Red Wine Blends

You may know me well enough to have heard this complaint before: "I am always ahead of the curve. I'm so far ahead I'm freefalling off the curve without a parachute. I'm so bleeding edge I'm missing fingers." This is one of those times.

Last year, I posted several times my wine reviews, and the conclusion and red blends offered the best value: strongest flavor and fullest body wine for the dollar. At the time there was basically four wineries doing this that had gotten their products into my supermarket. Now there are around 15. I bought a couple new entries, one of which I've tried before: Rex-Goliath Free Range Red. Its a nice sharp cabernet sauvingnon heavy red with some obvious zinfandel to extend it. I like this one. The flavor is excellent. The trailing edge tastes like Merlot so it probably is... and I'm wrong. Its syrah and zinfandel, according to their website. I've never had a syrah that was any good so obviously they're doing things right. And its a $5/btl wine. Amazing. It tastes like a $10 wine. I can easily recommend this.

While I most prefer Menage A Trois for best quality, a $9/bottle wine in California is pricey. Expect to pay around $20/btl for that elsewhere, btw. $12 bottles here are $30 out of state. And it might be spoiled since wine trucks are rarely insulated against heat and never refrigerated because that costs too much for the trucker to afford the trip. Above 78'F, wine starts to go bad and above 85'F it tastes "burnt" which is the real name for it in the industry. At that point its only good for cooking stuff. If you really like wine then you should live here, where its both good and cheap.

The other bottle I got was Naked Grape Red Blend. I didn't buy the many others, which cost more, but depending on how these taste I could try them later. My go-to sipper of Impressions Red Blend was missing today. Guess they sold out.

Red wine is so CIVILIZED. It's the moral and cultural opposite of the fohtie maht likkuh. Good red wine is a standard of civilization and its presence or absence is an important indicator of quality. Even the murdering Spaniards were drinking good red wine while they were massacring indians and stealing their gold to pay debts in Spain during the age of Conquistadores. In my Spanish class, about 6 years ago, I learned that the bread that's traditional with wine started as a disposable cap to put over the carafe, hilariously an Arabic word, to keep the road dust out of the wine while you drank it at the stagecoach stop. In those days, mass transit was by stagecoach and the roads were covered in silt and clay so turned to clouds of dust in the summertime, same as the roads do here in California if not for pavement. That's ANOTHER upside of motorcycles. The dust goes behind you because they are rear wheel drive.

Anyway, after folks started eating the bread, that stopped being stale and they started adding Ham and Cheese slices to the bread and the bread started being eaten as you drink the wine so wine, cheese, bread, ham, and olives are all associated with sitting down for an afternoon rest, since travel was work and you needed a break from it. Like here, Spain has hot afternoons, and taking a break through the heat of the day is a good idea to protect from heat exhaustion. From that we got tappas and the Basques expanded it into their own style of hors d'oevres, with cheeses and fish and more jamon, though it wasn't called that particular word. So really, the result of all this was good things and you now have things to eat that go with wine. Aren't you glad? And we have the Basques to thank for arty people wearing berets to show their support for ETA, the Basque separatist terrorist group in Spain. Most of the Basques just moved to California and Nevada instead, and can enjoy their culture without Spaniards giving them a hard time. I think its great we can ship them wine, and they ship up their Sheepherder bread and cheeses and we're all happy.