Wine-ers!

Wine #2 of the evening was the palate cleanser for wine #1. It was a very pleasant cabernet sauvignon from Chile.  We had seen this bottle on offer at several places and I was happy to finally get to try it. It had a light tanin, some fruit, was not too sweet, and would go very well with steak (especially a less humble cut than we had on offer). This we enjoyed as the sun set over the ocean and tropical night descended.

 

It was exciting to get so many decent Chilean wines on this trip, since Regidia, our friend Nisie, and I are planning on a day or two in Santiago towards the beginning of February.  I’m sure we’ll get more “wine-ers on the road” blog posts then o_O

Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

I was extremely excited to find a verified Costa Rican wine at the local supermarket in Samara when Regidia and I went over there to check out what was on offering.  We picked up some fish, some steak, a bottle of wine, some plantains, and some chips ahoy.  Regidia wanted the normal bag of chips ahoy and I wanted the special “feliz navidad” bag, so we bought both. This was good, since it ended up being pretty much all we ate that evening (until some of our neighbors brought over their own bag of Mrs. Field’s soft baked oatmeal raisin). 

What we thought we were going to have for dinner (note that at this point the bottle is already close to done because we’d been fussing with the fire for so long):

What we actually wound up eating for dinner:

It turns out that while Regidia somehow managed to coax an excellent roaring flame out of this (with the invaluable help of another set of next door neighbors, an older Swiss couple, who gave us some sort of fire-starting bricks after the newspaper didn’t work):

…the cuts of meat we had procured by pointing and agreeing with whatever the man behind the counter said in Spanish were HORRIFYING. They were tough and not tasty. The steak we could eat, but the fish ended up going to the stray dog that became my “vacation pet” for the few days we were there (note: the fish did not kill the dog):

So! Back to the Costa Rican wine we were so excited to procure.  It was very very sweet, which seems to be in line with the food and beverages we had in Costa Rica.  Either they really like sugar and sweet there, or they think tourists do, because everything we were served usually had a lot of sugar in it.  It had a unique approach to a cork: 

And tasted a lot like communion wine.  Sugar and fruit and practically guaranteed hangover in a bottle.

But fear not, dear wine-ers! My decision capabilities diminished by a meal of cookies and sugar wine, I crossed the street to the convenience store and grabbed a couple more bottles of wine to try out.  

To be continued…

This is when I decided to start counting blank rating lines as “zeroes.” That may not be a totally accurate reflection of a person’s opinion, but I’m using Illustrator as a graphing tool and it does not handle ambiguity at all, let alone well.

The Ampakama clocked in at an impressive 14% alcohol, apparently a devotee of the latest trend, which is to get better ratings from professional wine tasters (those lucky S.O.B.s who get paid to do this ish) by amping up the alcohol percentage.  I’m waiting for someone to get the highest possible rating by taking a perfectly nice 8% wine and spiking it with cheap grain vodka, but who knows, maybe it already happened.

Our tasters overall thought this was a decent enough drinking companion, but no one seemed ready to break any laws to re-experience its delights.

Notes from our wineers: 

• Can probably find a similar bottle for $5 cheaper (JC) 
• Not mind blowing but good (JC) 
• Good (T2)
• Meh.  Meh.  (M) 
• tannic but flavorful (T1)

Tally time!: 

• Drink Again: Eh (3)
• Good Value: Maybe (3)

And graphical goodness: