Our Daily Vino

I'm going to do another round of "Supernatual Wine" tastings where I pair a wine with a supernatural name with an episode of the TV series Supernatural.

For the first wine I've got Pinot Evil Pinot Noir, a French Vin de Pays de L'Ile de Beaute wine. (A "country" wine from Corisica.)

Color: A light red. This wine is almost Lambrusco colored, and you can tell it's thin as it pours.

Nose: Initially kind of closed, cherries and earth, astringent. Once opened, tart cherries.

First Impression: It's got a very silky mouthfeel, but it's sour and astringent straight out of the bottle. The predominant flavor note is cherries. The finish is very short.

Breathing Room: Not much changes. It becomes even more silky and astringency is gone, but it's got one flavor note: sour cherry and the finish is still really short.

Verdict: I ate this with a garlicy steak, potatoes, tomatoes, and roasted asparagus (aka "Flatiron steak from Sammy's Woodfired") and it went pretty well. It's so cherry tasting, that it would go well with some kinds of game such as duck, or with things like lemon-rosemary chicken and roast pork.

But, I paid $6.50 for a bottle at my local Fresh and Easy, so don't expect anything from this wine. It doesn't get anything wrong but neither does it get anything especially right.

Episode: 6x15 "The French Mistake" -- okay I had to go with the title here. The French Mistake is one of the funniest hours of TV it's ever been my privilege to watch. (Clip is under 5 mins.) Sam and Dean stumble onto the set of a TV series called Supernatural and all hell breaks loose. It's fun like the wine is fun, but as a meta episode, it's got more layers.

This isn't going to be my usual write up wherein I type up my notes. This is a bottle of wine I pulled off the wine rack and poured because when my dinner guest arrived she'd had a horrible no good very bad day and forgotten to bring the bottle of wine she said she was bringing.

Fortunately, the rustic potato and vegetable casserole I made pairs with both whites and reds, and since I didn't have any whites in the fridge, I hunted through the rack for something I knew would be an easy drinking red and found this bottle from the La Mejanelle region of the Coteaux Du Languedoc.

This is a bottle of wine I picked up at my local Fresh and Easy. It's 40% Syrah, 40% Grenache, and 20% Mourvedre. Most of the French wine I've seen (and drunk) is Vin de Pays, so I was pleasantly surprised to see an Appellation on the bottle. (Which is what made feel confident that this was something I could serve to a guest.) But then again, the wines of southern France are so much less famous than Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Loire, that there are some real bargains to be found.

The color is a nice garnet.

The nose has a definite smoky cherry and raspberries.

The taste is cherries up front, but it's not a fruit bomb. The tart raspberries come in on the mid palate. The finish is nice and clean with some vanilla and a little spice. The mouthfeel is nice and silky. There are tannins but they don't overwhelm.

It tastes good and drinks easy. We finished this bottle and would've happily drunk another.

And at $8-10 it's a solid deal; I was shocked when I found out how inexpensive this wine is. It tastes like something in the $15 dollar range, which is what I thought I must have paid for it when I pulled it from the rack, based on the way it tastes and the fact that's it's an AOC wine, because at the $10 price point, you typically get a Vin De Pays.