Venta Morales Tempranillo 2009

To give you an idea of how hard it is to identify a wine blind, let me provide this anecdote as evidence. Last Monday, the lovely Ms Cocktail and I finally succumbed to peer pressure and went to what is affectionately known as “bottles” at a place called Clyde’s Willow Creek Farm. Now Clyde’s is a very nice chain of restaurants in the DC area and “bottles” refers to the special they run on Mondays which is half priced bottles of wine.

They have a rather extensive wine list at Clyde’s and I had conveniently forgotten my reading glasses (not only am I getting old, but Lasik surgery guaranteed that I would need them) so it was up to Ms Cocktail to peruse the wine list and provide some suggestions. What she came up with was the Venta Morales Tempranillo 2009.

This was not a bad choice as we had actually had this wine only several weeks ago. It is from La Mancha which is a very hot region of Spain and as you would expect, a wine produced in this region will be very fruit forward with a not a lot of acidity so it was a touch out of balance. However, the winemaker did a fine job at providing some tannin structure to make up for this. I would give this wine 3 1/2 wine glasses out of five.

Now fast forward to Tuesday night. It had been a while since I had done a blind tasting so I asked Ms Cocktail to pour one for me. I found a glass with this incredibly deep purple liquid loaded with fruit and an almost off dry aspect to it. Light on acidity and a nice tannin structure. The blackberries were just jumping out of the glass at me. What did I call it? An Australian Shiraz. BZZZZZZZZZ! Wrong answer Klaus! I’m sure that you all have figured out that it was the exact same wine that we had the night before, the Venta Morales Tempranillo 2009.

This lesson just reinforced what I already knew about blind wine tasting. Breaking down the structure of a wine and indentifying the individual parts is the easy part. Identifying the region of the world it came from and the specific varietal in the glass in quite a bit more difficult. My takeaway from all this is that even though it will be a terrible burden to bear, I must practice harder and more often to hone my wine tasting skills.

Tasting Notes:

This is a clear, deep ruby colored wine with legs. It has a clean, youthful nose with medium(+) intense aromas of blackberry and tar. It is a dry wine with medium(-) acidity, medium(+) alcohol, medium(+) tannin and a medium body. It medium intense flavors of blackberry, tar and licorice. It is a good wine that is ready to drink now but will not improve in the bottle.