Wannabe Wino

I've been off visiting the fam in CT for the past few days, so I apologize for my lack of posting! The dial-up there is not so conducive to even using the internet, let alone doing anything else on it.

On Thursday (see, I told you I had a backlog of posts!) we went out to dinner at one of our local favorites, the Lebanese Taverna. My Dad was in town to do our housing inspection (which went very well, nothing major is wrong, we are proceeding to closing, yay!) and he loves the food there, but my Mom won't eat it, so we always go when it's just him visiting.

The Taverna actually has a really interesting and fairly diverse wine menu, including many selections from Lebanon. We've tried several of those in the past and have always liked them. However, my eye was drawn to a bottle of Pinot Blanc from Alsace, because I was thinking of the WBW hosted by Fork and Bottle a few months back where I had a biodynamic bottle of Pinot D'Alsace, which was a different blend, but had Pinot Blanc in it. Back then, I had wanted to find the same varietal from the same location and taste them side-by-side, but couldn't turn up a non-biodynamic one fast enough.

When I saw the bottle of Pierre Sparr 2004 Reserve Pinot Blanc, I had to get it. The basics: restaurant priced at $31, though I see you can find it here for $11.99, it's 12.5% alcohol by volume and had a real cork closure.

On the nose of this bottle I got lots of green apples. It was very floral and aromatic, a very good nose. In the mouth, I found minerals, more green apples and just a slight citrus quality. The finish was quite long, with the crips flavors lingering in the mouth. Overall, this was a very good wine and a great choice for dinner. We all had some variation of beef and lamb shwarma, which had a bit of a spicy kick to it, and the wine lent itself nicely to flavors.

In terms of comparing this bottle to my WBW bottle, I don't think that after drinking them, the comparison is fair, and I'm not sure I will every get a fair comparision, since the blend I drank for WBW only had 30% Pinot Blanc grapes in it, and though I can't find information on what grapes other than Pinot Blanc (if any) were used in this bottle, I'm fairly certain it was a higher percentage than 30% Pinot Blanc. Oh well, just an excuse to keep trying other ones!