Sunday, October 18, 2009

Casa Larga and You

How many of you paid attention to my Twitter feed? If you aren't, you should be. You'll get a leg-up on this site. Magical, mystical things happen on my Twitter feed. Like reviews that I don't post here. I'll stop shamelessly plugging this now.

Anyway, had you been paying attention to said feed, you'd know that I managed to pick up subsidized tickets to a wine tasting yesterday. The Casa Larga winery in Fairport, NY, to be exact. I will admit, it was pretty entertaining. We caught the bus (we being me and my friend, JP) from the tech center turned bus stop. We managed to run into a mutual friend on the bus, which was a pretty cool coincidence. But, regardless, more about the wine. The tour was rather uneventful and slightly boring, actually. Since we were college students, they pretty much treated us like idiots, despite the fact that some of us were going to go on to be doctors. They explained the fundamentals of wine production and even went on to insult our taste, which I found super-duper awesome. Apparently, because I'm a college student, I'd prefer the sweeter wines that you don't age (read: alcoholic kool-aid) over the wine that is typically drier and you can age (read: real wine). I was highly amused. I love Kool-Aid and I most certainly like drinking wine that shares the attributes of Kool-Aid. As a matter of fact, I prefer my wine to taste like some sort of strawberry cooler. And if you can serve it to me from a pitcher that breaks through a wall to deliver his sugary-goodness, all the better.

Assholes.

Anyway, we did a wine tasting of a bunch of their wines. The first, and my favorite, was the CLV (Casa Larga Vintage) Chardonnay. It was pleasantly buttery, well oaked, and had nice hints of fruit and white pepper. Less enjoyable was their Reisling, which was too sweet and rather bland and their Pallido, which tasted like the aforementioned Kool-Aid. It was sweeter than the Riesling and even more bland. Seriously, I could have gotten the same effect from adding rum to Welch's. We moved from the whites to the red at this point, going with a cutely named "Tapestry". It had a pleasant nose of slight oak and a garnet like color, but overall it kinda fell flat. It was mostly fruit with only a tinge of oak. It was smooth though. Finally, their Gallery 155 Pinot Noir (155 being CLV converted from Roman numerals to numbers) was the best red of the two. Nice and dry with an awesome, Christmas like spice (nutmeg, cinnamon) and an excellent finish of ripe red fruit. It hid the alcohol mostly but it was a touch hot. Overall, the CLV merited a bottle purchase. I managed to sneak a tasting of their CLV Chardonnay French Oak, which, to me, was too forward on the oak but otherwise palatable.

I will now stop sounding like a flaming asshole.

In summation, decent wine, condescending people. They looked at us like we just wanted a free buzz and treated us accordingly. While, for some, was the exact truth, I feel that if you want to conduct a successful business, you don't view the newest crop of aficionados with that snide outlook. With wine knowledge becoming more prevalent in the under 30 (at least I think) bracket, it doesn't pay to burn bridges before they finish building them.

On to other things! I just purchased www.inwithbacchus.com and will be desperately trying to build a respectable website. Honestly, I wouldn't expect any great shakes until December when I have time. I pretty much purchased the domain and hosting and subsequently realized I have no fucking clue how to build a website. Whoops. I may throw a pre-made Flash site up there until I can get this shit down but I'm not sure yet. You can pretty much just keep looking here for posts et. al. until I figure things out. Oh, and another thing. Tonight is a two post night. The samples from SakeOne came in on Friday, so I'll be reviewing them tonight while I watch a Mifune samurai film. I figured it'd be a sweet pairing.

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