#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!

#66- Concord

So it's been a few months since I last posted but I've been very busy and I think I have a good excuse!! From May to July, 10 weeks in total, I was away in Southeast Asia on a vacation/journey of sorts. In May, I successfully completed the Everest Base Camp trek- 24 days of climbing- up and down- and eventually reaching Everest Base Camp on May 25th! It was the hardest thing I've ever done both mentally and physically. But well worth it!

I didn't post at all in April as I was very busy getting ready for the trek and didn't drink much. Needless to say I have some catching up to do to get myself back on track. Technically I should be on wine #84 and I'm just now writing #66 (though I have 5 more ready to go) so I'm basically a whole semester behind and will have to double up at least 13 weeks to do it. Shucks darn- two bottles a week!

So let's get back at this shall we? The Concord grape is one that we tried back in April at our wine club and there was a broad consensus on this wine- we didn't like it. Well Craig did as it's super sweet but most of us found it a little strong and tasting way too much like grape juice. Makes sense- it is the grape they often use to make grape juice.

The grape is very popular for juices because the skin slips off the grape quite easily, making it ideal for drinks.
 It is also almost exclusively cultivated in the Eastern United States. This wine is also kosher meaning people of the Jewish faith can drink this wine.

The type of wine we had came in a square bottle (that should have told us something right there...) and was made by Manischewitz Winery. The wine is made, as the site proclaims " and bottled under the strict Rabbinical supervision of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. All of our fine products carry the mark of quality that signifies adherence to Orthodox Union guidelines."

The best way to describe is to say it tastes just like grape juice. So save yourself a few bucks here and just buy yourself some Welch's grape juice. I'm pretty sure the alcohol content is about the same as well. We had the wine at the wine club so a variety of appetizers were tried when drinking this wine.

 

The next wine tried is the Tocai Fruilano grape. I don't have high expectations for it as the last time I had a grape with the word Tokay in it, it was disgusting!

And here are a couple of pictures from the Everest Base Camp trek- one of our first view of the big beast and then a picture of me at Everest Base Camp!