Wine of the Day: Idol Ridge Riesling 2013

Hello again. Tonight, I shall open a bottle of wine, namely this one:

The front of the bottle

The back of the bottle

This I bought along with several others from this winery at their booth at the 2015 Altamont Apple & Wine Festival. I collected quite a few Rieslings at that event, partly because I was doing comparison studies between the 'dry' and 'semi-dry' Rieslings available from several of those vintners who were offering both. I was interested to see what the relative range of sweetness would be between the two. As I recall, most of those that I sampled in this way had a more or less pronounced distance between their 'dry' and 'semi-dry' Riesling vintages. For the record, Heron Hill seemed to me to achieve the most reasonable separation, narrower than the others.

So I expect this vintage to be fairly sweet. Let's see...

Nose: somewhat fruity, a little pear-like, maybe.

Taste: a bit of a bite on the tip of the tongue; otherwise seems fairly smooth. Definitely on the sweetish side of things, though I'm not sure I'd say that it's really sweet (YMMV, obviously). I suppose the placement of the little indicator on the scale on the back label is accurate, though. Sweet enough that I won't be in a hurry to my second glass, but not so sweet that I'd feel overwhelmed.

Sweetness is obviously not the only palate-related topic we could consider here. Just a moment--I need to clean my eyeglasses so I can taste the wine better... There. At first I thought the bouquet hinted of pear, but on the palate, now I'm thinking more apricot/mandarin orange. Finish has perhaps just a hint of grapefruit.

Verdict: It's all right. Several years ago, I went through a Riesling phase. As I said in the last wine post, I'm much more attracted to Spanish reds nowadays, for example. But I never entirely gave up Rieslings. This one I think is a reasonable specimen of the type.

Wine of the day: Cune Crianza 2011

I have an idea! (Uh-oh, says the world.)

I could blog about wine.

How about this? With each wine I try out at home, I could take a picture of the label and write a little bit about the vintage. It's bound to be completely uneducated--I have no feel for the technical points of wine tasting. Please forgive my naiveté, of which there's bound to be a great deal in anything I say about wine.

Here's the label of the bottle I just opened:

The things you can learn about this stuff... I find it nice to read up a little on the vineyards from which my drinks originate. It seems that though the label says 'Cune' pretty clearly, the real intent there is the acronym 'CVNE', derived from the full name of the winery, as shown at the bottom of the label: Compañia Vinicola del Norte de España.

I like this one, as I do so many Spanish reds these days. Lively fruit bouquet with a bit of a teasing aspect--definitely not one-dimensional; active on various parts of the tongue, yet smooth behavior. It's a success, definitely.