The Minibar – Wines

Let us talk about wines. Actually this is suppose to be a new series where I talk about alcoholic beverages in general, but let’s be honest. I’m not a huge beer drinker, and most of the time I don’t know the name of the mixed drinks handed to me, never mind what’s in it. So here we mostly talk about wines.

I took a course back in Cornell on wines, but these days I am super reluctant to tell people about such a factoid. For some reason, whenever people find out that you have “formal” education on wine, they suddenly expect you to know everything there is to know about every label and every vintage ever made. I’ve had people go “Oh hey, you’ve taken a wine class before, which one of these is better?” When I look, they’re usually two names I’ve never heard of, and are the same variety from the same region. (Protip: Pick the cheaper one, if you don’t know better.)

For a while now, I’ve been trying to do a Wine of the Month kind of thing, where I try a different bottle every month. The problem so far seems to be that I just simply forget which ones I’ve tried after a while (unless it was really really good). The other problem is that the liquor shops I have access to (i.e. by foot) caters really heavily to the college crowd. As a result everything is pretty low priced ($10-25 range).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with cheap wines. In fact, most of the time it’s great. But they tend to make poor gifts, and it doesn’t really prepare me for what I’ll normally see in restaurants (except apparently at Olive Garden, where I’ve seen them try and sell some of these wines at twice the cost -_- ). I think to fix this, I just need to search a little further out for better stores.

In general though, I’ll probably just take a photo or scan of the label and put it up here with some kind of a rating I haven’t figured out yet. It’ll help me remember which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t.

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