As most regular readers will know, I’m very lucky to receive sample wine bottles on a regular basis, in addition to invitations to trade and press tastings. While spitting at tastings is de rigueur (and, quite frankly, necessary if you want to maintain both your palate and the ability to walk unaided), sample bottles are drunk without spitting chez moi.
So what do you do when you have a good few samples that you need to try, but you’re cutting back on the booze for a bit? Share them with wine friends is the obvious answer! Thus, at an informal dinner with friends from the DNS Wine Club I produced four bottles of relatively inexpensive red wine all wrapped in foil – for a mini blind tasting.
The objective of the blind tasting wasn’t to see which was the best wine, but rather to see how good we were at guessing the vintage, main grape(s), country of origin etc. And we were painfully average at that! However, one wine was agreed to be the tastiest – and happened to be the go-to bottle of one of the tasters:
Finca Las Moras Dadá Art Series 1 2016 (12.5%, €10.00, widely available at SuperValu, Dunnes Stores and all good independent off licences)
There are actually lots of different wines in the Dadá Art Series, but this Bonarda / Malbec blend is the most widely available. It’s actually quite an unusual blend, as Bonarda in Argentina is the same grape as the obscure Deuce Noir from Savoie in France (and formerly part of Italy) rather than the slightly better known Bonarda Piemontese. Malbec is of course Argentina’s signature black grape.
Obscure or unusual don’t matter in the end, it’s what’s in the glass that counts – and this is lovely! Blackberry crumble with lashings of custard, it’s that kind of lovely – black fruit from the grapes with plenty of vanilla from the American oak. And for a tenner in Ireland, this is great value for money!
damn, wish i was there!