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was that I assume since her book was about five years old her tasting recommendations would be out of date.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.
