#98- Muscadelle

On the 6th day of Wine-mas my true self gave to me- a bottle of Tokay from Hungary.

Now I've had a Tokay before, but it was a Tokay D'Alsace, similar to a Pinot Gris. But this one is the Muscadelle grape and known as Tokay in that country.

This is also a dessert wine.

And boy was it sweet. Super sweet but it was also very good. I hated the other Tokay but this one I enjoyed very much.

It was very thick and syrupy. A beautiful copper colour almost bordering on the orange colours and full of caramel and vanilla flavours.

The grape is of noble rot and hence gives it the dessert like quality to it. It is ranked a four star wine so it is of very high quality. Bill at Unwined suggested the wine to me.

Chateau Megyer  produces this wine. The Muscadelle grape is a white grape and is often blended with other grapes to create sauternes in France. In Hungary, it is often used as a single variety grape for dessert wines.

I paired this wine with dessert- carnation milk and a mixture of fresh blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. This was an absolutely delicious dessert.

I think I'll be bringing this to Christmas dinner to share with the family. I'm sure it'll go with a nice spread of baking or something of the like. It should certainly last a while that's for sure. That's now two sherries and a dessert wine on the list of six so far. I'm definitely in the mood for sharing!

#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!

#73- Melon de Bourgogne

Is that not the best name ever for a grape? Seriously. The wine I drank is the melon de Bourgogne grape but it's also known as Muscadet and that's what it said on the bottle but I'm going with the official grape name on this one for sure!

The winery is Chateau du Coing de St. Fiacre. The winery is located in France. It's a great website but note to the websmaster- not all of us are fond of listening to music and it'd be great if I could turn it off on the website rather than having to mute my computer.The wine is also known as Tradition Millenaire and there's a great description of it on the website.

The grape is considered a light lightweight and very acidic. It is very similar to a Riesling so if you like the lighter, sweeter white wines (but not a dessert wine), then you will likely like this wine. I did enjoy it very much. It was a beautiful evening outside and hung out back on my patio, just sitting and chilling, drinking the white wine and paired it with fresh shrimp and a nice shrimp dipping sauce. I wasn't sure about the pairing but the freshness of the wine went really well with the cool shrimp.

The Melon de Bourgogne grape is French (melon of Burgandy is what it translates to literally) but is found in other parts of the world as well. Outside of France, it's known as Melon as France is the only area in the world that can call their wines Muscadet.

It was very easy to drink and it took a lot of resistance not to drink the whole bottle and leave Craig any. As you can see by the picture, the wine was very yellow and that surprised me as usually that is an indication to me that I'm not going to like the wine very much. But I did- with a hint of spice and with the fruitiness of peach coming through, I found it an easy wine to drink.

It's definitely a great alternative to a Riesling if you're looking for a nice summer white and don't want to fall back on the regular wines.

#57- Semillon

Mendoza, Argentina wine- you are a sweet one. And we like you (though not everyone tasting you had an easy time drinking you- you are that sweet).

Let me introduce you to a wine that could easily be disguised as an expensive ice wine or dessert wine for an affordable price. The grape is Semillon and the winery is Lancatay Huarpe Wines. They make a huge variety of wines and I encourage you to check out their website.

I enjoyed this wine and I didn't even pair it with dessert (though we did have it with birthday cake on Sunday- happy birthday dad!) and it was almost too sweet. I ended up having it with a simple dinner I had thrown together one evening- chicken and broccoli. I appreciated that I wasn't overwhelmed by sweetness and the broccoli really paired well with it in my humble opinion.

The Semillon grape is made for sweet wines, the wine a beautiful golden honey brown. It is fruity in taste (this one in particular had hints of apples) and other aromas such as fruits and florals (this one had a rose aroma).  it is a heavy and dry wine and one describes it perfectly when the wine is described as having an oily texture. It's not light on the tongue and it has a "fullness" to the wine. That is if you can get over how sweet this wine is. Kristin had a hard time drinking it. I did not. Craig seemed to enjoy the wine as well. But I should note that Kris, Craig and my mom drank this wine after trying two other reds so their pallettes were not perfect (always hard to follow a red with a white).

I would definitely recommend this wine for a nice summer sipping wine (and yes, it should be sipped, the bottle itself was not a 750ml bottle- maybe half that).

#35- Muller-Thurgau (Rivaner)

Happy Halloween! What a great evening filled with family and little ones. But let's not kid ourselves, we got drink to wine! Random fact: any wine will do on an evening where one has to dress up and put up with little kids screaming "trick or treat" at the top of their lungs in the hope you throw a candy or two into their bag? True story. A second random fact: all wine pairs great with chocolate.

But I'm not even on that wine yet. I am reviewing the wine that we drank on Friday evening. After a long week of hating my job, Kris invited me out to her place for the evening to bitch, drink and do whatever grown ups do on Fridays. I brought us out a Rivaner. The Rivaner grape is one I hadn't heard of before but it is a cross breed of a Riesling and a Madelaine Royale grape (it was once thought to have been crossed with Silvaner but that has been proven wrong). It is quite sweet.

The name of the Winery is Black Tower in Germany, more specifically the Rhine Valley (note: I was just there three weeks ago- the Rhine Valley, not the winery). What a beautiful place on earth that I got to visit. I really enjoyed this part of Germany so it's nice to be able to drink a wine from there.

The Rivaner is also known as the Muller-Thurgau grape (and much easier to pronounce). On the varietal table, it appears as the Muller-Thurgau grape and it's also known as Liebfraumilch (direct translation if I remember my German correctly is Love Woman Milk) or something to that effect. it is moderately acidic and is a light lightweight wine, in other words, very easy to drink. And sweet.

Did I mention sweet? When Kristin took her first gulp of it, she was taken aback. It took us a while to get used to how sweet this wine was! Looking at the varietal chart, it is right next to the Pricesso grape, an Italian grape used for sparkling wine so you can imagine that it is indeed on the sweet side for sure. At first, Kristin said she wasn't sure if she'd be able to finish her glass it was that sweet.

She did.

In fact, she did ask if we had to leave any wine for Craig to try. I said she did.

I enjoyed this wine a lot. It is very fruity but hard to decipher exactly what fruit it is. Kris and took stabs at it- she guessed kumquat. Wrong. The fruits are apparently pineapple and mango.  It was sweet but we paired it with some maki from one of our favourite Japanese restaurants in the city- Teriyaki Corner. They had this new menu item- Dragon Rolls (spicy salmon deep fried and rolled with rice and a special dragon sauce). It was spicy all right but was nicely offset by the sweet crispness of the wine. Looking up the wine online, we found out it pairs nicely with a lot of spicy dishes.

I wouldn't suggest this wine if you're looking for a wine to go with a typical, American style food. It's much too sweet to drink with anything but spice or if you were treating as an aperitif or dessert. The Black Tower winery does indeed do this wine justice and comes in a very funky wine bottle (Black of course...)

The next wine is one of the favourite wines on our list- Shiraz. It is the one we drank this evening while the kiddies dug into their candy. They had their candy, we can have ours!

Craig was left at home to hand out candy to the kids so I stopped by to drop off the Rivaner to him; told him to pair it with something spicy. He ate a tuna fish sandwich with it. When I asked him what I thought of the wine, he said "all I can taste is tuna". Yup, we're related...

#32- Pinot Noir

Also known as Spatburgunder. A nice German wine, I picked this up on my latest trip to Europe. Yes- I'm back! I got back from my three week trip around Europe just over a week ago and it's been go go since. I plan to do a special post (this week sometime) on the various wines I got to try while I was there. To be surrounded by vineyards and dozens of wines I'd never heard of, I was in wine heaven!

But back to the wine at hand. As I mentioned, it is a wine that I picked in Germany. We stayed in a beautiful little town called St. Goar and had the most interesting wine tasting at the Familienwappen (weingut Carl Fricke) Weingut Schloss Rheinfels Winery. I ended up purchasing three wines and one of the wines I picked up was their Spatburgunder wine. It is made from the Pinot Noir grape. Usually considered a red wine wine, this wine was actually a rose wine! But I have learned that most Spatburgunder wines are in fact rose wines, and are very expensive to purchase (I must say I got myself a deal then...) This bottle of wine was about $22.00 CDN (I can't remember exactly how many Euros it was, so this is purely a guess).

I brought the wine over to my parents house for Thanksgiving dinner. Five of us wanted to taste the wine so after the first pour, there was very little left. As per tradition, mom made a turkey feast and I felt that the Spatburgunder was an excellent match to the meat. More and more people recommend going with sweeter wines for turkey and many are doing sparkling wines. While not a sparkling wine, the Pinot Noir grape is often very sweet. And sweet this wine was!

The wine is very lightweight and therefore easy to drink. Both my mom, Sharon (new sister in law) and I had no problems polishing off the wine. However, both brothers had issues finishing the wine, finding it very sweet and not to their tastes. Luckily for them I have no issue finishing their wine for them. The wine is very fruity and reminded me of a Zinfandel (well the rose anyway).

I really enjoyed the wine and wished I had brought more home with me but alas, I will have to settle for the memory of an amazing wine taste and knowing that I shared it with the most important people in the world to me. Yup, they're worth that much!

Next up is the Kerner grape and guess what? I bought myself a Canadian wine. It's good to be back home.

#26- Chenin Blanc

And so began the weekend of five! I was very much looking forward to this weekend, not only because we get to drink a crap load of wine (all for research purposes of course) but that I was again going on some amazing hikes in the Rocky Mountains. We are so lucky that we have such a wonder like the Rockies in our backyard, just an few hours drive away from the chaos and into some peaceful awe and wonder. And with glasses of wine to boot!

Now, Craig wasn't feeling well at all for this trip but total trooper that he is, he joined me on the camping weekend anyway (turns out he has bronchitis and should not have been doing what he was doing all weekend)- but turns out all of us Stevenson's have a stubborn streak (pneumonia ring a bell for anyone? oh what? right-- that was me...)

So Friday night we kicked off our weekend with a more common wine available here in Canada- the grape being a Chenin Blanc. The winery is from South Africa called the Winery of Good Hope and the wine itself has some interesting information on it. The wine was purchases at the Cellar (amazing store by the way) in Calgary Alberta for $21.95.

Craig was really sick that evening and wasn't able to try it that evening but took a nice swig of it after our crazy weekend. Instead, my mother joined me in drinking this wine and let's just put it this way-- before I knew it, my mother was refilling our wine glasses! A fan of white wine, it would be safe to say that it's mom approved! I too really enjoyed this wine and it actually didn't go too badly with our steak and pan fries. This would be a great wine to pair with a tastier dish such as Thai food or anything Asian or Mexican or Spanish.
With a slice of tomato from the back garden (before the blight arrives!), I was ready to enjoy a nice glass of white to put me to sleep. I had two glasses and could have had more but we did have to keep some for Craig to try a little later.

This wine was so light and crisp, easily a wine to drink on its own. You could definitely taste the citrus flavours and when told, the cinnamon could be tasted on the back of your taste buds. It left no aftertaste whatsoever. This wine would also be a good starter wine for someone looking to try wine further. It's quite acidic and on the sweet side (but not too sweet, again a great wine to drink all on its own).

The label itself is awesome- too bad I can't keep it. It's right on the bottle itself so the bottle may now become a funky new vase of sorts.

Craig and I packed two reds and two whites for the two full days of camping we had ahead of us. What a weekend to look forward to. (I also don't have pictures of Craig and I drinking the Chenin Blanc so I'll have to come back and replace the filler pics).