First Tasting - Trimbach Riesling

Before getting into the details of our first wine tasting, I want to talk a little about the tasting environment. Maybe after you have more experience you can form your opinion of a wine in any setting, but when you are novice like myself I think the ideal situation is to have an environment where you can really concentrate on the wine.

So what was our environment for the first tasking? 

• 5PM
• my wife was trying to finish cooking diner
• I was trying to entertain our 2 and half year old son

Ideal? Probably not, but we had some ambitious drinking plans for that night. It was New Year's eve and we were planning on tasting the 2007 Trimbach Riesling and then drinking a bottle a champagne. We opened the bottle, tried to taste and think about the wine while everything else was going on. Bottom line - it did not work. We decided to just drink a glass or so with dinner and then revisit the wine again after our son went to bed.

Now that it was quite in the house we sat down together at the kitchen table to taste the Trimbach Riesling again. This Riesling was from the Alsace region of France. As described, but not expected, this Riesling was not sweet like the German Rieslings I have tasted in the paste. It was actually rather dry. The thing that stood out to me the most about this wine was the acid. When I first sipped it I really felt the acid on the side of my tongue and cheeks. Overall, on a scale of 1 to 5 I gave the wine 3 and my wife gave it a 2 and a half.

We were a little behind schedule but we did manage to have some champagne as well.  We did not finish either bottle but I think we made a respectable effort and most important, by the time the ball dropped at midnight, I was feeling pretty happy.

Buying wines for the first tasting

Class one in the Windows on the World book is about the White Wines of France. The chapter ends with suggested wine tastings for ten wines broken into five different parts. I expect most of the tasting to be done by just my wife and me so we decided to do each part on a different night in attempt to avoid a lot of unfinished bottles. Based on our schedules, young son, etc. these five tastings may take a while, but like I said in the introduction, I am planning to work through this book slowly.

I wanted to prepare for the first two tastings so I needed to get some wine. One of the reasons I decided to use this book and not just pick up where I left off with Adrea Immer's book was that I assume since her book was about five years old her tasting recommendations would be out of date. For these tastings I need to get: 

• Trimbach Riesling 2007
• Muscadet, Marquis de Goulaine 2007
• Pouilly Fume, Jolivet 2007

Now the big test - can I find these wines?

I happen to be lucky enough to live in state where I can buy wine at the grocery store and even the gas station. I decided to skip both of these options while searching for these three bottles. I went to a bigger liquor store that I considered to have a big selection. To my delight, when I went to the French section the Trimbach Riesling was easy to find. Unfortunately, they did not have a single Muscadet and none of the Pouilly Fume's on the recommended list.

I came home and decided to use the internet. My first stop was Wine.com. Wine.com had two pages of Muscadet's listed but they were all sold out. After a couple of hours on the internet I found a site named Gary's Wine & Marketplace. They did not have the Marquis de Goulaine Muscadet but they did have a Sauvion Muscadet which was on the other recommended list. They also had the Jolivet Pouilly Fume. For good measure I decided to also buy a Sauvion Sancerre since it sounded good when I read the information about the wines of the Loire Valley. The good news was that I now had my wines for the first two tastings. The bad news was that I had to pay $20 to ship three bottles of wine which was about 25% of the total cost.

In the future I hope to find a better local source or figure out how to get a deal on shipping.

One additional note, after I already purchased my wines from Gary's I found a site named wine-searcher.com. According to their about page, the site has " 3,541,969 offers from the price lists of 15,822 wine merchants." I was able to find the Marquis de Goulaine Muscadet using this site. The site also makes it very easy to see the prices of the same wine from multiple merchants.