Tasting- Famille Perrin Cotes du Rhone Reserve

Name: Famille Perrin Cotes du Rhone Reserve

Variety: Grenache, Mourvedre, Syrah

Region: Rhone Valley

Country: France

Vintage: 2022

Price: $12.99

Review from Decanter: "A Côtes du Rhône that is packed full of bright plump fruit, blueberries, sweet sticky cherries, this has a really turbo-charged fruit profile. Tasty and sweet-fruited, it's fairly rich but still fresh enough for more than one glass. A medium tannic structure lends support to this tasty, loveable wine." -92

Wine Folly: The GSM Blend is a versatile food pairing wine that works particularly well with dishes featuring Mediterranean spices including red pepper, sage, rosemary, and olives.

Personal Review: This wine has a very heavy and upfront berry flavor profile. I mainly tasted blackberries but also hints of blueberry. It has a medium body. It is quite tannic but extremely well-balanced and smooth despite the high alcohol content. The bottle said to serve at 59 degrees, so I tried this wine both slightly chilled and at room temperature. I couldn't tell much of a difference between the two. 

Wine Dinner #1

 

The Dinner Group!

This week, we served chorizo and Spanish rice with cheesecake for dessert. We paired the chorizo with a red blend (Merlot and Syrah), the rice with sauvignon blanc, and the cheesecake with a Moscato. 

Main course and side dish, with the wines we paired

Firstly, the chorizo with the red blend was not as flavorful as we had hoped. The sausage itself was great, but the red blend could have been much better (tasting notes below). When pairing the two, the chorizo brought out the tannins in the red blend very heavily, but really no flavor profile came through. 

The Spanish rice was also quite bland and clumped together (probably because we used a microwave pouch). The rice extremely overpowered the sauvignon blanc, and all I noticed was the acidity of the wine.

Three Finger Jack Rum Barrel Aged Red Blend

Tasting Notes:

Vintage- 2021

Region- California

Personal Review- This blend stayed true to the label. It smelled very strongly of alcohol and spiced rum. It had slight tastes of vanilla and oak, with an acidic aftertaste. I noticed that it was sometimes sweet up front, but overall very tannic. 

Seaglass Sauvignon Blanc

Tasting notes:

Vintage- 2023

Region- California

Personal Review- Honeydew and melon on the nose. Strong acidity, but complemented with a citrusy melon taste. VERY light body, almost like water. We also tried this with the chorizo, which brought out the acidity again and didn't quite overpower the wine like the rice. 

Cheesecake and Barefoot Moscato Dessert

This was by far the best pairing of the night, since both the cheesecake and Moscato were sweet. I bought a variety cheesecake, so we tried each of the different cheesecake flavors with the Moscato. The group as a whole tended to like the chocolate cheesecake the best with this wine, since it seemed to balance some of the bitterness from the dark chocolate well. The overall sweetness was also reduced to a more likeable level with the pair.

Tasting notes:

Vintage- 2017

Region- California

Personal Review- Very sweet wine, but not overwhelming. Tasted almost exactly like cotton candy grapes with slight peach accents. The peach came through more on the nose. Very light body again here. Overall a very likeable wine for desserts.

Bonus picture of my roommate cooking