Chardonnay: Three Wishes ($3)

Whole Foods, where Lucille Bluth buys her bananas for $10, is not where you would expect to find cheap wine. Nevertheless, they do have a product for those who, struck by remorse in the middle of their weekly grocery trip, feel the need to make up for their profligate habits. Three Wishes Chardonnay is only $3! One dollar a wish, says Joe.

"What do you think?" I ask him.

Joe tilts his head, and thinks. "There is a worse version of bad wine," he says, finally, "than this version."

It is bad. It is too bad. It is simultaneously too sweet, too sour, and too water.

Now I know what my three wishes are!

We finish the wine. We drink some beer. C comes home; we all hang out. At the end of the night, I walk Joe to the door.

"That was terrible," I say.

A pause, as Joe thinks for three seconds. "I liked it," he says.

White Blend: Big House ($8)

[Continuation from below post.]

We tried a second wine.

"It's a wine that I would toss in a guy's face at a bar."

"I don't know if I like this one," DVT said.

"It's better than the other one," AH said. "I don't mind it. I don't think I'm picky with wine though. I would drink anything."

A few glasses later, DVT said, "I prefer drinking the other one."

AH nodded. "I think I would prefer the Sutter Home."

It was bitter, we agreed.

DVT said, "It's a wine that I would toss in a guy's face at a bar."

AH said, "It's a wine that they would hand out for free at the art thing."

Later, DVT's boyfriend, JP, arrived. "This wine is good!" he said, when asked for an opinion. "It tastes like a classy and high-quality Manischewitz."

Chardonnay: Sutter Home

I'm sorry it's been so long! I've been drinking wine, as usual, and taking notes on some of them, but then I didn't write them up immediately, and now those notes are tragically incomprehensible. So let's take a moment of silence for the "not atrocious" wine with "peppery notes" that I drank in Vermont with C and my friend Z, and another moment for a Trader Joe's wine that I drank at some point, somewhere, with someone.

And now, to business.

"This is my boyfriend's mom's favorite wine."

A week ago, I was sitting in my new New Orleans home (!) with some new New Orleans friends (!), drinking some wine.

"It's kind of... sweet," DVT said. She took another sip. "It's kind of... dry."

We all sat there, pondering the mysterious complexities of wine. AH pointed out that the bottle's label said that the wine was "medium between sweet and dry." We all sat there, contemplating our wisdom.

"I don't think I like this," DVT said.

"It tastes rotten," I said.

"This is my boyfriend's mom's favorite wine," AH said.


VERDICT: Fine.

"Jack's Blend": McWilliams Hanwood Estate ($13)

"Red Wine."

A few weeks ago, as C. and I were bravely making our way through a particularly terrible bottle of red wine, I remembered about this blog (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, baby you know I love you) and quickly snatched up the bottle to look at exactly what kind of unholy grape we were drinking.

Quick aside -- I know this is a wine blog, but you guys know a thing or two about whiskey, right? You know, probably, that a lot of the time it comes from Ireland or Scotland or Kentucky or Tennessee; you know and love/hate its burn; you know that people put ice in it, to "open up the flavor." You may also know that sometimes they are called "single malt" and sometimes they are called "blended malt" and sometimes they are just called "blended," and probably you know from firsthand experience that single malt whiskey is, like, way expensive omg. The reason for this -- stay with me, guys -- is that single malt whiskey is made from only one kind of grain and only at one distillery, which makes it more pure, and makes it taste better, et cetera.

Blends, on the other hand, are made by blending -- that is, blending different distilleries' whiskies or even different kinds of whiskey altogether. Throw everything together, and it's still alcoholic, right? Cheaper for them, cheaper for you, just try to make sure you get that shot in the back of your mouth so it doesn't hit your taste buds.

So: whiskey can be blended. That's fine. That's a fine thing. God knows I've had enough blended whiskey to be able to start a second blog. But wine, though? Wine is something different. Wine is sophisticated. Classy. Traditional. Pure.

This is what I learned from our terrible, terrible wine that night: blended wine exists!

"Jack's Blend," the label declared, and then, on the line below, by way of explanation: "Red Wine." Nothing else.

Of course, we finished the bottle. But we weren't happy about it.



VERDICT: DO NOT BUY.

Chardonnay: X Winery 2012 ($20)

Mmm!

Obviously, I got this on sale. Twenty dollars! Absurd.

However, my thrifty wine aficionados, it is with a heavy heart that I must break this news to you: this wine was, actually, pretty good! I know it does nothing to further the search for the best-tasting, cheapest wine -- any wine more than fifteen bucks had better taste good -- but, hey, if you ever see it on sale, grab it. It was sweet, but not too sweet; it was fruity, but not in a gross way at all.

If anything, it was much better than the label would have us believe; on the back of the bottle, X Winery claimed "a supple, fleshy mouth-feel."


VERDICT: Buy!

Cabernet Sauvignon: Máscara de Fuego, 2011 ($15)

Bad, yet compulsively drinkable.

God, this is actually kind of bad. And yet compulsively drinkable -- I wonder if it's more alcoholic than wine normally is, for after each sip I feel that pleasant sort of immediate fuzziness...

"I don't really drink wine," says our friend, JM. "But I like it better than most red wines I've had. So I assume it's pretty good."

Also, this wine's name means "mask of fire."



VERDICT: Oh, it'll do.

Sauvignon Blanc: Steelhead 2011 ($14)

"aggressively grassy"

This wine is a little over my normal price range -- it's fourteen dollars! -- so my expectations are high. Nevertheless, Steelhead's sauvignon blanc disappoints: it is too sour, and too dry. At this point, I wish I could say something knowledgeable, like, "Like most sauvignon blancs, its dryness is counterbalanced by a grape-ish finish," but I know actually nothing about wine. What is sauvignon blanc, anyway?

Wikipedia tells me that it is a green grape from France. Good! Also, "the flavor can range from aggressively grassy to sweetly tropical."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THIS WINE IS.

IT IS "AGGRESSIVELY GRASSY"!!!!!!!

It's getting me tipsy, though. I've almost finished the bottle! Time to finish Arrested Development!

love,
Maia



VERDICT: Enh, you could get a better wine for cheaper, probably. Definitely not worth the fourteen bucks.