The other day I was walking through my grocery store when a bottle of wine caught my eye. A Corbière for one euro. One euro? Granted, wine is cheap in France, but that sounded a bit too cheap. But how could I let such an offer pass me by? I decided to buy the bottle and also a three euro bottle and a five euro bottle. All three from Corbière, about which my wine book says: good tasting red wine, usually an outstanding value. These bottles I kept until my mom and grandmother arrived here. I was wondering how these seasoned vinophiles would judge them.
When the day came, I pasted little numbers at the bottoms of three wine glasses so they would be invisible when drinking and filled each glass with wine corresponding to a number. I did this in complete darkness so I wouldn't later recognize the wine by its color. Then I shuffled the glasses like a second-rate magician and wrote big numbers at their sides using a permanent marker. Finally all three of us were sitting around the kitchen table with the glow of excited expectation on our faces.
To make a long story short - and long it took us indeed to come to a conclusion - all three wines were very drinkable and tasted remarkably alike. They were all Corbières, duh! I studied the color, trying to find differences in their profound redness. I sniffed their bouquets and started to pick favorites. One candidate tempted me very pleasantly, but I'm not sure I would have been able to identify it blindly, with my nose only. By this time my olfactory system was registering an overload of stimuli, and my palate was demanding its turn. Time to sip!
Again, the similarity of taste was striking. Fairly soon I declared one wine loser, but that was more a whim to make it easier to choose a winner than to really declare a loser. After a few more rounds, my taste bud were slowly giving up one me. I had to rank them - and so did mom and grandma.
Our picks didn't match. Experience counts. The older generations got it right. I was surprised to see that I had chosen the one euro wine as tastiest. It would certainly be good for my budget if I could find this wine again.
2 comments:
I too have found have found very nice wine at a very low price. I even was able to buy it again, but then it was gone.
It seems we're both in Grenoble and both tasting wines. Nice write up.
Post a Comment