Ode on a Wine Bucket

All work and no play makes a dull blogger. So we took ourselves out to a fine dining experience. It was a much anticipated dinner, 4 courses and 8 wines. What more can a girl ask for? We started out with with some Welch's white grape juice, I mean, white wine. As one would expect, there were wine notes accompanying each wine. We thought it would be fun to decipher or rather provide our own interpretations of these poetic homages to wine.

"1994 Torre Oria Grand Reserve Tempranillo--
Nose of ripe cherry with background aromas of herbaceous tobacco, olive, hardwoods plus a touch of eucalyptus. Chewy palate full of jammy plum and berry flavors with a long, complex, elegant finish. At its peak and ready to drink now!"

Most of the description was pretty standard, much ado about nothing, but the final line caught our eyes. To the untrained reader, they may be misled to think, "Great, I don't have to wait to drink this wine." Little do they know, "At its peak and ready to drink now!" translates to "We got too much of this wine, it's not as good as we thought, and we're trying to get rid of it."

After perusing more of these eloquent wine notes, we wondered about wine mixology. Cocktails often have more than 1 liquor, why not mix wines? Afterall, a wine described as "...rich, ripe blackberry and white cake" would do well to be mixed with "rich, cocoa tannins." Voila! The new Chocolate Cake, grape style.

The night ended with a sumptuous dessert, of decadent sherry drizzled on vanilla ice cream, the good kind, too. We also got a great tip on an adult milkshake with this wonderful sherry. We plan on making another evening out of grape derived alcohol. This time with sherry spiked milkshakes we decided to name Mrs. Robinson.