When the Moon Hits Your Eyes like a Big Pizza Pie…

Posted on March 25, 2007 by Sonadora

We’ve had some company with us this week, so I decided to make some homemade pizza as a slightly fancier mid-week dinner. And with it, we started out with a bottle of 2004 Alderbrook Carignane.

The wine came in a club shipment and didn’t have a price, but the 2003 was $19, so I would guess it was around the same price. It was 14.1% alcohol by volume and had a real cork closure.

On the nose there were plums, dark berries, spice, leather and oddly enough, the scent of a forest. The aromas just kept coming as the glass sat out. In the mouth the wine was incredibly smooth and is drinking really well, though the layers of flavors make me think it could age for quite a bit longer. In the mouth there were dark fruits, black cherries and blackberries.

Overall the wine had a great mouth feel and I wish we had more of it hanging around. I picture this with pasta sauce based dishes, the spice would be a good compliment to the sauce.

I was poking around the Alderbrook website this afternoon and discovered that Alderbrook is part of the Terlato Wine Group. I wonder if it’s possible that the one bottle of Terlato that we drank back in February came in a club shipment? It was a mystery to me as to where it came from since I am 100% positive that we did not go to the Terlato Vineyard and it has been driving me nuts ever since we drank it trying to figure out how it arrived in our wine rack. However, it might make sense that it came from an Alderbrook shipment since they are all part of the same group. I guess mystery solved, finally. Here’s to hoping that I will no longer have the lapses of my spreadsheet now that I am faithfully using Cellar Tracker.

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Filed under: Alderbrook, Carignane, Cellar Tracker, Red, Terlato | 2 Comments »

At Long Last, Success!

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Sonadora

What seems like ages ago, but was apparently only 2 months ago, I spent a very frustrating weekend attempting to add an RSS subscription button from FeedBurner to my blog in case any of you readers like it here enough to want to subscribe. 🙂 At the time, I managed to add the Toast This! feature from Wine Life Today (though I admittedly rarely remember to actually put what I write up there, or maybe I just feel a little self-serving in doing so…nonetheless, I should be more diligent about it) and was quite proud of myself.

I haven’t actually tried since that day to add the feature again, since html code is really not my thing and I get easily frustrated with it (I was, at one point, a webmaster for an organization I belonged to in college and I won’t even begin to tell you what a disaster that was….HTML for Dummies was lost on me and I had to farm the work out to someone else who actually knew what she was doing).

However, apparently the computer language gods were smiling on me today and I did it! And more! You will now notice the handy RSS Subscribe to WannabeWino in the sidebar, along with a Fave Technorati icon! Also, down at the bottom of the sidebar you can see a link to get to all the blogs that link here and a search my blog feature! (Or was that there before?) I also added a new section for Helpful Wine Related Links, which I will update as I remember more and/or find more. Finally, I’ve added a link on the sidebar to my CellarTracker cellar so you can see what’s in there waiting for me to drink (even though it’s significantly smaller than it used to be, and apparently I drink obscure California wines that NO ONE else drinks….literally, there are maybe 12 of my wines in there that anyone has ever written a note on).

Please enjoy, and now that I *think* I’ve figured out how to manipulate the template around here, let me know if there are any other features you think I’m lacking and I will take a look!

Filed under: Cellar Tracker, Wine Life Today | 3 Comments »

What I Learned Today

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Sonadora

I finally broke down today and entered our collection of wine into Cellar Tracker, mostly at the repeated urging of Dr. Debs from Good Wine Under $20.

I learned that I do not like when wine clubs ship you wine yet do not list on the packing slip or anywhere in the shipment how much each bottle cost. Yes, I can look it up on my credit card bill and figure out the total, but that doesn’t break it down by bottle. It’s a royal pain in the rear end to figure out the price of something, especially when it’s an older bottle that was sent and is not available on the website to purchase. Note to wineries: Tell me how much my wine costs!

I learned that we currently have 84 bottles of wine that are all now rearranged into 9 wine racks. This is both good and bad. We started, back in early September, with 12 wine racks and a wine fridge full (read: approximately 150 bottles). So this means that at a minimum, since September, we have consumed 66 bottles of wine. However, this is not nearly the extent of the wine we have actually consumed, given that we were receiving shipments from 12 wineries during that time and we bought several cases of “everyday” wine, not to mention the odd bottle here and there for WBW. By rough estimating, I gather we’ve received around 60 bottles of wine from wine clubs. Rough guess? I would say the number of bottles consumed (or given away as presents) exceeds 150. In approximately 185 days. At that rate, what we have in our racks will only last us about another 100 days. And we will not be drinking all of it, since there are bottles I know are not ready yet. Additionally, since we cut out half of our wine clubs, the wine will not be arriving fast enough to cover the rate we are drinking it. I guess I will be hitting up the local wine shops more this spring.

Finally, I learned that the wine we do have adds up to a cost that I don’t really want to think about. And if I do think about it, and and I assume it roughly equates (if I extrapolate it to include more bottles) to the cost of the wine we have consumed thus far, we have, in the last 6 months, probably drank several thousand dollars worth of wine.

In conclusion, wine drinking is an expensive habit, and if you’d like to have a mini-heart attack like I did this afternoon, head on over to Cellar Tracker and enter your collection in. I will be recuperating from the shock this evening with a bottle of wine.

Filed under: Cellar Tracker, Good Wine Under $20, Misc, Wine | 7 Comments »