Review for Tuesday - 02/28/2006 by Steve

I’m starting to get a reputation that I’m not proud of. Oh and, no, I don’t care I ended the previous sentence with a preposition. I’ve been, let’s call it, “adventurous” the past several weeks with my wine selections and my rep is starting to pay for it. Surprisingly though, this week the Cabernet I brought garnered mixed reviews. Fish Eye’s faithful thought it was pleasant, mellow, slightly sweet, and very drinkable. Meanwhile the detractors morphed those opinions into lacking, indistinctive, and uninteresting. John lumped this wine into his own personal category of “cheap wines which will likely give me intestinal issues the next morning”. Although it should be noted that the postmortem revealed that it did not.

Two Tone’s Napa Valley cab didn’t fare too well with the winers. Most thought this wine was harsh in aromer and taste with a mellowing quality. Personally, I thought it smelled and tasted like a light truck tire. Chris, in one breath mind you, thought Two Tone bitch-slapped him (complete with *whack* sound effect) yet also called it a run-of-the-mill, tanniny cabernet sauvignon. Curiously, Bill and Ed mirrored each other again and believed that it not very distinctive. Their similar, repetitive polarization in opinion left me wondering whether they were still merrily entranced by the Fish Eye. It should be noted that while the Two Tone had four “drinks”, two of the four were barely “drinks”.

In the parlance of the greater New England area, this Sensi Montepulciano is wicked dry. It’s also tart, a little harsh overall, and may or may not be metallic tasting. Ed prefers crackers in bed to this wine. I really can’t, nay refuse, to comment on that one. He’ll have to explain that grizzly image on the forum sometime. John, a self attributed Montepulciano phreak, thought this wine was just plain bad and had pretty much nothing going for it. As an aside, Chris deemed pizza rolls to be an excellent antidote for Sensi cotton mouth. So pick some up the next time you grab this wine, they’re in your freezer section. Did I mention the Sensi is dry?

Okay, so this is the wine of the evening when everything went downhill. No, I’m not referring to the quality of the libations or a degradation in the reviewers overall sense of enthusiasm. Instead I’m primarily referring qualities of humanity you wouldn’t want to see on a Pictionary card...like say, dignity, civility, and perhaps even faith in mankind. I would like to personally say that I will endeavor to watch my mouth during future reviewing activities. In my own defense, we were playing "Guts" and my hand was two aces. With that out of the way, Ravenswood continues to score well among the winers. Just about everyone, sans myself, would gladly drink and buy this wine again at only eight large. Although not overly special, we thought this Shiraz was worthy of the Ravenswood brand, dry and complex with good level of spice. The audio also includes a succinct PSA-style clarification between Syrah and Shiraz.

Tensions flared on over this Rosemount wine, with opinions clashing primarily between me against everyone else. The Traditional is a cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit verdot (SMV) blend. At 30 large, this wine is expensive, at least as far as our tastes go. We could all agree that it did not smell very inviting at all. Descriptors ranged from trashy at worst, to strange at best. Most of the winers weren’t very forgiving when describing Traditional's taste as well. Price was definitely a sticking point but John basically abhorred this Rosemount. Referring to it as sweet and vanilla-y, he even went as far as to compare it to the Yellowtail reserve we had a couple of weeks ago. Personally, I thought this Rosemount was amazing. It was very oaky, smokey, and smooth with amazing balance, and a velvety finish. Even with my cheapo ways, I’d enthusiastically drink and buy this complex beauty.

Limoncello is a particularly vile Italian liqueur creation. It looks lemony, it smells lemony, and it tastes like lemon ass. I first encountered this concoction as a rite of passage from my then soon to be father-in-law several years ago. I won’t spoil the audio on this review, but the winers unanimously thought this was somewhere between lemon moonshine and something hawked by the good people at either Procter & Gamble or SC Johnson. You should basically only drink this “beverage” on a dare. It you buy this, be sure to pour a very small glass for yourself, and then pour it directly down the drain. It’s for your own good, son.