Welcome to

Yesterday, after working all day and then hitting the gym, I stopped on my way home to buy a bottle of wine.  Tired and sweaty, I stood in front of a selection of varietal reds, ready to grab an old stand-by to go with the lasagna I was planning to make for dinner.

Chianti?  Maybe, but none of it looked at all intriguing.  Beaujolais?  We had that last week, plus the nouveau will be coming out in a couple of months.  Barolo?  Too expensive for light-weights like my husband and me…we never finish a bottle in one sitting anymore, and really good wine is never the same after being open for too long, I don’t care how good your vacuum-seal on it might be.   So Malbec, then?  Ah,  Malbec, how I love you, so self-assured and sexy, yet so unpretentious and forthright.  Argentinian Malbec is our absolute favorite, more so me than my husband, I think.  It’s like meeting a rough-and-ready gaucho in the countryside, then taking him to Buenos Aires and finding out he’s a tango champion as well.

I was getting more impatient with myself by the second.  I couldn’t justify spending more than $10 on a bottle…it was for a Thursday night lasgana, right?  But I felt annoyed that we seemed to keep on drinking the same wine over and over, so what if we liked it?  But I was in a hurry, too…Aargh!  I grabbed a bottle of Valpolicella impulsively, paid for it, made my way home, and promptly forgot about it until it was time for dinner.

 My husband opened it just a minute before we sat down, we took a couple of bites, toasted each other and…the Valpolicella was GOOD!  Not great, but really good, light in the mouth and very easy on the tannins,  which was nice with the red sauce on the lasagna (it had plenty of it’s own acid).  The bottle claimed notes of cherries, berries, and almonds, but I honestly wasn’t catching anything more than a sheer fruitiness that rode on top of a decent amount of alcohol.  In short, just right for a Thursday night lasagna.

The moral of the story?  Try a completely different wine once in a while, letting impulse and impatience be your guide.  You’re guaranteed to learn something or find something new.  You might love it, you might hate it.  Just be sure you don’t pay too much for it.   Unless you’re wealthy, which we and most others are not, it can be totally demoralizing to spend a fortune on crappy wine.  I’ve got this story about a Vouvray…but that’s for another day.