Review for Week 20 (yes, 20) - by Ssezi

Apparently we were still in our, if it has alcohol we'll try it phase, starting out with a cranberry apple wine from a local winery. There's a reason the vast majority of wines are made from grapes, and this beverage gives ample clue as to why. For those turned off by the sweetness of wine coolers, this may be an enjoyable drink, and we were debating whether it was an efficient inebriant on a hot summer day, too bad we forgot to test that this past summer.

It is kind of refreshing to listen to the winers of several months ago. For one, I sound like I have a stuffy nose, but it always seems that way to me when I listen to myself on tape. More importantly this episode is near the beginning of Bill's love affair with [Argentine](http://www.realworldwiners.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=2066) Malbecs. And if you're going to chose a Malbec to fall in love with, this is the one, with both a reasonable price of approximately $10 and unanimous recommendation as worth both drinking and buying.

An unusual blend, since [Voignier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viognier) is a white grape. In this blend though its character is hidden enough for even Chris not to care. We also didn't care about whatever point the vintner was trying to make with this blend, finding the wine unremarkable in general and probably too pricey at $18.

From middling to mediocre, the second Shiraz of the night found few fans. This wine had all the qualities of a desert wine, namely sweetness, without actually being one. I speculated that the maker may have spiked the wine with ethylene glycol, unlikely since even trace amounts will make you go blind, and whatever other problems I had with the wine visual acuity was not one of them. Perhaps for novice drinkers looking for a path to a more sophisticated palette and unimpressed by White Zinfandel may appreciate this wine, for the most part the Real World Winers don't.

After sneaking in the pale grape with the Shiraz Viognier blend we get a straight up white wine with the Trimbach. The flaw in our tasting method shows up as we all detect sweetness in this wine, probably because of the relatively drier red wines we'd tasted earlier. It's almost not worth asking John or Chris their opinion on white wines, but we put you the listener through it anyway. If you do purchase the Trimbach, be sure to do so at a store with reasonable prices or you may have issues sitting down as Ed explains.

This wine poses a conundrum, how bad does a wine have to be before you won't drink it at any price? For most of the winers this wine passes that threshold, at a mere $5 it did not provoke high expectations, and proceeded to leap clear over our barriers. Except for Ed that is, who was unswayed by the value proposition this wine represented. So for winers on a budget, who still want a respectable wine, or at least something with a cork in the bottle perhaps this is for you.