#78- Muscat Ottonel

Hello dessert wine! I had this wine just after our August wine club meeting which just happened to be ports and sherries so I was pretty familiar with tasting sweet wines.

This is a good wine. In fact, I'll probably have some more tonight with my fruit (yes, the same batch of fruit you see in the picture, I froze them so I didn't have fruit overload a while back- goes great with yogurt!)

The Muscat Ottonel grape is a white grape from Germany (though the bottle we're trying is from Austria) In France, it's known as Muscat D'Alsace. It is primarily used in dessert wines but can also be used in dry wines and some blends coming out of the Eastern European region.

The winery is House of Hafner in Austria (that's with an "a", not an "e"). Visit their site and immediately you know this is one proud Austrian company- Mozart blasts at you from their site (luckily they have an off button, I love Mozart but not when I'm visiting websites thank you very much-but you have to hit the off button every time you visit a different page-- Hafner take note how freaking annoying this is!!)

What's also interesting to note about the wine is that it's Kosher (and can I say way better than the crappy Concord Kosher wine we had a while ago....)

As I mentioned before, the Muscat Ottonel wine is a dessert wine and it pairs very nicely with many things. It's been a beautiful last few weeks here in Edmonton and I take advantage of the seasonal fruit we have available here so I paired it with blueberries, pineapple, raspberries and strawberries. Okay, one of these fruits is not grown here and I'll give you one guess only...

It's a very delicate wine on your mouth, quite acidic but very sweet. It's not as sweet as a port or sherry so you can in fact drink a glass of the wine with your dessert rather than limiting yourself to just an ounce or two.

It comes in a fancy royal blue bottle, likely to make the bright yellow label stand out.

Perusing their site, I have discovered that there are a few grape varieties I have yet to try that are grown in this region so I'll be extra careful checking out the Austrian section of the wine story to see what I can find!

#18- Zweigelt

If you like a Valpolicella, you will like this wine! One of the very first wines I was ever introduced to was a Masi Valpolicella by my friend Mark in St. Catharines, Ontario. That's when I was living in Ottawa and made frequent trips to the Niagara region. It was here that I attended their wine festivals and began to appreciate wine for what it is.While a Valpolicella is a mix of 4 different grape varietals (and therefore I can't drink it as a part of this 185 grape experiment), the Zweigelt grape comes very very close to its taste.

The Zweigelt grape comes from Austria and this wine does also. The Pleil Winery in Weinvertel, Austria (two Austrian wines in a row!).I didn't realize until I started exploring more wines that Austria was such a big producer of wines! We've drank two of their most popular grapes varieties- the Gruner Veltliner and the Zweigelt but they do produce many good wines. I should mention too that Austria is the home of Schnaps and I had the pleasure of visiting the original Schnaps store in Vienna and brought a boatload back including their infamous Absinthe! That has nothing to do from wine but Austrians understand, know and market their alcohol very very well.

The wine is velvety, not unlike the Valpolicella. It is dry and leaves a subtle but apparent aftertaste in your mouth. It is not a wine to be sipped slowly and by itself on a warm evening but works well with food. I had a lot of salmon leftover from the previous evening and it was beautiful outside and I wasn't about to cook. So barbequed salmon in a  light garden salad it is. Not exactly a perfect meat and wine match but it worked for me on this occasion. It is usually flavoured with fruit such as cherries and while I could taste the fruit, I couldn't be sure that it was cherries. This is also a wine that definitely needs to breathe and I noticed a difference in taste as I let the wine sit there.

While I loved this wine, my brother could have cared less, even with the bottle having been opened for a few days already. He didn't particularly take to it and found the taste quite strong. I did notice however, that it stop him from drinking the glass! He is becoming more and more attuned to red wines but he still favours white wines and a white wine was up next so I'm pretty sure he was looking forward to that one! In any case, he won't be grabbing for a Zweigelt any time soon. That's okay. We still have a 165+ wines to go! The next one on our list is an Italian wine and it took some searching to find- the Fiano.