Allison was raised on the vine in Sonoma, California, and believes that life is too short to drink bad wine, count calories, or second-guess your destiny. She now lives in Los Angeles where she practices many things, the two most important being contentment and tricks for opening a wine bottle without a wine key.
To tell you the truth, I haven’t been drinking a whole lot of wine lately (gasp!). As you may recall, I am transitioning into a new work situation and this past week had me all shook up. Sadly, I seem to have somehow matured to the place where I find myself handling excess stress with yoga and cleaning and tea rather than reaching for alcohol to simmer me down. I suppose this day was bound to come eventually, but I can’t help but admit that some part of me resents the evolution: not only does it make me feel just the teensiest bit old, but it’s not nearly as entertaining. Additionally, I’m fighting a bit of a cold. Nonetheless, a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do, and so on Saturday night, while Tom and I were picking up this wild mushroom and black truffle flatbread from Trader Joes that I am semi-obsessed with, we snagged a bottle of wine on the way to the checkout. Now I consistently hear good things about the Trader Joes wine selection, but I had not yet ventured into any exploratory purchases, as my old gig in San Francisco left me spoiled rotten with great wine at killer discounts. But we’re in leaner times here, and anyway, there is absolutely no use spending big money on wine when you have a head cold.
We walked out with the J. Vidal-Fleury Côtes du Rhône 2006. J Vidal-Fleury is the oldest wine house in the Rhone Valley, so I figured it was a safe enough bet at $6.99. It promised fruit, spice, and soft, rounded tannins. It delivered primarily alcohol, with a bit of black fruit crouching in the back corner like a nervous turkey on Thanksgiving Day. It teetered back and forth between tolerable and offensive, like your boss’s coffee breath, or the stink stuck on your fingers after chopping garlic. It was the bratty kid on the school bus, always chewing with his mouth open and keeping his backpack on the seat instead of on the ground, as if you want to sit next to him anyway. You keep waiting for him to one day come around and wipe the snot off his face, maybe tuck in his shirttails, but instead he spits a half-sucked cherry cough-drop at the back of your head and it gets tangled in your hair and you abandon any malnourished notions of metamorphous as you draw a big ‘X’ across his face in your yearbook with the sharp end of your geometry compass.
Sigh.
Luckily, I have something to look forward to this week. Via my dear friend and fellow wine aficionado Jess, I’ve managed to get my hands on a bottle of the 2006 Nobility, a Sauternes-style dessert wine from R.A. Harrison Family Cellars, a small family-owned boutique producer up in Napa. It is waiting patiently in my refrigerator for my sinuses to clear. I’m anticipating that this will happen conveniently on Friday night.
Cheers.
