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So, back in the Second Age of Mankind (*cough* 2006 or so) the dude and I went on a Wine-Tasting Tour thing. We took a long weekend, booked a B&B down in the Finger Lakes area, and hit up a bunch of wineries on a self-directed little tour. It was fun. We stayed in Watkins Glen, and went all around Keuka and Seneca Lake, and it was pretty, and it was right before tourist season so everybody was open but nobody was there, so we got all the good tourist shit but all fresh-faced and eager and genuinely pleased to see us, unlike at the height of the season where they’re just like “... please, I know you’re on this Wine Tour because you like public drunkenness, please put down the vodka bottle and pretend to pay attention and don’t throw anything through our window, please”

(Tourist Season in Wine Country is really fucking dire, yo.)

Anyway. I know, it’s New York State Wines, and what the fuck, that’s not a thing. Is that a thing? It turns out, that’s a thing. Fortunately, they’ve become sort of trendy, along with the locavore movement in general. Because I picked up a taste for medium-bodied dry-ish semi-fruity New York State red wines, and those are not something you can buy elsewhere.

Cut for length and the sorts of ramblings that happen when I drink half a bottle of Marechal Foch:

You may laugh. I may sound like I’m talking out my ass. But honestly, Bully Hill makes a Baco Noir that’s really quite pleasant and has a phenomenal ink drawing of a bulldog on the label. They also have a Marechal Foch that I quite like. Tonight we are drinking a random bottle I found in the basement, where I sometimes put wines I buy in some mistaken notion that I’m storing them-- it is not a Finger Lakes wine, but a Lake Erie wine, and is Johnson Estates’ Marechal Foch. And it’s just really nice. It’s not bone-dry, it’s fruity. And I’m not super good at describing wines, I don’t know what I’m really talking about, but it’s just-- it doesn’t turn your mouth inside-out (I know tannins cause that), but it doesn’t coat your teeth with sugar either. Dyes your tongue purple, but hey.

The other thing that’s really nice from Central NY is sweet whites, and I know that sounds kind of gross, but the best Gewürstraminers I’ve had have mostly been Finger Lakes wines. Sometimes they’re so sweet your eyeballs almost burst, but so many of them are just so good, like this kind of crisp sweet hard-edged taste-- I guess the Reislings are good too but they don’t stick in my mind as much. There are a lot of sweet whites I loathe, though, so it’s always a crapshoot.

When reading this, to calibrate your mental image of my tastes: I fucking hate Chardonnay, and the more oak in it the worse I hate it. And like, given that’s what’s literally always on any wine menu, clearly the rest of the world either doesn’t feel this way, or are a bunch of fucking masochists. (When I first was like, hey wine is a thing, I’ll have some... uh... white? i drank a fuckload of oaky Chardonnays and was like okay I really thought I liked wine but this is bullshit, what is wrong with me?) Seriously, it’s horse piss, I don’t get it. So if you like oaky Chardonnays you’ll probably hate everything I like. Also what is wrong with you.

But so here’s the thing. The point of this post.

I think it would be enormously fun to do dinner parties with wine tastings, but not like, the usual-- where it’s like, some guy on commission telling you These Are The Best Wines. No no. Themed wine-tastings. Like, first off, okay, these are all the Marechal Foches I can find. (It’s an uncommon grape nowadays, an unfashionable modern hybrid developed in France after WWI, and about a decade ago Canada had a nationwide program of eradicating it-- I know right?? but it’s really really well suited to the climate of the Finger Lakes so it’s still common enough there.) Let’s drink them all and see what we like.

Or like, these are all the wines in the store that had a dog on the bottle. Let’s go for it!

I mean, it’d be smart to be more like, directed about it. Like, eight out of ten Gewürtzes, I love, and the other two I basically think are rat poison. What are the features I actually like?

Or like, malbec, what is that, you only ever see it from Argentina, is it another name for something, why do I like it so much except when I don’t. That’s the thing with wines. So many of them. I like a thing, and I think it’s because it’s X, and then it turns out that other things that are X are utter shit, so it’s clearly not the X I like, but fuck me if I know what it is. And so I go to a restaurant and they present with a flourish the wine list and I look at it and I’m either like, oh, I know that wine, that’s a great one, I bought a bottle of it for eight bucks the other d-- oh sweet Jesus they want thirty dollars for it, I can’t. OR I’m like, literally none of these sound like anything I’ve ever had before, are they making this up what is this that’s not a WHAT IS SYRAH WHEN IT’S NOT SHIRAZ YOU’RE FUCKING WITH ME.

Anyway. Wine tastings are clearly the answer, only self-directed ones so you don’t spend quite so much time being intimidated by some dude.

But you can’t do that with just two people because it turns out there’s a lot in one bottle of wine and now that we’re in our mid (late???) thirties, Dude and I just can’t get through that much booze. So I need to start hosting dinner parties.

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