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| Hooray! |
I said it in my first post and I meant it: you CAN get really
great wine with a screw top!
For the bottle-opener impaired, I bring you the Mt Beautiful
Pinot Gris—a fantastic New Zealand white. Now, since all seven of you have
committed my previous blog posts to memory, I don’t need to remind you that I’m
a bit picky about white wines. I don’t, as a rule (or a guideline, I suppose),
enjoy the drier ones. This wine is different.
It surprised me from start to finish.
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| I hope none of the anonymous people in this photo are angry that I used it here... |
First the smell: New Year’s Eve, before midnight. That is to
say, the Mt Beautiful Pinot smelled like champagne. I also smelled the alcohol;
to me, it brought back images of wiping the excess polish off of my hastily
painted fingernails with a Sally-Hansen-covered Q-tip. A little nail polish remover
never hurt anyone, right?
Thankfully, the Mt Beautiful doesn’t taste like nail polish
remover, although the alcohol smell does translate into its flavor, and no
wonder—it’s 14.5%. If you’re strictly a
wine drinker, you’ll notice right away; if you generally prefer liquor, this
won’t be a quality that'll much impress you. However be aware that this one could
pack a punch.
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| Drunk-texters beware! |
Besides being able to easily taste the alcohol content, this
wine dealt a few other surprises—depending on what I ate, the flavors changed.
After a bite of salad with ranch dressing, it was smooth and fruit-salad
flavored. Maybe that sounds generic, but I detected many fruits in there:
apple, pear, peach, perhaps some grapefruit and pineapple. After a bite of
lemon-pepper chicken it was like drinking an entirely different wine. Much spicier
and a little bitter, much of the fruit flavors were no longer detectable. As
fun as it was to try and guess what flavors would present themselves depending
on what I ate, I eventually went back to my salad; it paired best with the
wine.
Hands down the best part of drinking the Mt Beautiful Pinot Gris was
how varied it was; besides the chameleon-like flavors, it reads on your tongue like an EKG—there’s a definite spike toward the middle of the sip, where the
flavor hits hardest before fading again.
So kids, today’s takeaways for the Mt. Beautiful Pinot Gris:
Tastes like desert animals AND electrocardiograms
Avoid lemon pepper marinade
Screwcaps= YAY!!
Don’t forget you can try it yourself on Friday 7/6 at
Personal Wine Cellar. See you there?
Price: $$
My Rating: B+
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