Forty Bottles of Ringboree

It's my understanding that the Sam Adams Triple Bock isn't available everywhere. Indeed, it might even be illegal in some states. It's a beer, sort of. It's brewed like a beer, but is 17.5% alcohol. How they accomplish that, I don't know. Perhaps it involves elves in some unspecified way. It has very wine-y overtones, like a big shiraz, perhaps. Lots and lots of chocolate, as you might imagine. It is dark dark dark - almost black - and the texture might turn some people off, since it is slightly gritty, like a unfiltered heffeweissen, and throws a heavy sediment.

All in all, wonderful. 30 bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree. Thanks, Scott, for introducing me to this. Highly recommended.

Note that other folks don't agreee with me. Seems rather pretentious of him to call me a fool for enjoying it, but, hey, I suppose that's his perogative. It is important to warn you that if you like Budweiser, this isn't the beer for you. Of course, if you like Budweiser, chances are you don't like real beer anyway. As far as I can tell from reading lots of other reviews (see Google for a zillion of them) beer drinkers don't like this, but wine and port drinkers do.

Talon 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon
With chili, on the deck, with a group of friends.

Bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree: 32

As you now doubt know, the enjoyment of a particular bottle of wine has much more to do with the surrounding circumstances than it does with the wine itself. A terrible wine with good friends can result in fun and good stories later. But I digress.

Anyways, the Talon Cab is exactly the style of Cab that I like. Big and bold, with caramel, chocolate, dusty earthy aromas, and just a hint of mint. It was perfect with the chilli and the night air.

Unfortunately, it was my last bottle of Talon, leaving me in a situation where the only wines that I have are ones that are to be saved for a special occasion, or ones that I really want to keep for another couple of years. I think I may have one wine that I can open on a whim, and that's a bottle of Fat Bastard Chardonnay - still a very very nice wine.

Perhaps I can get out to Talon today and get another case of yumminess.

For those of you not in this area, Talon is a local winery, out on Tates Creek road, and it's extremely unlikely that it''s available outside of the central Kentucky area. Sorry.

Bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree: 15 Price, unknown - this was one of the monthly selections in the Wine Of The Month club from Liquor Barn. Alc, 14% Label coming as soon as I get it off and scanned in. If it doesn't soak off easily, I'll just take a picture.

The main reason that I started this blog is that I've forgotten how to talk about wine. I used to drink at least a bottle of wine every week, and I knew how to taste it, how to smell it, and how to talk about it. Now I find myself being unable to figure out the aromas, and unable to describe it. This is very, very disappointing to me.

The reasons that I have forgotten how to talk about wine are more complex, but they come down to two relatively simple causes.

First, for the last 3 years, I've lived in a teensy apartment, roughly the size of my nose. Consequently, it was very difficult for me to have people over for dinner. Consequently, I seldom had an opportunity to serve fine wines. Sure, I could open a bottle for myself, but drinking a whole bottle by myself is not only depressing, but is likely to lead me to be a permanent drunk. And, whatever products I buy to keep the wine fresher for longer, that doesn't fix the essential problem that drinking wine alone just isn't as fun as drinking it with someone else.

The second reason is a little more complicated, and far too silly to go into. Besides which, a) you wouldn't believe it, and b) you'd post all sorts of silly comments that I've heard a bzillion times before and would have to delete. So what's the point of going into it?

So, in light of these things, I approach this, the first wine of the 40 Bottles site, with some trepidation. This is increased by the fact that reading Spanish labels has always posed a considerable challenge for me.

Crianza is a spanish term meaning "aged in oak." So far so good. Villarroya de la Sierra is something of the mountain. I presume that this is the name of the wine, or perhaps the name of the vineyard. And, likewise, I assume that Ia is the name of the producer. Finally, Calatayud is a wine producing region.

Of course, you could have determined all of that in a few minutes on Google, just like I did.

As for the wine itself, we had it with grilled barbequeued chicken, cooked on my own back porch. It stood up well to that bold taste, and enhanced it, with aromas and tastes of black cherry and strawberry. As it opened, there were, strangely, aromas of menthol and pine, which seemed odd, but I'm going to write what I smell, and not attempt to second-guess. At least, much.

So the general concept of this site is that I tend to think of wines on a scale of one to forty. Measured, of course, in bottles of Ring Bo Ree. Of course.

All wines are thus measured against the unrealistically high standard of that mythical wine, consumed these many years ago. Yes, it was the 1992 Far Niente Cab.

The year was 1997. It was the peak of the dot com days. We had a bunch of investor capital, and, obviously, the way to make money was to go to the left coast and spend that money as fast as possible. So we went to Internet World 1997 in San Jose, CA.

To give you an idea of how absurd these folks were about purging money as fast as possible, I'll just mention that the evening entertainment on the second day of the conference was Chicago. So perhaps 200 of us had a sort of private Chicago concert. I sat in the front row and sang along loudly to "25 or 6 to 4" and "Does anybody know what time it is?"

Anyways, one evening during the conference we went to a fancy overpriced restaurant, and I was asked to pick the wine.

You know how it is, when you go out to dinner and someone else is paying. There are two categories on the wine list. The affordable ones, and the rest. I picked the wine all the way at the top of the affordable list. The most expensive one I thought I could get away with. The 1992 Far Niente.

Wow.

Even the name (Far Niente means "doing nothing") is great. This wine was big, bold, complex, and far more wine than I had any idea what to do with way back then.

Since that time, I have had perhaps 3 wines that measured up to the mark. The Cakebread cabs that I've had are two of them.

So, that sets the stage. That's the 40 mark. Everything else strives to come close.

Yes, my scale is arbitrary and silly. By that measure, it is indistinguishable from the scales of certain well known magazines which I will refrain from mentioning. ;-) At least I don't expect anyone to agree with me.