#27- Catarratto

It was the yellowest wine we'd seen in a while. Now one could perhaps blame the silver goblets we were drinking the wine from but no, it was freaking urine yellow. Craig really liked the wine. I thought it was so so. Split decision. I could end this blog right here, right now. But I won't.

There is just so much more to tell!! The grape we were trying on our first day, first hike was the Catarratto wine from Sicily, a product of Italy. Bought for $15.99 at Crown Liquor in Spruce Grove, the wine was chilled prior to Craig and I heading up on our first hike at Mt. Robson Provincial Park in British Columbia. More on the hike later.

The winery is from Terre di Ginestra in Italy (and as far as I can find, no website for the winery- please let me know if this is not the case). It's also cheap wine and I can tell by the label. On the label itself it says "Indicazione Geografica Tipica" or IGT which in layman's terms means less than, or cheap wine. Well $15.99 is cheap here but would be one hell of a bottle in Italy me thinks! Well, I'll let you know whether the latter part is true when I'm in Italy in just a couple of weeks!  But again, more of that later- say Wednesday.

My first thought about this wine was that it tasted exactly like apple juice. It looked like it, it smelled like it, it had the consistency of it. It reminded me of no other wine I had tasted in recent memory, perhaps the closest being the Vermentino wine. I was pretty neutral on it but Craig really seemed to enjoy it. I blame the fact that he was sick as anything and couldn't taste much.

We drank this wine after a pleasant 7km hike from the Mt. Robson Visitor Centre (at the base of Mt. Robson, the tallest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. Part of a larger hike to Berg Lake, Craig and I had left mid afternoon for the hike so we only (and planned) to make it to Kinney Lake. Berg Lake is a two day hike up the mountain and some climbers choose to stay at Kinney Lake as a pit stop. We pitstopped.

I ate chocolate and beef jerky with my wine. What can I say? I was hiking people!! I was not about to bring anything much more than that. I was busy trying out my new pack (love it) and my new trekking poles (love them!). Eating wasn't something we'd really thought about for the afternoon as we were in between meals.

Craig and I rested for a bit, drank our wine and observed that our hike was telling us to drink. On the mountain across the lake, the trees were growing in the shape of an upside down wine glass! So we took our pics, got our sugars up and headed back down the mountain. We hit a bit of rain on the way down but overall this was a very pleasant hike.