Wannabe Wino

I loved it. An overall fabulous bottle of wine, it had it all. An amazing nose, flavorful in the mouth, excellent structure and acidity, good tannins, I could go on....

The wine was a 2005 Quivira Grenache 2005 from Wine Creek Ranch Vineyard. It cost us $20.40 in a club shipment, clocked in at 14.8% alcohol by volume, and had a real cork closure. I've always liked Quivira and this is easily among the top wines I've tasted from them.

On the nose I found dark fruit. It was actually surprisingly floral overall. I specifically detected blackberries, strawberries, black currants, vanilla, and spice. This was a very aromatic wine.

In the mouth I would describe this wine as round, smooth, and full-bodied. Again, the dark fruit showed through, with slightly sweet strawberries and blackberries being the most prominent flavors. Overall this was a very dark wine.

I served it with homemade bruschetta and pizza and it was a fabulous match. A great pizza wine in my opinion!

As previously mentioned, we joined Leah of DC Gastronome (too cute with her food journal open the whole time!) at David Greggory for the Happy hour meeting of the DC/NOVA Meetup Wine Club. All in all, a good time was had. A good number of people showed up (I would say around 20 over the course of the evening!) and it was great to meet new people, which I find is hard to do when you move to a new place and 95% of the people at your new job are at significantly different life stages than you are.

Overall, the restaurant was crowded! It was hard to get enough seats for everyone at the bar, and the bar is a good size. The servers were also a little frantic, they seemed to only have one bartender for their biggest happy hour of the week.....

The wine specials for the evening, at $4.75 a glass were a Spanish Grenache, a Cava and a Chardonnay. I don't think anyone had the Chardonnay. I had the Grenache and the Cava. Nice selections, I was particulary impressed with the Cava, it had great bubbles, a scent of yeast, and was crisp and light with apple and pear flavors. The Grenache was a little less exciting, though definitely drinkable. It had little on the nose, but the mouth was nice and fruity and it went down easily.

Several options existed for appetizer specials and the group seemed to try all of them over the course of the evening. I didn't have any (not my best call ever), since Matt wanted the deviled eggs (NMS), but he said they were delicious. He got 3 deviled eggs filled with different centers for $5.00. Not so bad. I also saw they had some mini-pizzas and wings. Everything looked good, and came out of the kitchen quickly.

We stayed for dinner and a bottle of wine after the happy hour slowed down a bit. I'll review that later!