I kid you not. The NRA has a wine club (click here).
And it turns out you don’t even need to be an NRA member to join the club. A guy named Michael Alberty signed up and then rounded up some Willamette Valley winemakers to taste the wines blindly, and wrote it up for Willamette Week.
What were the wines like, you ask? Alberty wasn’t too keen on the 2015 Lodi Chardonnay from Iron Rock Cellars:
This chardonnay tasted like someone took cashews they found between the sofa cushions and threw them into a blender with cotton candy, quinine water, blood meal and cocoa butter. If you enjoy the taste of rancid butter, meet your new house wine. The winemakers said they’d pay someone to take it away.
I’ll let you read the rest for yourself at the Willamette Week link above. (Note: When the winemakers learned the source of the wines, they asked that their names not appear in print.)
But wait! There’s a bonus: Vinesse, the company that operates the wine club for the NRA, offers a thought-provoking discussion on its website of wine pairings for Girl Scout cookies.
If ever there were a topic that’s ripe for a Berserkers thread!
“A guy named Michael Alberty” has been kicking around the wine scene and various wine boards for a decade or three now. If he says it tastes like rancid butter, and Wayne LaP says it’s great, I’m going with Mike.
Mike Alberty is about as ‘checked out’ and intelligent and aware of wine as anyone on this board. Top notch human being and lover of wine. If he says the wine sucks, it does.