Our good friend Dave came over last night for veggie burgers on the BBQ. He brought over several wines to try. Three of the wines were just bottled by a local home winemaker and Dave’s friend, Steve Gardner.
Steve provided us with a 2010 Sangiovese, a 2010 Barbera, a 2010 Zinfandel and a XXX red wine. The XXX stands for nobody knows what year or what grape, just an unlabeled bottle that has been hanging around for awhile.
We tried the XXX wine first. It looked like it was fairly old, real brick like color. The nose had a little sherry and smoke. Flavor was the same, well over the hill but still interesting to try. As I mentioned, the others were just bottled over the weekend so it is really too early to really taste and critique. We will look forward to trying Steve’s wines again after they have matured a little.
With the grilled veggie burgers we also BBQ’d some sweet peppers and some Jalapeño peppers. Other trimmings were avocado, lettuce and Jarlsberg cheese. The wine was a 2009 Zolo Gaucho Select Malbec. It had a dark ruby color and some vanilla and smoke, maybe barrel char in the nose. Light red fruit flavor with moderate tannins. This went quite well with the veggie burgers, they really made the fruit in the wine “pop”. Overall a nice relaxing and interesting wine evening.
Yep, they were very good. Especially when you get a little smoke from the BBQ.
Sounds yummy! Wish we were there. 🙂