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Tennessee Mountainview Winery's Raspberry Wine Semi Dry Drink As Apertif Or Create Your Own Cocktails

3/22/2018

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Picture
by Patrick Ogle

Tennessee Mountainview Winery's Raspberry Wine Semi Dry is excellent as an aperitif or a great fruit wine to use creating cocktails.

Sure, wine from fruit other than grapes gets a bad rap. This is often deserved but as often as not the negative assessments are based on treating wines made with raspberries, blueberries or other fruit as if they were WINE.  They lack the complexity of wine made from grapes and can be sweet and cloying.

Yet wine made WITH grapes can be awful too; fruit wines need not have an albatross hung around their collective necks.

This wine is a solid fruit wine. On its own it is not super sweet for a fruit wine. This still means the wine is sweeter than most wines made from grapes (excluding desert wines). It is pleasant enough but the acidity that marks top notch sweet grape-based wines isn't there.

Where this wine shines is in cocktails. Here are couple ideas for those.

Raspberry wine, soda water and a crushed mint leaves. BAM! Perfect summertime drink. How much wine you use versus soda water is up to you but Id suggest at least 2 to 1 ratio...probably 3 to 1. You could jazz this up with some vodka.

Raspberry wine, soda water, St. Germain....BAM perfect summertime drink #2 (if you want more sweetness? Use Sprite). Same ratio as above but toss in  shot or so of St. Germain (or other Elderberry liquor). Again you could jazz this up with some vodka.


Raspberry wine, tonic, gin and a lime. Basically you are jazzing up your gin and tonic with the fruit wine.

I tried to come up with a drink similar to a "hurricane" using this wine and didn't manage anything particularly good. This does illustrate the fun you can have trying to create YOUR cocktail with this wine. Do not fear the fruit wines just know their place in the world of beverages.

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Partida Creus "GT" Penedes Garrut (Monastrell) 2014--Not What You Might Expect from Monastrell

3/1/2018

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Picture
by Patrick Ogle

Partida Creus GT Penedes Garrut 2014 The first sniff of this wine made me think of some sort of antiseptic...then...the next sniff? It smelled like a cherry sweetheart candy. Then it sort of morphed into some of the Pais grape wines I've had or even some of the super funky Gamay. Yes it is a tricky wine. This all makes it sound unapproachable but, oddly, it isn’t.

It is light in color in the glass. When I got around to doing what really matters--tasting the wine (really I'm not sure why I BOTHER talking about what it smells like sometimes...) It has a tart cherry taste and what seems to be some CO2, not enough for it to be sparkly but enough for it to be really lively. It has some dirt on the finish. The earthiness is more understated than I expected given the nose. Dirty isn't a bad thing really, and it blows off a great deal with air.

I was a little afraid of this wine after hearing three different opinions on it. I hesitated to open it. I thought "Monastrell from the South." and thought it might be a big, fruity wine. The Spanish iteration of mourvedre can be that way but this has NOTHING to do with that. cranberry, sour cherry, hints of vinaigrette. It is almost a summertime red and while it is unusual it is easily approachable.

In addition to earth there are other strange hints of vegetation here that call to mind the bitter and aromatic herbs of amaros and the like. All of these complex tastes exist in a light, easy drinking wine. More than one person I talked to about this said something akin to “I tasted it, thought ‘this is weird,’ then poured another glass.”

Partida Creus are located in Penedes, Spain. The area is known for white wines and Cava but, more and more, interesting reds are appearing from the area. Monastrell del Litoral/Garrut is a sub-variety of Monastrell--or maybe not. I’ve found sources saying yes and no to this assertion. This wine does not call to mind other Monastrell. Monastrell is known as Mourvedre in France and is also sometimes called Mataro.

If you are into natural wine? This has no sulfur added, uses native yeast, is unfiltered and aged in stainless steel.

It is unusual wine but do not be afraid of it. This is a fabulous introduction to the more unusual side of natural wine making.

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    WINE!

    There are thousands of wine grapes and many places that grow great wines. Why not find out about some surprising wines from surprising places?

    NOTE-Until recently I did not capitalize the names of varietal grapes (as a matter of style) but for a variety of reasons as of February, 2018 we will capitalize but I am not going back and altering the previous style!!!


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