2022 Villa Molino Soave Classico
I needed wine to make a tarragon mustard sauce for Christmas Eve and didn’t want to sacrifice a bottle out my collection because the sauce takes 1.5 cups of wine. I was at Trader Joe’s picking up last-minute ingredients and grabbed this Soave instead of my usual $7.99 white Bordeaux (can’t ever remember the name) for cooking. The Villa Molino was $5.99, and I wondered whether it would be drinkable.
PnP, just a tad cooler than room temp. Nose… more like “What nose?” Maybe some faint honeydew? Doesn’t smell of much. Taste: lemon water with a hint of apple. Not a lot of flavor, very acid from start to finish. I did not want to drink another sip of this. Perhaps if it were straight out the fridge at 36* degrees, it would be fine on a sweltering hot day, but I would rather drink the Trader Joe’s Vinho Verde. I debated chucking this in the sink and opening something else, but there were too much going on in the kitchen and my brain was short-circuiting. This wine made my sauce so acidic that I resorted to adding a splash of the Inniskilin posted above (and a lot of butter to then disguise this weird combo). I was cursing myself for picking such a dud of a wine. Why the heck was I trying to “save” $2 on our Christmas Eve meal? Hard pass on this.
NV Charles Collin Brut Champagne
I reorganized my wines and found this bottle, which was labeled in CT as “Missing presumed drunk.” It was purchased from the now-defunct Underground Cellars, which had an “interesting” (in retrospect, scammy) premise: you would buy wine by theme (e.g., “sparkling”) and you would not know exactly what bottles you would get because they would be “upgraded” to a “more valuable” 
selection after payment. It sounded fun at the time until the boxes arrived - and I was lucky that I did not trust their “Cloud Cellar” 
. Some folks stored their purchases in the “Cloud Cellar” and received nothing when UC went bankrupt… In any case, many of the wines were not close to their claimed value and half were not to my taste, so this Charles Collin was a flip of the coin.
No details available on the bottle besides being a blend, and I didn’t do any sleuthing. Medium mousse. Vivid medium bead. Lighter yellow color. Smells of sulphur (blew off after about an hour) and supermarket brioche, for lack of better term; if you’ve smelled bagged brioche that has some preservatives, this champagne was reminiscent of that. In terms of taste, it has an almond pastry note, with faint lemon and green apple notes. The almond pastry note, for a fleeting second, made me think of the infamous Wilson’s Creek Almond sparkling wine. Dosage was noticeable to me, but it might not be for someone who seldom drinks champagne or prefers Grande Marques. Very short finish. It was serviceable for brunch today since the maple syrup and breakfast sausage would overwhelm most sparkling wines, but I would not recommend this unless it was priced at $18 and used to make Kir Royale.
