One of our goals in starting The Grape Pursuit was to try and find new varietals of wine we've never had with hopes that some would quickly become new favorites.
It only took a few sips into the Oro de Castilla Verdejo 2018 to know that this is a grape varietal we want to experience many more bottles of in the future.
This is simply a delicious wine!
Every once in a while we come upon a great wine deal and pick up a bottle purely because it is an attractive price compared to national averages.
Costa Di Bussia's Barbera d'Alba 2017 was one such bottle. While the flavor notes felt a bit one dimensional to us, it did pair quite well with a mushroom and truffle polenta with tallegio. A true Northern Italian pairing if there ever was one!
I was fortunate enough to visit a tasting room for Poggio Amorelli in Italy in 2019. I found myself here while on a Walks of Italy Tuscany day tour that included, Siena, San Gimignano, and the winery (a tour we cannot recommend highly enough even if the specific winery may vary). During our stopover, I was able to sample many of their products with a massive feast and put an order in for a few bottles to be shipped home.
One of these bottles was their Chianti Classico Reserva 2016 which we popped open to enjoy with a nice steak dinner in 2020.
We've been fans of Boundary Breaks since the tasting room was in the owner's kitchen (2015). In its early days, this Finger Lakes winery focused exclusively on single clonal Rieslings and was, pardon the pun, breaking boundaries when it came to this famous varietal.
Since then the winery has expanded immensely with a gorgeous tasting room, bringing on many non-Riesling varietals, and more. While we enjoy these quality wines, it is their Reisling that have us returning time and time again. In this one we broke open one of our bottles of the Grand Reserve Riesling #110- the best bottle we've had yet.
We recently celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary, and so naturally we were looking for a wine to pair with a special dinner. Our menu included a cheese and charcuterie board, crab cakes, and black cod so we were looking for a dry white wine.
We chose a 2016 Heritiers du Comte Lafon Macon-Milly Lamartine Clos du Four, a Chardonnay from the Maconnais region of Burgundy (arguably the region's most popular grape, and our first Chardonnay from Burgundy). While we didn't end up being terribly big fans of this wine, it did pair nicely with our seafood dinner.
If you ever find yourself in Sicily and want to go wine tasting, a trip to Gambino Vini on the slopes of Mt. Etna should be on your radar.
Not only is the tasting experience phenomenal (with an array of wine, extra splashes of your favorites, and a lovely tasting plate with their housemade olive oil), the property itself is also stunning with a gorgeous view down the hillside all the way to the ocean. As with most every winery visits we go on, I purchased a few bottles to bring home.
One of which was the Tifeo Etna Rosso 2016- a blend of 95% Nerello Mascalese and 5% Nerello Cappucio (two Sicilian varietals) that we enjoyed in early 2020 when the bottle was just under four years old.
MacRostie Winery is one of those places that is near and dear to our hearts as we had a chance to personally visit the estate when traveling around Sonoma in early 2019. We were one of the first appointments for the day and got a prime outdoor seat on their patio (complete with complimentary blankets as it was quite cold) and enjoyed our wine with some of the finest views we had on that trip.
We picked up some bottles to take home, one of which was the MacRostie Dutton Ranch Chardonnay 2016. We held off on drinking this one for about a year and cracked into it in mid-2020- just under four years from the point of harvest.
