Drinking with your parents

Wine with Hillary: Organic wines suck

After the Daily Red debacle, I was unwilling to try another organic wine, but I didn't want to discount the whole group because of one bad bottle, so I tried again. It was the color of the squishy stuff in a lava lamp. This set off alarm bells in my head, because that's not what a wine should look like.

Wine with Hillary: Vampire makes a tasty blood-red wine

Just in time for Halloween comes this product from the Transylvania area of Romania. Unsurprisingly, it's a beautiful blood purple red and the taste is very good. It has a thick earthy flavor that gets less intense over time. Although most of my tasters were more excited about the cool label than the wine at first, and were more interested in discussing prurient matters in bad eastern European accents, all my tasters enjoyed drinking Vampire.

Wine with Hillary

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

October 1, 2004

Parents Weekend is upon us, and what better way to interact with your visiting folks than through wine? No, I don't mean you should go out and try to get your parents drunk; that would just be wrong. Sitting down with your parents and sharing a bottle of wine either with dinner or before, however, is a good way to spend some time with them.

What better way for a French major to show that she not only knows the language but is a true Francophile than that she will attest that the Bordeaux is the superior wine? Even a classics student can come up with one of the many pithy sayings he's translated about wine. Economics majors can show that they've taken the lessons of cost and value to heart with a well-chosen but inexpensive wine. Parents will be less likely to worry about their child who can't make up his mind about any sort of academic path if he can pick out a good wine. Finally, a relaxed glass or two will take the awkward edge off the ever popular "I've already spent all the money you gave me for the semester please give me more" plea.

Below, three wines to please both you and your parents.

1. Ch?teau Duplessy 2001 Premières C?te de Bordeaux

My tasters and I absolutely adored this wine. We didn't find it very fruity at all, but rather spicy. However, it was not so much that it made you feel like you were drinking a spice rack. It has a tannin level on the higher side, but it did not leave your mouth as dry as other high tannin wines. We found it went very well with corn chips although it was easily drinkable without food. Since this wine came from the New Hampshire state liquor store on I-95, it would be best for you to call your parents and ask them to pick it up on the way. Have your parents pay at the northbound NH liquor store.

2. Masciarelli 2000 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo

This wine was definitely the most popular with my tasters yet. It was pretty light, with an underlying apple flavor at the start but the taste in your mouth at the end of the sip was a toasted one. We found it to be kind of dry, but not overwhelmingly so. If you're not a fan of dryness, be reassured that letting the wine sit after opening for fifteen minutes or so (a.k.a. allowing the wine to breathe) will temper the dryness. We did not try this with any food simply because it needed nothing to make it more drinkable. I would buy two bottles of this. $7.15 at Tess's Market.

3. Monte Antico 2001 Toscano

This is a wine drinker's red?if you like those parts of wine which take most people a year or two to learn to like, this is the wine for you. It had a very heavy oak taste with a noticeably strong and somewhat bitter aftertaste. My tasters demanded food for this one and gave it a much more positive review after drinking it with some distinctly flavored cheeses. Again, allowing the wine some time to breathe makes it much more palatable for the tasters who aren't especially into the more bitter wine flavors. $9.45 at Tess's Market.

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