weekday wines – botani moscatel seco
One of my favorite ways to spend an evening is at a wine tasting, especially when I get to taste wines that I am completely unfamiliar with. A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went to a wine tasting featuring the wines of Finca Allende, a Spanish winery in the Rioja region. Spanish wines are, for me, a bit of a mystery – much like Italian and French wines – so I was happy to learn a little more about them.
The wines we tasted ranged in price from $15 a bottle to (hold on to your seats) $200 a bottle. The priciest of the wines were the 2004 Pago Del Calvario Rioja – my personal favorite of the reds that we tasted – and the Finca Allende Aurus Rioja.
But I’m not going to tell you more about these reds, because that’s not what we walked out with at the end of the night. We left with a couple of bottles of a lovely white wine that started off the tasting – a bottle called Jorge Ordoñez & Co. Botani Moscatel Seco.
This wine is a beautiful wine, very easy to sip and linger over. It’s crisp and refreshing, and even though it’s made with the Muscat grape, this is not a sweet wine (hence seco, which means dry). This is the type of wine that is great on it’s own, as an aperitif, or with seafood or Chinese takeout or just about anything else you’d want to eat in the summer. It cost about $15 a bottle, so maybe it’s a little pricier than one might like for a typical bargain wine, but it’s so, so worth it.
I wish I could write about wine in as beautiful a fashion as Jancis Robinson is able to do, but I just can’t. I don’t speak that beautiful wine language. Since she does – and did – please go read what she said about this wine. And then go find a bottle or three.
