Red or White?

The Boston Wine Expo is this weekend. Wineries and vineyards from all over the world will be in the city, pouring tastes of their delicious selections. To my surprise and delight, it is the largest wine tasting in the country, which is a bit strange, as Boston isn’t exactly the first place that comes to mind when I think of wine. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to make it this year, but it did get me thinking about how much I love a good glass of wine…..

I am, by no means, a wine connoisseur. In fact, to call my expertise amateur may be a little generous. But it is interesting to note the evolution of my tastes over the years. My first love was a very cheap date- Berringer’s White Zin. Sickly sweet, but quite easy for me to drink. The perfect wine to get me hooked, and hooked I was. I pretty quickly and uneventfully moved on to white varieties; chardonnays, pinot grigios, sauvignon blancs. I played it safe there for a while until I started waitressing at a local steakhouse where I learned that, as a general rule, ‘fish equals white, red meat equals red’. Since I do not have my mother’s vegetarian gene, I decided to move to reds. After discovering the heady tastes of pinot noir and chianti, I was committed to the dark stuff.

In 2007, we took a trip to France, which is where we discovered rosé. We met a charming Parisian couple at a little restaurant in Paris. Matt had been petting their dog throughout dinner (dogs are welcome guests at dinner!), so we struck up a conversation and the next thing we knew, we were sharing a bottle of wine. They did the ordering and to our surprise, they ordered a carafe of house rosé. I was slightly baffled since my only experience with pink wine was Berringer’s, which is what I’d assumed this was. But when I put the glass to my lips, I discovered that I’d been missing out on the most perfect blend! It was sweet and crisp like a white, but seemed to have the fuller body of a red.

We did the monogamous rosé thing for a while (while perusing on different occasions, we were told that French and Spanish rosés are the best), then discovered other wines that we liked just as much (prosecco, the Italian cousin of champagne, and one step better, brut rosé, the deliciousness of rosé with the sparkle of champagne).

I no longer feel the need to tie myself down to one type of wine at a time (‘Oh, I’m a red girl’) and I don’t always want to follow the wine-food pairing guidelines. At this point, it comes down to what I feel like the moment I make my wine purchase. And to be honest, I’m not sure that I can tell the difference between Vueve Cliquot’s Rosé Champagne and Barefoot Sparkling Rosé (both just simply divine), but I know what bottles I like and what bottles I don’t and that’s just fine for me:). I’d love to hear your wine stories, ideas, tastes, evolutions, recommendations, so please feel free to share. Who knows, maybe you can lead me to a new love:).

Cheers!