been working on developing a thing for Spain, so I picked out a mid-priced red (though hell if I can remember the name of it now, which is exactly the reason I started this blog), and also the Gran Feudo Rosado 2005, because it was just so darn pretty. We went home. I put the paper bag with the two bottles in it on the kitchen counter. I turned my back. I heard the crash. Alas, but I had placed the bag down unevenly, and it had toppled over, shattering both bottles on my mother’s very hard kitchen floor. It was a very sad day for wine. We returned to the liquor store and I re-purchased the red.

Gran Feudo got its second chance last week, and this time I did not drop it on the floor. I drank it! As the second bottle of the evening, the memories of it are, uh, not quite so sharp, but it had a nice tart, fruity acidity that went quite well with a vodka sauce pizza. I always expect rosés to be sweet, because, well, they’re just so pretty in pink, but this was fairly sharp and dry.

BUY IT AGAIN: Possibly! A very good under $10 rosé.

BOOZE TYPE: Wine (sparkling!)
PRICE: $6.99 at Astor Center
RATING: B

My best friend and boozing companion, Arielle, was not feeling too chipper, and had wanted to drink Sofia Coppola Champagne, with a straw, out of a little metal can. Because, as you might agree, this is a perfect recipe for making yourself feel better. But alas, that day Astor Center was sold out of the canned version of Sofia, and only had the bottle, which is just so not even nearly as fun. So it was a dejected roam through other sparkly things for us, looking for an intersection of cheap and bubbly. I won’t lie to you, if they sold Cold Duck there, we probably would have bought three bottles.

We ended up peering at the cava section, which I believe was new. I was intrigued, because I thought that word meant some kind of rodent or maybe was Spanish for “rabbit”. I realize now I was thinking of “cavy”, which is another word for guinea pig, and is far less sparkling, and usually not corked (guinea pigs are most often sealed with screw caps.) We had been dawdling in the store for a while, so I pointed at a bottle that hit the center of that Venn diagram that decides most of my alcohol purchases:

This non-guinea pig sparkling wine had little impact on first taste. Arielle and I both took a drink, looked at each other, then said, “Huh.” It was mostly mouthfeel, and little flavor on first blush. Further sips proved it to be nicely dry and crisp, the sort of bubbly that you’d want to drink outside on the Fourth of July while watching fireworks. It gave me a very nostalgic feel for exactly that sort of thing. It had little character or complexity, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, and suspect I will use it as a variation on an old trick I used to do: mixing cheap box chardonnay with nice pear liqueur or framboise. I think this will make a good medium for bubbling up a sweeter, thicker liqueur.

BUY IT AGAIN: Yes!

BOOZE TYPE: Wine
PRICE: $7.99 at Astor Center
RATING: B-

I’ve been trying to do Spanish wines lately, because I think I like them… at least, I know I like a bunch of Portuguese stuff, and they’re like totally right next to each other? So I fussed over the Spanish selections in my wine shop and picked out this one, which met at the vertex of ‘price’ and ‘interesting blurb on the name card.’

When I poured this one out and stuck my nose in the glass, I thought, ‘Ah! This has the aroma of… wine! Yes, this definitely smells like wine! Red wine, even! Oh, by jove! It tastes like red wine, too!” …This is just sort of run-of-the-mill, one of the ones folk’ll call “drinkable” and not mean it as an insult. I tossed a glass into the pasta sauce I was making to great effect. This is kind of the perfect wine to cook with: good enough to drink on its own, but not so full of character as to overpower your dish.

This one definitely improved as it sat around in my bedroom and opened up more. When I didn’t have tomato sauce confusing my palate (though it went very well in and with the tomato sauce), I got some nice mineraly, chalky hints in the scent, and a spicy, kind of coffee flavor. The back of the label says it has hints of “licorice mint” and honestly that is just nonsense. Seriously, wine people, that is just nonsense. And if it weren’t nonsense, it would probably taste nasty. Dang!

BUY IT AGAIN: Probably not. It’s decent, but it didn’t wow me, and I’d rather explore more. It’s basically exactly what you’d expect from an $8 wine.