Every serious wine collector wants to have a “Trophy Wine” on display in his wine cellar. The older the better, the more expensive the better. This wine will probably never be opened, it is there primarily for show or bragging rights, and must of course have a fantastic story behind the wine itself, or how the owner managed to acquire it, or both. If you have your current “Trophy Wine” on display in your cellar now, keep in mind that you cannot drink it without having a suitable replacement ready to take its place. And always remember that your replacement should always be an upgrade over your previous “Trophy Wine”. So what should be so special about your own “Trophy Wine”? Should it be the most expensive wine in your cellar, or maybe the oldest wine in your collection? For some it might be a wine from the year...
Read morePost # 71 – Decorating the Christmas Tree with the 1976 Eitelsbacher Marienholz Riesling Beerenauslese
About twenty years ago, we began a tradition of making a family event out of decorating the Christmas tree about a week or two before Christmas. And on that evening, after dinner, I would uncork a suitable dessert wine, or port, while we all decorated the tree. It has been a lot of fun, and gives just our immediate family a chance to get closer again after a year of leading separate lives. So I usually make it a point to open something special that needs to be consumed. Twenty years ago the kids were all under 18, so my wife and I would share the bottle. Today however, between the four kids and their spouses, we are often ten people sharing the bottle, so I am finding more pleasure from the good company I am keeping than the contents of that special bottle of wine I just opened....
Read morePost # 70 – La Grande Dégustation 2019, Montreal Wine Show
I have been to so many wine shows now that I have lost count. I went last year as well, but I had such a thick head cold that I decided not to write a report. That decision was an easy one, when I reread my notes, every wine tasted the same, so that would have been a waste of time. As I was heading to this year’s Montreal Wine Show, La Grande Dégustation 2019, on Friday November 1st I asked myself what it was that I found so entertaining about attending a wine show. This year’s specialty region of coverage was Portugal, which left me wondering if I would end up tasting port all night. In I went still wondering if I was going to have a good time or not, and why? Walking into the exhibition hall, I smiled immediately at the sight of Thomas Bachelder holding...
Read morePost # 69 – Tasting Turkish Wines, Part 1
Most people have never tasted Turkish wines, and up until about four months ago, tasting Turkish wines was something that I too had never done. My son has visited Turkey a couple of times and brought back various wines with him, so we decided to make a mini wine tasting for our Reg’s Wine Blog tasting panel to broaden our palates. Last February we tasted six wines, one from Romania, another from Bulgaria, and four from Turkey. With little to no previous tasting experience with wines from this region, I frankly had no idea what to expect. One of my objectives was to learn more about the region’s wine history, comparing Turkish wines tasted in this tasting to those from other countries, and to try to understand the reasons why there is not more of an international market for Turkish wines. The tasting panel started with a Romanian wine,...
Read morePost # 68 – Tasting the Apothic Red wines from E. + J. Gallo
On March 9th we were celebrating a family birthday party and held a mini wine tasting of the locally available Apothic Red wines from E. + J. Gallo Wines. . Our quest was to find inexpensive wines suitable for everyday drinking, something well known, easily available almost everywhere, that you will undoubtedly run into often at parties, barbeques and family gatherings. We tasted the classic Apothic Red, the Apothic Dark, and the Apothic Inferno. Below you will find our collective thoughts on these wines. We started with a tune-up wine to get everyone settled around the table, so we tried the Trapiche Malbec 2017, a simple inexpensive red wine that we purchased for $9.95 at the SAQ (Quebec Liquor board). This wine hails from the Mendoza region of Argentina. The wine was young, thin, and a little acidic, and we should have decanted it for at least another 3...
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