Wine Dinner Post
During a nice warm spring evening, in between doing homework to prepare for the coming week my roommates and I enjoyed a wine dinner pairing three wines with a three course meal. This was a great way to begin the end of the semester and we plan on doing this more often in the future.
Appetizer
To begin my wine and food pairing meal I first decided to start with an appetizer of crackers with sharp cheddar cheese and thinly cut salami. I paired this with a cheaper jug wine of wild Irish rose. I've tasted this wine before but I wanted to see if it would improve being paired with some food as I had yet to do that in the past. This was not a dinner planned very early, but me and my roommates decided it would be fun to try this. Prior to trying this wine paired with food some noticeable tasting notes are that it is a darker rose color wine that smells a little "funky" compared to most nicer wines I have tried and kind of smells like a cleaning product you would use to clean counter tops.. One characteristic to note is the taste is not very hot on your pallet and leaves a strange after taste. Once paired with the food however kind of helped mitigate the overall strength of that taste and it was ok with the salami taste especially. This is not a wine with a lot of body and doesn't form legs really on the glass as this could be an indication of the lack of body. Not much going on this this wine to become excited about. After a glass of this wine we were ready to move on and try the other wines with dinner and the appetizer as well.
Main Course
As the main course with my vast cooking knowledge I made some baked beans with a simple cheese burger. However, I didn't cheap out with this wine as I paired this meal with a Greyson Cellars 2011 Zinfandel from California. I have grown to really like the zinfandel grape wines and it has quickly become one of my favorites. This wine was extremely good and interesting. It had a very dark deep purple color with a grape juice smell mixed with some berries. This wine has a much better body than the previous one and was not too hot on the pallet. It had a very nice after taste that left me wanting more. My roommates agreed that they really enjoyed this wine. We had this wine with our appetizer as well which I found very enjoyable especially with the salami and sharp cheddar cheese. This is by far one of the best wines I have tasted thus far this semester. I purchased this wine at the vintage cellar earlier in the day. Another intriguing taste with this wine even more so than the burger which went very good with this wine was the baked beans with chunks of bacon mixed in. The bake beans sauce tasted very good with the light fruity taste of the zinfandel. I was curious to the wine tasting notes on the wine itself but there were none listed for me to compare with what I was tasting to give me a better idea of the descriptors I could of been tasting. I would definitely recommend this wine to my friends and family in the future as it was very reasonably priced at ten dollars.
Dessert
Lastly, we ended our wine pairing adventure with a nice Australian Shiraz paired with some girl scout trefoils cookies. This 2012 Shiraz comes from Southern Australia's Milton Park Vineyard and it was surprisingly ok with these cookies. Prior to tasting it this wine was also a deep dark purple that had some hints of berries on the nose. In tasting this delightful wine I found that it had more bit than the previous zinfandel but was not much hotter on the pallet. I tasted some more fruit with this wine but it had a much different after taste than the zinfandel which was very distinctive. This wine was a very full bodied wine and it presented that with the legs on the glass. It was very smooth as I washed it and coated my mouth with it. This is another wine I would definitely recommend to my friends and family as well as a very good purchase at nine dollars. I only had a few cookies with it, but from those few I was able to taste how the short bread cookie taste mixed with the wine leaving a very sugary after taste which I enjoyed. This concluded our wine pairing dinner and I believe it was very successful.
