When Things Get Hairy, You Can Always Bail With a … Port

We’ve had a lot of fun with our WA state winetasting pals Susan and Derek.

Years ago, we adopted a sort of creed as we stopped in to any of the proliferate Woodinville wineries. Preaching to the choir, but it used to be that one could turn into the drive of any W-ville industrial park (sic) and taste through the card, and then stumble to the next sandwich board’s invitation. And then, the “Napa Tasting Fee Creep” crept in.

A few years ago, Kathy, Susan, Derek and I adopted our own little wine algorithm: At any tasting room serving reds and whites, the whites will probably be less expensive (OK, cheaper) than the reds.

Ergo: You may not like the wines, but not wanting to look like a tourist-slash-bridesmaid, you buy something. Something relatively inexpensive (OK, cheap). Usually, a white wine: their cheapest Sauvignon Blanc, an experimental unoaked Chardonnay, a rare patch of Chenin Blanc recently rediscovered, or a wine made from some obscure old country grape planted a century ago. Cool, maybe, but our little algorithm still holds when it comes to tasting rooms:

“When things get hairy, you can always bail with a white.”©™

OK, so Kath hooks up with a cool Groupon certificate for Tamas. It’s a second arm of Wente vineyards, south of us, in Livermore. Wente is the oldest continuously owned family winery in the USA. Five generations later, Karl Wente is still checking the tanks.

We’ve written before about our Port run to Livermore, but an Internet deal to taste, and including a bottle of the Tamas Barbera, just sweetened the deal: Brix not factoring in.

But it could not stop Kathy from running a Port marathon of her own: She stopped at Rios-Lovell, a place we’d visited months ago, at which was obtained a 50/50 Barbera/Mourvedre Reserve Port-style wine. I noticed a hard, just-about-to-ripe color. Kath nailed a big fruit nose of vinous blueberry and cane strawberry. Loooong finish: cedar?

We thought that we had some exotic cheeses in the fridge; turns out that we had nothing left. As the (now) old saying goes: “When things get hairy, you can always bail with a white.”

Or a Port. Or a Dessert wine. Or a Red. Or a TV program. Or NPR. Cheers, whatever you may choose to toast.