Old friend spends two nights...

The wife and I usually don't do mid week wine drinking by nature. We enjoy our mid week health kick, however after two long days and I was craving a drink, bourbon would have been my first choice on a night like tonight, but intentionally, I don't leave a stash in the house. My wife had gone out with some girlfriends to celebrate to a birthday and said a night cap would be nice so while watching the DVR'd NCIS we went for our wine stash. Taking a quick look at our everyday wines, we spotted a wine made with some favorite VA varietals from a favorite place in our wall wine rack.

Cuvee Laurent from Delfosse is a blend of two wines that grow particularly well in Virginia Cabrenet Franc and Chamborcin red from Delfosee winery which is just a wee drive south of Charlottesville in Faber, VA.


Night One

Only wanting one glass the first night, we opened the bottle and re-corked it after pouring two glasses. The initial glass smelled of dried red sweet cherries mixed with spice and earth. Taste was very pleasent and a great wine for sipping on the couch. It rang out with bright red fruit, light green pepper mild tannins on the middle of the tongue with a long almost effervessent feel on the middle tongue and cheeks.

Although this wine didn't strike me as having a lot of layers, depth, or width it is great for an evening sipper and left me curious for Friday night when we'd pair it with some grilled bar-b-que chicken pizza.

Night Two

Unfortunately, somehow an additional half glass each seemed to disappear out of the bottle that same night so when Friday came around there was only really one glass left to finish off the rest of the bottle. Instead of having that with dinner, we decided to enjoy it as a pre-cursor as we prepared our bar-b-que chicken pizza.

The couple days in the bottle did nothing to hurt this wine. It smelled of bright red rasberries and a slight burn in the top of the nose. It wasn't probably best sipper and would have been really good with food as it had mellowed greatly. It shared flavors of back raspberries and green bell pepper with just a pop of late tannins as it went down the throat.

It was nice to experience how oxygen can change a wine greatly. It didn't hurt it at all and proves why decanting wine is so important.