snousle

Joined a group of friends from the ranch at McNab Ridge winery, just down the hill from us, to participate in a wine blending contest.

albear_garni came along, as well as his partner, Dave, who did the actual blending while we all argued about what to put in.

I felt like I was off to a slow start - on our first pass through the six different single-grape bottles provided, they all tasted the same. But quickly they began to differentiate themselves. It was amazing how slightly different blends ended up tasting very different indeed.

My suggestion of 70% pinotage with 30% of one of the zinfandels went over well at the table, and after a lot of discussion we agreed it was the best, but only by a hair. I had thought we had hit a magic combination there, but somewhat to my surprise it did not place at all in the contest. Apparently they got quite a few pinotage based entries, as they were real easy to like. I had thought that wine would be a bit like pizza - the typical person would try to put in too many different things, and the result would be a muddle. Indeed, it was surprising how just 10% of the wrong grape totally wrecked the blend. I mean it was all drinkable, but adding the wrong thing usually made the combination quite inferior to a more restrained approach.

Much to my surprise, the blends that did place well tended to have 4 or so different varietals, and included very small percentages of some of them. This is not so unlike Bordeaux, which sometimes has as little as 2% of things like petit verdot. I'll know for next year!

The guy that grows the pinotage, by the way, lives here on the ranch and is a real good looking daddybear with a gray amish style beard. I hope he takes our suggestion and joins us at the Friday get-together sometime.

Anyway, I don't want to have ANY red wine for a good long while now. My palate is exhausted!