2019 Lamblin & Fils Bourgoune Blanc. Wasn’t quite sure about this one as I wasn’t clear where in Burgundy it actually comes from. Chablis?
I bought this in 2018 from Garagiste for $12, so expectations weren’t high. Funny thing was in 2020, I bit on a Rimmerman hyped $20 mystery white Burg. Guess what? Same exact wine
Pretty solid wine overall. Crisp apple, minerality, acidity right in the zone. Excellent food wine as it is enjoyable and is a complimentary beverage.
I felt a little scammed on pushing it off for $8 more as a mystery wine 2 years later. But as with many Garagiste offers, $20 is still a good value. $12 was a terrific deal
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When I was first learning about wine, I remember Mumm being a wine I was really interested to try. I’m sure I tried a bunch I them buy don’t remember (wonder why) except for two bottles of DVX and two bottles of 2000 Wedding Cuvée (this was in like 2010), both found on the grocery store clearance rack and both moved my appreciation of wine forward.
This bottle didn’t do that. 
This is like pillowy sweet cream. It’s tastes pretty good, but it barely tastes like wine. My favorite brewery had a slushy machine (in beer, out slushy) and I’m thinking that’s the jam — pour this into the slushy thing and hang out at the lake.
Chris, hitting your charity with a 2x matching donation for my note.
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Merry Christmas, Kyle, thanks for the note and the spirit of generosity.
Was at a friend’s house for her 70th birthday party/Christmas Eve open house. Lots of different wines on offer, and I tried to at least give each a small taste, even if I was doubtful that I would like them. The 2013 Woodstock Shiraz (McLaren Vale) was one that I was especially dubious about trying. Then I thought about this charity challenge and grabbed a pour. It was pretty good. Not at all over the top. Plenty of dark fruit and some decent structure. What surprised me was that a 10 year old wine might as well have been a new release. Perhaps the screw cap helped slow evolution.
p.s. the Eagles wine was downright gross
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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.
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Got swamped with holiday family stuff and hadn’t closed the loop here.
I made a $500 donation, plus my employer matched to make it an even $1000. Thank you all for the spirit and participation.
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