When you drink wine socially you have one glass in your hand and you either like the wine or you don’t but you drink it anyway just because it is there. When you are a wine taster there’s often more than one bottle open and it’s all about swirling, sniffing and sipping one wine after the other while making evaluations, making comparisons, asking yourself which one you like best and ranking wines in order of preference. But for me it is often not as simple as saying A is better than B. I like to also try wines with food and that can change the comparison rankings on their head.
For this wine tasting exercise I opened Te Mania Nelson Pinot Noir 2015 ($24.99) and Richmond Plains Nelson Pinot Noir 2015 ($28.99) to taste on their own then to accompany with lamb shanks to see how they would fare.
It’s not often I get excited about unoaked chardonnay but from the very first sip Hunters Marlborough Unoaked Chardonnay 2016 set out to impress me.
Colour: Ruby with flashes of purple.
The bouquet is sensually smoky and savoury with bright touches of Morello cherry and fruit of the forest connotations and, after smelling the pomegranate molasses, I reckon that hard-to-put-the-finger-on scent is pomegranate most definitely.