Zach Wine Blog

 Tasting - Bay Bridge White Zinfandel Bay Bridge White Zinfandel from California. The bottle did not list a year, so we assumed it was just a 2024 as it is very cheap ($3.99). A review of this wine on tastings.com described the wine as follows: " Aromas and flavors of lime gelatin, raspberry granita, and ripe strawberry with a satiny, vibrant, dry light body and a seamless, agreeable finish that shows shades of cherry pastry filling, tart strawberry, and lime custard with fruit tannins and no oak flavor. A rose bursting with ripe berries and sweet lime; a perfect summer sipper." We tasted this bottle without food. Poured into a wine glass and swished around a little, it smelled like sweet strawberries with hints of lime, as expected for a white zinfandel. It smelled light and not very acidic or alcoholic. When sipped, it tasted sweet with hints of strawberry, raspberry, and citrus. Overall, I thought it had a pleasant, slightly dry taste, and I think it would pair well with s...

 Wine Dinner 2 For our second wine dinner, I was in charge of cooking up the dinner while Sierra, Adam, and Karim chose bottles of wine to pair with my dishes. I decided on making grilled chicken (dry brined and seasoned with Trader Joe's everyday seasoning blend) and pasta with alfredo sauce, and I bought a couple small pecan pies as a desert. This time we communicated what food we were having before everyone bought their wine, so there was at least an effort at making good pairings this time. Post Dinner Scene The first bottle of wine we tried was a Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, which was chosen based off decent peer reviews. Swished around in a fancy wine glass, it smelled light with some hints of vanilla. Tasted by itself, it was light and fruity with slight hints of vanilla and pineapple. It was paired with the alfredo linguine, and when sipped after taking a bite of the noodles, it was very pleasant. It took the bite away from the wine but left a good bit of flavor with no weir...

 Wine Dinner 1 The gang and I decided to boldly defy wine traditions and blaze a new path for our first wine dinner. We had one person cook up some food while the other three chose bottles of wine, so there was no real idea of the kinds of pairings we'd have beforehand. We ended up with some stew beef, carrots, and potatoes as our dishes and three interesting bottles of wine. Beef, carrots, and potatoes on a plate Our first bottle of wine was a Gnarly Head zinfandel (Figure 1), which I chose solely based off it's name and pretty label. The Gnarly Head had some fairly strong berry/cherry scents along with a little spice. I also thought it smelled a little dusty, which is the best word I could find to describe what I smelled. By itself, the Gnarly Head had a light berry taste and was moderately dry. I thought it tasted decent by itself, but it really shined with the carrots. The carrots were fairly soft and sweet, which paired well with the sweetness and dryness of the wine. The ...

Current Experience With Wine So far in life, I have a fairly minimal amount of experience with wine. Until fairly recently, a lot of my peers and I treated alcohol as just a means to get drunk, so nobody really cared about how things tasted. With that mindset, it feels pretty taboo to drink along with a meal or just drink to enjoy the taste. That view also wasn't helped by the fact that most of the wine I had tried until recently was either a cheap Barefoot Fruitscato or came from a bag. I think I only started to come around to wine when I wanted to have a drink with some character to go with some steak. I had a friend who brewed his own mead, so I drank some of that with the steak. While the mead probably wasn't the ideal pairing for steak, the combination was still very enjoyable and opened me up to the idea that pairing certain foods and alcohols can be tasty. I am very new to wine vocabulary and spent nearly all my life not giving any thought to describing wine I've had...