Great food, great friends, great wine. What else IS there??

Last weekend we attended a fabulous wine event at some friends’ house. Everyone brought a bottle of wine (or several bottles in some cases) and we all got to taste some excellent wine. Included was an Amarone that was born in the last decade of great music: The 80’s!!

Also included is a BC wine from a grape that I had never heard of until this evening. I had to Google it.

To start, I brought a couple bottles of a wine that I have tried several times and have never been impressed with. I left the other bottle behind for anyone who liked it more than I did. It’s the first and only vintage of this wine, and for good reason, IMO.

So now we come to the bizarre portion of the evening. My old high school friend, who owns Blasted Church winery, brought a bunch of his wares including almost every one of their lesser-known wines. This one, in particular, sent me to Google to look up the grape:

<<A family of closely related varieties found Northern Italy and neighboring Slovenia with genetic links to the grapes of Valpolicella. Wines range in body and style but usually feature deep color and elevated acidity.>>

So, OK, let’s see what it’s like!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming of grapes I have heard of 🙂

Next up, my choice for wine of the night. It so happens to be one of the wines I brought. We picked this up at auction during the Vancouver International Wine Festival in 2021; there was no actual festival that year, of course, but they still held the auction and I paid $800 for a lot of 6 well-aged wines from Chile. Four of them were just terrific, one was corked, and this was the last of the lot. This lot was a real treat, worth every penny.

And the last table wine of the night, an Australian beauty that our host picked up at a recent auction. It’s usually Grenache-heavy but this particular vintage had more Shiraz.