Tasting Tisdale White Zinfandel

Name: Tisdale

Variety: White Zinfandel

Region: California

Country: USA

Year: Not Listed

Price: $4.89

Tisdale Winery Review: With Flavors of ripe raspberry, watermelon and fresh strawberry, our experienced winemakers have crafted this White Zinfandel to a delightful, full-flavored wine with medium body and a brilliant finish.  Perfectly paired with your favorite salad or pasta.   

My Review:  This wine has a nice pink color, not very dark, but somewhat cheery.  It's a little tart, but in a good way.  I could tell right away that it was fruity, but after concentrating for a while I decided that the fruit was strawberry.  It seems to be almost a little bubbly, like when you leave soda out too long and the bubbles are gone, but there is still a trace of them.  I was sampling this wine while my dinner was cooking: mushroom soup and quinoa with ginger fish, onion, carrots, and dill.  This wine does not go with my soup at all. The label said to pair it with pasta, which makes me think of rich Alfredo, so I tried it with my mushroom soup instead.  The soup is too creamy and makes the wine feel more acidic than it does alone.  Even though it didn’t pair with my soup, I really like it with my dinner.  It has a nice tartness that makes my ginger fish taste not too sweet.  However, I think I may have burned my tongue because I cannot taste the strawberry anymore. 

Wine Tasting Blog 

Name: Bea’s Sweet

Variety: Mead Honey Wine (Dessert/Fortified Wine)

Region: Not Listed on the bottle, nor could I find it on the internet

Country: Germany

Year: Not Listed

Price: 11 dollars and some change

Wine Critic Review: Bright golden color. Rich honey vanilla gelato aromas with a silky, fruity and off-dry medium-to-full body and a lingering honeyed banana, coconut and pear finish with a dash of spice. Very tasty. Review from Tastings.com

My Review: This mead has a really yellow color, it could pass for apple juice in appearance.  It’s definitely sweet and has that standard “wine after-taste feeling” once you swallow it.  I don’t taste anything acidic in it.  It just feels smooth and happy, I guess this is where a wine expert would use the word full, it doesn’t seem scratchy or rough, it seems to have the edges buffed out! 

After trying the Honey Wine alone, I tried it with a dessert, since it is after all a dessert wine!  For dessert I had a hazelnut pudding with a vanilla cream topped with fresh cherries.   They paired together fantastically! I feel like I could not have picked a better wine to complement my pudding! The wine is slightly sweeter than my dessert but not so much that I feel over-sugared.  When drank with the food, it does not have that swallowing-wine after-taste effect.  I’m not sure if this is a universal feeling I’m describing, of if I’m alone in imagining it.  I have been trying really hard to understand what the review mentioned, but I don’t taste the fruits.  I concentrated on the taste of bananas while sipping the mead, but still didn’t recognize even the faintest bit of banana flavor.  I did not detect coconut or pear either.  But I think it would be a perfect wine to eat with a coconut cream pie!  After finishing my wine but continuing with my pudding, I felt incomplete without the mead to complement my dessert, so I indulged in another glass.

My Wine Blog

I don’t remember the first time I tried wine but it must have been when I was really little, maybe around 10.  I wasn’t ready for the taste so a long time afterwards I believed it had the flavor of vinegar.  Over the next several years I would occasionally sip my parent’s red wines and each time decide it wasn’t for me.   I’ve had the same experience with sweet potatoes.  I don’t like them, but when I come across sweet potatoes cooked a new way, I want to like them and give the recipe a try with the hopes of finally finding a sweet potato I enjoy.  So far I have had absolutely no luck with sweet potatoes, but I have had much better luck with wines! 

This is probably how everyone is converted to a wine drinker.  You find a sweet white wine.  It’s like being a kid with a juice box, but it’s an adult juice box so it’s okay.  After deciding I liked white wine, I drank several varieties and became brave enough to yet again tackle the reds.  I do not like Merlot.  This is something I have proved to myself over and over again.  I have heard people call wines dry, but obviously they have to be wrong since liquids can’t be dry.  Merlot has taught me what a dry drink is. And I am not particularly a fan.  The sensation you feel in the back of your mouth when you eat a lot of walnuts and your cheeks hurt from chewing, that is a dry wine to me.  I feel like there is something covering my mouth so it can’t get wet. 

Even though Merlot doesn’t really excite me, I am willing to believe it has a perfect food pair which will convert me.  I hope to learn how to pair wines with foods so that I can enjoy both together. Since the start of the class I have already learned something new.  Just yesterday I went to Kroger and learned from the Kroger wine guy that a dessert wine needs to be sweeter than the food it is paired with or it will be overpowered.  I expected the opposite to be true.  Something I am curious about is the difference in white and red wine production.  I have heard that white wine is made of the same grapes as red but the grapes are peeled; yet I have also heard that green grapes are used for whites and dark grapes for reds.  Searches on Google have left me more confused than before since I can’t find any credible sources that agree with each other.  I’m excited for my new wine voyages to begin!