2011 Wine Tasting

The second annual wine tasting was Friday night.  Last year I purchased a bunch of flute glasses to use for the tasting.

Twenty five people attended.  I had 3 bottles of each of the ten wines to be sampled.

Here are the five reds carefully wrapped.  I used electrical tape on the neck and lid to help protect their identities.  I didn't want people to be biased in their judgement based on name or price.

 The Coke fridge kept the five whites - along with a variety of Coke products and juices (some attendees were not drinking wine.)

 Each taster had the option of recording their impressions.  That way when the names and prices were revealed they could remember which ones they liked and didn't like.

This year I added voting.  The choices were:
"Swill, I tell you!"
"Ho-hum"
"Scrumptuous!"

(One of my British guests pointed out that I had misspelled scrumptious.)

The voting was a huge hit. People seemed to get into the competition among the wines.

The theme this year was "Wines of the Southern Hemisphere."  Of the ten wines I had only tried two of them before Friday night.  The rest were randomly picked off the shelves at the local liquor store.  This may technically be a "dry" country but the wine selection is incredibly impressive.  I could do two more Southern Hemisphere tastings and still have some left over.

Anyhow, a month or so ago I found a wine I *loved* from the first sip.  The problem?  It's Dh 80 ($22).  I kinda choke at the idea of spending that much for wine... but, wow, it is good.  All of the other wines in the tasting were random but I purposefully put this wine as #10.  I kinda hoped most guests would quit long before 10 and leave me with 2 bottles of the stuff.  Nope.  Those that made it to #10 raved about it so everyone else had to try it.  By the end of the night it was all gone.  *sniffle*

So here was is the runaway winner of the 2011 wine tasting:

Will someone in Iowa do me a favor and see if you can find this?  I will bet the price is about half of what we pay here.

I found a place to buy it online for $12.99/bottle.  At $12.99 it's worth ordering a bottle case.