Cattail Creek Estate Series Chardonnay Musque 2011, VQA Four Mile Creek

The night I reviewed this wine was my birthday, and on birthdays I drink special wines. My roommate K made me delicious mac and cheese with bacon and it was the perfect filling meal to precede a birthday party! We drank my mom's favourite wine, a 2011 Chardonnay Musque from Cattail Creek, a small batches vineyard on Niagara on the Lake. At $17.95 a bottle, this is a birthday wine, NOT an everyday wine, but that's ok, because the little bit of sparkle makes it feel special.

A -This wine is lemony, peachy, and sparkly all at once. It is a bit like the Fresca of wines, citrusy, not too sweet, and still sparkilling. It is dry but also sweet. It smells very fruity as well, but more like tropical fruits than the light fruits you get when you taste it. In fact, it smells like my body wash, which is a good thing. It tastes and smells heavily of vanilla.

K- This wine smells very fruity. It smells like white fruits, like peaches, white grapes, etc. It is not as fruity as it smells, though I still like the pear taste I get to start, I don't like the aftertaste. While it is above nail polish remover wine, I still wasn't feeling it. It has a slightly syrupy start, but finishes like burning (alcoholy, covering the whole tongue).

L- This wine is sparkly and sweet (quite heavily both of these things). It tastes like pears. It has a kind of acidy aftertaste though and is very heady. It tastes like it has more alcohol than normal wines. It has the exciting finish of cough medecine sweetness followed by the same fruity, alcoholly, finish.

Sandbanks Love, Cassis Apertivo, 2012

One of A's favourite people had a baby the other day. And babies are worthy of celebrating with wine. A was going to go for a theme, but the only wine with "Baby" in the name is Baby Duck, and you'd have to pay her to drink that (or buy the bottle at least!). So, since the baby is a girl, A went for pink because girls have been associated with pink for the last century. She even drank it from a pink glass! Sandbank's Wineries Love Apertivo seemed perfect for two reasons. 1) It is pink and has a suitable name and 2) it is a half-bottle, which she appreciates as a live alone wine drinker. Half-bottles mean you don't have to drink 6 glasses of wine yourself! This wine is actually a blend of white wine with Canadian Cassis syrup and is technically an apertif, not a wine. It claims to be best drank cold and on its own, so on the instructions of the bottle, A will "embrace the moment!"

A - This wine is a little bit thicker than I normally drink and is quite a lot sweeter. It is a bit syrupy and it really tastes pink, by which I mean sweet, fruity, light, and pleasant. At a 2 on the sugar scale, this wine is a nice compromise between ice wine and normal wine. If you don't like ice wine, this would be a nice dessert sipping wine for you because it is a bit more tart, like cranberries or currants, but still has a nice sweetness. Unlike most ice wines, I probably would buy this wine again. It is more like a thick rose. At $14.95 at the LCBO, it is a wine fit for a dear friend's first baby, and not an everyday drink (luckily, and this friend will appreciate this, I got it on sale from my local store for $10.95, which made it even sweeter!).

Sue-Ann Staff Estate Winery, 2012 Baco Noir, VQA

Sadly, due to the whims of fate, my favourite winery is not making Baco Noir this year. In light of this sad news, I, A, have struck out to replace my favourite Baco with a good substitute. I turned to Sue-Ann Staff Estate Winery's 2012 Baco Noir. Priced at $14.95, it is in the mid-range for Baco Noir's and it has received good reviews. Plus the guy at the liquor store recommended it, saying it was the best Baco in vintages. With all of these things in its favour, I decided to give it a try. First, I drank it on its own while I cooked dinner, then I drank it with the dinner I had made, a rich mushroom and beef stew served poutine style (over cheese curds and fries) on the advice of Canadian Living (found here: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/gravy_smothered_beef_and_mushrooms.php ) The poutine was good, but I think that the stew was delicious enough on its own, so in the future I would recommend it over mashed potatoes, so its flavour can stand alone (how I ate it the second day) . Enough of my thoughts on stew, you say! So on to the wine...

A - This wine was not the flavour explosion I was hoping for. It predominantly tastes like black pepper and strawberries, with only a hint of the campfire smokiness I like in my Bacos. It didn't exactly have the strong oomph I was hoping for. It was definitely not the cherry, strawberry preserves, and blueberries that the website promised me. Perhaps I was just bitter because I lack the "fireplace, your mate, and a quiet night in," that this wine's website claims it pairs best with. EYE ROLL! While this wine was not exactly what I was looking for, it was by no means a bad wine. I was just hoping for something a little less subtle.

WITH POUTINE: Eating this with a saltier food like poutine brought out the fruitiness and also cut a bit of the peppery-ness. I liked it better with this obscenely rich meal. It brought both to a good middle point. 

AN IMPORTANT ASIDE: I later served a wine-liking but non-snob friend this wine and she really enjoyed it. She isn't big on strong wines so liked that this was a little more subtle, and didn't have an overbearing smokiness. I think this wine might have been something my mom would like too, since she likes less heavy, more fruity reds. With that in mind and my general like for the wine, I would recommend serving this on its own to friends on a night in, or drinking it with a savoury rustic meal. Hot Hamburg anyone? I would drink this wine again, but it does not replace my favourite baco in my heart!

2010 Huff Estates Pinot Noir, VQA – aerated

This wine is a real treat. At $24.95 a bottle it is the kind of wine you drink from time to time, not every day. It is now sold out.  This is one of my Dad’s picks, drank with dill pickle popcorn, because my mom doesn’t like to drink red wine so for my dad any chance to share a red is a special occasion. For normal people, I would recommend it with a dinner, probably a heartier one, though it is nice and complex to drink on its own.

D – This wine is full bodied with a lot of legs, and tastes lightly oaked. There are a lot of flavours going on here. It is nice to drink by itself so you can taste all the flavours going on. It is a very light red, and is almost the colour of a rose. I taste blackberries and currents, darker red fruits, and the woodiness I mentioned earlier. I love this wine. I would eat this with cheeses and pork. The wine isn’t heavy enough for beef or something strongly flavoured like Italian. I might even consider this for a thanksgiving or Christmas wine with turkey.

M – My mom made a very bad face. I think that this wine is too red for her, so this is not a white wine drinkers red. She said it tasted dry and sour, so that’s a no go.

A – This wine has a very distinct flavour, that is quite different than other wines I have drank. It is woody and raisiny and a little bit dry. It tastes like eating a meal, because there are a lot of flavours going on at once. First it is like cherries and raisins, drier fruits. Then it gets dry and spicy. This wine would go well with a nice pork roast, maybe with apples or sage. OR something bacony. I would want to eat it with something fattier to bring out the flavours and balance the dryness. This might also go well with something with a creamy gravy, like a turkey or a chicken pot pie for the same reasons. The more I drank this wine, the more I liked and appreciated it. I would use this a gift for someone who I knew liked red wine. It would also be good for a fancy winter dinner. A win for our wine and popcorn night!

Cattail Creek Collaboration White, 2009

This wine was a m-fing challenge to open. The screw top wasn't fully perforated, so after many manual attempts we ended up going at it with a screw driver, hoping it would be worth it.

This is a wine for a special occassion though, especially given the $22.95 price tag. Available only through the winery, we judged that if any white were worth this amount of money, it would be this one, with the caveat that I would not drink it every day.

A-  This wine smells like pineapples and mangoes to me, like summer time. It tastes very apple-y and minerally to me. It has a kind of floral front taste to it. It is quite sweet  but also a bit dry but also not puckery, like some rieslings and Sauvignon Blancs can sometimes be. It has a slight hint of vanilla too, with a light hint of oaking and smokiness, but not overwhelmingly so. I love how many fruits there are going on in this wine, there are different fruit tastes on each different sip on each different part of the tongue, making this wine a complex joy. While it is partly reisling and gewurtztraminer, it is much more complex than our other reisling gewurtz. The sauv blanc adds a really different level to the fruity sweetness of the other two grapes. It tastes a bit like a peach stone to me, sweet, but also bry, but not bitter. It is the kind of wine I think 10 people could taste and get something different from one another. I would drink it in the place of champagne at special events because it is dry and a bit sparkly like champange without being puckery or headache inducing.

M- This wine smells like pop, summer, or apple juice. It is gentle at first, and then intense, and then back to nothing again, which is unusual for a wine. It would be good with dinner because it is light, flavourful, and has its own stand out taste which worked seperately from the food. It has a nice colour, like a yellow diamond. It is good and holds up for sipping like a good red but is lighter like a good white, without being overwhelmingly sweet.