Wannabe Wino

Tonight found us drinking a bottle of 2005 Hop Kiln A Thousand Flowers. The wine is a blend of Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Muscat Canelli. You can find it on the Hop Kiln website for $14, though I think ours' cost a little less because it came in a club shipment. It has a real cork closure and is 14.1% alcohol by volume.

I thought this blend might work well with our dinner, which was Chicken Roll-ups (a recipe I found at the age of 8 in the Mini-Page consisting of chicken and sharp cheddar cheese rolled up in Pillsbury Crescent Rolls and topped with a cheddar cream sauce), green beans and white rice, because the flavors are really creamy and the wine said it worked well with chicken on the label. I was wrong. The flavors didn't work at all and the creamy nature of the sauce made the wine taste bitter. So instead, we drank it after dinner.

The nose of this wine is very aromatic, and you don't even have to stick your nose in the glass to smell the flowers jumping out. Honey, honeydew melon, white flowers and spice; an intensely sweet aroma. In the mouth, it's not nearly as sweet as I expected, given the nose. I find apples, but not crisp apples, more like slightly past their prime apples. It's light at first, but mid-palate it gets heavy and the melon flavors are more pronounced than the apple.

Overall, I think this perhaps does better as a stand-alone wine than it does with food, though perhaps a light white fish with very minimal sauce or flavoring would be an okay match. Or possibly with a spicy dish. I would serve it very chilled and drink it on the porch this summer if I had any more.