Sunday, March 25, 2012

Tasting: Masquerade



Name: Masquerade
Variety: Chardonnay
Region: Virginia
Country: USA
Year: 2010
Price: $19.00
Winery Review: Dry, smooth and oaky; pairs well with cheese plates abd creamy foods. This creamy chardonnay is the same base wine as our Yesterday’s Song, with masked with significantly more oak.  Smooth & buttery, but still fruity.
My Review: This wine smelled amazing. It was hard to put your finger on the smell. It smelled like green table grapes. It was very light smelling. The taste was better than any chardonnay that tasted like vanilla. I really liked this wine better than any chardonnay I have had.

Tasting: AD 325


 Name: AD 325
Variety: Chambourcin
Region: Virginia
Country: USA
Year: 2010
Price: $16.00
Winery Review: Dry red with bold flavors and cherry undertones; pairs well with hearty foods, including BRIX chocolates. This Chambourcin, brings together a rich, brilliantly colored wine with vibrant aromatics and slightly-sweet flavor.  Chambourcin is best served with chocolate, as the flavors intermingle exceptionally well.
My Review: This wine has a very earthy smell. When you swirled it, it was very purple on the glass. The color was beautiful. It had a very simple taste that was not overpowering.

Tasting: Vertex


Name: Vertex
Variety: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon
Region: Virginia
Country: USA
Year: 2010
Price: $20.00
Winery Review: Dry red, rich with black currant flavors and French oak notes, pairs well with rosemary walnuts. This bold and unassuming Cabernet Sauvignon with rich tannins and intense plum flavors, reaches a peak of spiciness.  It can be paired with bold meats and rich pasta meals.
My Review: This is the most okay/tannic wine they have. It is aged in French oak for 11 months. It smelled a lot like oak. It was very oaky tasting as well. It has a slightly spicy finish. It also had some cherry in the nose.

Tasting: Sudden Downpour



Name: Sudden Dounpour
Variety: Apple, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay
Region: Virginia
Country: USA
Year: 2010
Price: $13.00
Winery Review: Sweet, apple wine with bourbon notes and earthy tones with a clean finish; excellent mulled. This sweet apple wine, blended with white table wine embodies a quality of surprise, with warm vanilla notes drawn from the aged bourbon barrel.

My Review: It smelled really sweet and like apples. A mixture of apples, not just one type of apple. It tasted very sweet. You could definitely taste the apple. I didn’t taste any of the bourbon notes. You could tell some of the earthiness in the wine.

Tasting: Seduction


 
Name: Seduction
Variety: Tinta Madera/Touriga Nacional/Souzao
Region: Virginia
Country: USA
Year: 2010
Price: $26.00
Winery Review: Sweet, vintage ruby port. Direct from Portugal, hints of raspberry and raisins. Pairs well with aged cheese and brie. This vintage Ruby dessert wine conjures up flavors of dark chocolate, raspberry, blackberry and a slight touch of nuttiness.  Perfect for a cold winter night.

My Review: It smelled like finger nail polish remover. It tasted a lot like Brandy. This is because they add Brandy to the wine. The alcohol is 18%. It tasted like wood chips as well. The after taste was raisins. You could definitely taste the raisins.  

Winery Visit- Attimo Winery


The Vines at Attimo Winery
          This past weekend, my friends and I decided to take a trip to Attimo Winery. We heard great things about it, but have never visited. I was very excited to visit a winery that was so close to Tech.

Attimo Winery is located in Christiansburg, about 30 minutes away from Virginia Tech. The drive was pretty enjoyable and strait forward. It is very close to Sinkland Farms where everyone goes to pick pumpkins in the fall. Rik and Melissa Obiso own the winery. They both attended Virginia Tech and never thought that they would be returning to opening a winery after graduating and leaving for their respective jobs. They have lived in Nex Mexico, Tennessee, and Maryland working in corporate jobs. In 2006, the Obiso’s decided to move back to the New River Valley to raise their children and do something that wasn’t working with corporate America. Rik explained to us that he had the idea to start the winery about 10 years ago. About four years after that is when he and his wife decided to move to southwest Virginia. The only opened the winery just last year. He explained that wine making runs in his family. His great grandfather and grandfather were wine makers in Sicily. Rik and his wife have always been interested and wine and the business of winemaking. They even started making wine in their home before they decided to move back here. 

Inside the Winery

The winery started with some test vines, and has grown into what we saw. They have consistently planted vines every year beginning in 2007. They could not open the winery until a year ago because the vines started producing fruit that could be used in 2010. They now have over 10,000 vines on the property. Most of the vines come from New York or California, but they do have a USDA permit to plant Saperavi grapes from the republic of Georgia. Attimo is currently the only winery in Virginia to have these grapes. They also have 1,200 raspberry and blackberry plants right as you come onto the property. This is for their desert wines mostly, which we got a chance to try.
Kathryn and I at the tasting
Rik and his wife make the wine in their basement and at the winery in Charlottesville. The name Attimo means in the moment. All of their wines are named after a specific moment in time. This was really cool because Rik explained all of the moments while we tasted. They are one of three wineries in the state of Virginia that have a restaurant. All of their wines are stylized based on the grapes or region that the wines originally come from. Because of this, their fermentation process varies. For the Chardonnay and Vidal Blanc they use barrel fermentation. This means that the wine goes strait into the barrel instead of being fermented in stainless steel. This is fairly unique. The sweet wines are only fermented in stainless steel. This is to preserve the fruitiness. With the red wines, they usually bin ferment them and then move them to an oak barrel to age them. 

As far as production, they have been very successful over the past few years since opening. In the year 2009, they produced 200 cases of wine. In 2010, they produced 1,700 cases. In the year 2011, they produce 3,200 cases. And they expect to produce 5,000 cases in the year 2012. 

The bottling process is a bit different in a small winery. They bottle by hand and bottling truck here in Christiansburg, and share a bottling facility in Charlottesville with other wineries. 
The Winery

They are a green winery, which was a pretty cool concept. The tasting room was a passive solar building. This means that the windows, walls and floors are designed to collect, store and distribute solar energy. This energy comes in the form of heat in the winter and rejects solar heat in the summer. This type of solar energy does not use mechanical or electrical devices like active solar heating. They also compost everything possible, and recycle all of their wine bottles. They use recycled cork too. 

They are currently only selling wine at the winery and at a few select restaurants in and around town… including Zeppoli’s. They plan to expand to all restaurants in the Blacksburg area, and then move out to Floyd and some other surrounding counties in the future. Rik said that they will be hosting Fork and Cork this semester, which is a big step for them. Overall this was an awesome trip. It was really cool to talk to Rik. He explained the process of their wine making really well, and was just a genuinely nice guy. I finished off the tasting by having a dark chocolate-rimmed glass of sweet berry sunset.
So Yummy!

We tasted:
Masquerade
Sonnet 98
I do
Deep Silence
AD 325
Vertex
Sweet Berry Sunset
Sudden Downpour
Seduction
Firefly Dance

Dinner: American-Italian (Spaghetti and Meatballs)


All of us at dinner
This week we decided to make spaghetti and meatballs. For some reason it just felt like a pasta night. We started off by looking at what we had and went from there. We had a ton of pasta, a starter sauce, half an onion, and some pancetta. We needed to buy meatballs, mixed veggies, cheese, garlic bread, and of course brownies. I happen to always be appointed master chef because I am an HNFE major and my roommates tend to think I know the most about cooking (which is probably true considering one of them almost caught the whole house on fire once while cooking). 

Garlic Bread in Prep
We decided that we wanted to use half of the loaf we got for an appetizer and make the rest into garlic bread for the meal. Now, we decided to get multigrain bread… so it was a little hard to decide when the inside was done cooking. After putting the bread in, I got started on the garlic bread. The main ingredient of course is a heaping amount of butter. After the butter is covering the bread in a rather thick layer, you add some salt free garlic and herb seasoning, a little bit of Italian seasoning, and a generous amount of cracked black pepper. Then you sprinkle cheese on top to your liking. 

Sauce Prep
Sauce with Meatballs

After prepping the bread, I started the water for the pasta and the base of the sauce. For the sauce I started with sautéing the pancetta and onions in a pan. I then added a small amount of olive oil and minced garlic. After letting the onions caramelize, I added the base sauce and meatballs to the pan. At this point, I added some spices and sugar to the sauce and turned it down to simmer. The pasta started cooking and it took barely any time. After draining it, I added some olive oil to make it less sticky. We left everything on the stove to stay warm while we tried the wine and ate the appetizer. Between the three of us, we got two different bottles of wine to try. They were Ebano and Crucero. Both were $7.95. 


Ebano was 2007, 100% tempranillo from the Ribera del Duero region of Spain.
The winery review said: The 2007 Ebano 6 is 100% Tempranillo aged 4 months in French oak. Dark ruby red in color, it displays a pleasant bouquet of cedar, spice box, violets, black cherry, and blackberry. Medium-to fullbodied on the palate with savory flavors and plenty of spice, this racy, vibrant Tempranillo has enough structure to drink well over the next 5-6 years and is a very good value.
My thoughts on the wine: It smelled of berries and dark fruit. It was very mellow with a spicey finish.


Crucero was a 2010, 100% Carmenere from the Colchagua Valley region of Chile.
A winery review said: Deep ruby. Cherry, blackcurrant and dark cherry on the nose. Juicy dark fruit flavors turn slightly bitter in the middle palate and are framed by dusty tannins. Finishes with tightly focused bitter cherry and pepper qualities and decent length. This gets better with a bit of aeration.
My thoughts on the wine: It smelled very peppery. This proved to be true in the taste as well. All you could taste in the wine was pepper. It was cracked black pepper all the way.

Appetizer
The appetizer was Brie cheese with the baked bread. By itself the appetizer was amazing, but then again, I love cheese. With the cheese, the Ebano tasted very spicey. The bread and cheese kind of muted the taste so all you got was the spicy sensation. I believe this was due to the fact that the bread was kind of heavy. The cheese and bread actually made the peppery aspect of the Crucero milder. It helped tone down the wine.

The Dinner
We decided that we needed to have some veggies with our meal because we didn’t add any to the tomato sauce. We had steamed potatoes and green beans in a Parmesan butter sauce. The Ebano wine was again more spicy with the food, however, this particular side brought out the berry in the wine. The Crucero was more muted with this side. The pepper did not take over your mouth. It was very good with this particular dish. Next was the spaghetti and meatballs. The main dish made the Ebano slightly spicy and slightly sweet finish. The Crucero was very spicy with this dish and the pepper explosion made a reappearance.

Me cutting the finished bread
The garlic bread was the last thing that I tried with the wine. The Ebano did not taste much different. It was a tad bit spicy, but mostly tasted like it originally did. The bread brought out the pepper in the Crucero. It was more of a pepper explotion than when I first tried it. I think this is because I used a generous amount of cracked pepper on the bread.


Overall, the dinner was a great experience. Everything was very good… although I probably wouldn’t get the Crucero again. I did end up liking the Ebano, which is interesting because in my initial tasting notes I did not like the wine.