Tasting- Risata Moscato d'Asti

The best wine I tasted this week at the Vintage Cellar was called
Risata Moscato d'Asti. This wine was super delicious!!!! It is from the Asti region of Italy and made from Moscato grapes. The Vintage Cellar described this wine as "vibrant" and smelling of stone fruit, tangerines, and honey. I thought this wine was so sweet and floral and really just pleasant. It tasted like honey and orange and it was sparkling too, which really just made it more fun! It smelled wonderful and tasted even better. I will probably be buying myself this as a gift soon.
The worst thing about this wine is that it costs $15.95. I really wish it were $8 or $9, so I wouldn't feel guilty about spending as much money.

Tasting- One Hope Chardonnay

The second wine I tried this Saturday was the One Hope Chardonnay. The One Hope wines were pretty cool because a percentage of their profits go to different causes. For the Chardonnay, 50% of the profits are donated to Breast Cancer research. This wine comes from the Napa Valley Region of California and is made from Chardonnay grapes and blended with Muscat and Chenin Blanc grapes picked in 2009. The Vintage Cellar sells this wine for $11.95, which is another affordable price for the wines they offered. The described the bouquet of this wine as "apple blossom and honeysuckle" with "flavors of crisp pear and apple... balanced oak and bright acidity." I agreed with this description for the most part. It was very fragrant and I definitely tasted the apple and pear the Vintage Cellar mentioned. It was a pretty sweet wine and I would love to try it again some time.

Peter Mertes Platinum

This wine was a lucky find on my part! We had a couple of guests in town who didn't finish the bottle and left it for us to finish, so it was basically free! The Peter Mertes Platinum is a white wine from the Pfalz region of Germany of the Reisling variety.The vintage is 2010. This wine has been pretty tasty so far, with a lot of light, fruity flavors. It reminds me a lot of apple and cherry. It's also a little oakey and smokey. This is a lot drier than the other white wines I have been drinking lately, but it is much fuller and more complex than I was expecting.
Another thing about this wine that I thought was pretty cool was that the back label gives food pairings that go well with this wine. I like this wine a lot, but it would definitely be better with food .

Tasting- Paulo Laureano Classico Alentejano Tinto

The final wine I tried at the Vintage Cellar was the  Paulo Laureano Classico Alentejano Tinto. This wine is from the Alentejo region of Portugal and http://www.weinarkaden.de says that the grapes are Trincadeira Aragonez picked in 2010. The Vintage Cellar sells this wine for $9.95. Every single wine I sampled on Saturday was definitely in my price range for wine. There were some that I would definitely want to try again, but with food instead of just alone. This wine would be one of them. The Vintage Cellar described this wine as "soft" with "silky tannins" and an "elegant long finish. They definitely got it spot on with respect to the tannins. All I noticed when drinking this wine, was my mouth drying out and it lasting a long time. It would probably have been a lot more flavorful with food to bring out the properties that were masked by all the tannins. I really didn't even find much to describe about the smell. Although, this was probably more a function of me not having a strong basis for describing wine smells yet. This wine was pretty good, but definitely not something I would want to drink without some sort of food to go with it.
Overall, my first wine tasting (and wine week!) went pretty well! I tried a bunch of different wines and really started exploring how the flavors and smells can be so different. Probably the worst thing about trying these wines was having to try them during the morning when I was in no way ready to be drinking.
I'm going to be going to a lot more wine tastings!!

Tasting- Boas Vinhas Tinto

The Boas Vinhas Tinto was the fifth wine I tried at the Vintage Cellar on Saturday. This wine is from the Dao region of Portugal and is made from grapes picked in 2009.According to http://www.herculeswines.co.uk, the grapes used in this blend are
Touriga Nacional, Alforcheiro and Tinta Roriz. At $9.95, this was another reasonably priced wine that most college students could afford.
This was a really interesting wine. I liked it more than the other red wines I tried, and for some reason the only way I can describe this wine is that it tasted like dry Christmas. I think it was more of a feeling that I got from tasting the wine than the taste, but it definitely had some quality that made me feel like it was the holidays all over again. The Vintage Cellar described this wine as tasting like plum and strawberries, but I didn't really think it tasted like that. When I think of those fruits, I think of them as being very sweet and delicious but I definitely did not think this wine tasted sweet.