On Saturday following a morning hike and an afternoon movie, Jen and I headed to Montclair for an evening of wine tasting at the woodsy home of Jen’s coworker Jane and her partner Sarah.
The concept of the evening was great: Each couple brings two identical bottles of favorite Cabernet Sauvignon (less than $20), everyone does a blind tasting, scores each wine, then the winner takes home all the second bottles. I’m glad that the winner was Heather, the only non-coupled attendee of the party. She seemed really cool.
Jen and I cheated a bit, thinking it would help us win: We went to our local Mollie Stone’s (quite the snobbish establishment in the world of grocers) and asked the resident wine expert (yes, there’s a guy whose sole job it is to work in the liquor aisle and give advice) which under-$20 Cabernet would bring us victory. Of course, being his job to get people to spend lots of money, without hesitation he pointed us right to a $19.99 bottle of Martin Ray 1999 “Mariage” Cabernet Sauvignon.
Forty dollars and several tipsy hours later, our highest-priced wine ranked only 4th out of 10 overall.
Sadly, the wine Jen and I ranked as our favorite (I scored it 21 out of a possible 25 in the blind tasting) was the $3.33 bottle of Forestville. Perhaps our college days of drinking jugs of Carlo Rossi aren’t as long gone as we’d like to think.
