I’ve been searching for some time for a red wine I like and can enjoy without getting heartburn (a problem for me only when I drink red wine) or a skull-splitting headache (another red wine side effect, and we’re talking after only one or two glasses). Then there’s also my mysterious allergic-like reaction to some red wines. I can’t pinpoint the grape or the style, but at some tastings, most recently when my brother and I checked out Napa Valley in January, I'll get a sudden tightening in my chest, flush and feel light-headed. It passes after a couple minutes and no, it’s not that I’m getting tanked.
In any case, while part of me is happy to stick with my beloved Rieslings, the off-dry and the semi-sweet but not the syrupy, and the occasional bottle of mead, I feel given my profession I need to understand reds better (a side note: I can drink port without any of the aforementioned problems, and suffer no ill effects from tempranillo, though I don’t really like the taste). So the search... journey... quest... thing has continued.
Until now.
From now on, I will only drink reds that have a cheetah on the bottle.
Last week, I stopped by one of the bigger liquor stores (as you might imagine in Ski Podunk, where I live, there are many of them) that offers a discount to employees of Bullwinkle Ranch and other locals. I like them for the discount, but also because they carry my rum (Gosling’s Black Seal Black Rum) and silly girly drink (South Africa’s Amarula... like Bailey’s only better) for reasonable prices.
I was buying a bottle of Dr. Loosen Riesling when another bottle caught my eye. I’ll admit it was the name that first lured me: Herding Cats. Is that a reference to the act of herding cats or to cats that herd? I wondered. For $8.99, I decided I’d try it, mostly because it was a Merlot/Pinotage blend, which I had never tried, and it was a wine from South Africa, which I’d also never tried.
It was delish, and I was able to drink it over the course of a week without a moment of agitas or slipping into momentary anaphylactic shock.
When I made my weekly stop yesterday at Rocky Mountain Moonshine (real name), I saw they had another brand from South Africa, also featuring cheetahs on the label and costing less than $10, even before discount. So I tried Sebeka’s Shiraz/Pinotage “Cape Blend” and liked it even more.
Both wines tasted, to me, anyway, medium-bodied in a good way, and very, very jammy, especially with blackberry. Sebeka had a little more body to it, but Herding Cats was in no way watery. And, a big thing for me, neither had that nasty tannin mouthfeel that I equate with sucking on wallpaper paste or eating shoe polish.
So, while I don’t claim to be a wine afficionado by any means, and some have dismissed my preferences as pedestrian (including some close friends! You know who you are!), The Pastry Pirate officially endorses West Cape cheetah reds for enjoyable drinking with no nasty side effects.
And if either Sebeka or Herding Cats wants to send me a case to help spread the word, well, that’s fine, too.
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2 comments:
Every year I go to a wine tasting Dustin's family and every year his mom and I pick 1 bottle that we keep going back to after trying everything else.
This year it was Sebeka! Hooray for the cheetah wines.
It is the same Shiraz/Pinotage blend and I love it. She even bought me a bottle for Christmas. I don't even want to say how many bottles of it I've gone through since then.
and it is excellent with dark chocolate...even though I know you don't like the stuff.
mmm...I know what I'm doing tonight.
Yay - I discovered South African reds (no cheetahs, tho') during my year in Amsterdam. They are yummy, and of course like Laura I enjoyed them with dark chocolate. And I can't believe you like Amarula, only because I had never heard of it until a friend here in the Queen City introduced me to it. I thought it was some sort of secret!
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