Last weekend Gabriele and I attended a fun wine-tasting event in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria. Planet Wine set up some tables across the street from their location and poured 30 different wines for a crowd of about 50 on a gorgeous fall day.
From the email invite: As always, we’re breaking this thing into 2 sessions (12-2 pm and 3-5 pm), so please get your tickets now to secure your preferred time slot. You’ll be rewarded with not only a beautiful fall celebration, sipping some serious wines with a crew of pros doing the pouring, but you’ll enjoy the security of trying before you buy with some once-a-year pricing on all of the bottles – just for you and just for the day, so c’mon and let’s get tasting!
Planet Wine and its neighbor next door, Evening Star Cafe, are both owned by the Neighborhood Restaurant Group. Customers benefit by having the entire stock of Planet Wine available for only $10 over retail price when dining at Evening Star. This makes a nice bottle so much more affordable and is an advantage of Evening Star over other NRG properties.
The wines poured were from all over – Australia, Italy, France, California, Oregon, Virginia, even Lebanon. (That was Ixsir Altitudes – a red blend that wasn’t bad.) The tasting was set up as six tables with five wines each, with each flight of wines having a different presenter. Any bottle you liked during the tasting could be purchased for a small discount off the retail price.
The presenters really knew their stuff, giving us a lot of background on the producers and the growing conditions. This made it interesting even when we didn’t particularly like the wine. The pours were small and not enough to dull anyone’s mind or palate.
Here are our winners:
Scenic Valley Farms Pinot Noir – 2021, Willamette Valley Oregon. Very tasty and easy to drink Pinot. Nice raspberry and strawberry fruit but soft, not overly juicy. Just a hint of spice and earthiness. A quality alternative to expensive Oregon Pinot Noir at $22.
Scenic Valley Farms Chardonnay – 2021, 91 points from Wine Enthusiast. Grapes from three different vineyards, a beautiful Chardonnay. Velvety and rich but with nice acidity as well, with apple and pear notes. Stored in oak for 10 months to give a bit of depth and vanilla. Again a bargain at $22.
Freja Albarino – 2021, Chehalem Mountains, Willamette, Oregon. Albarino is a white varietal native to Portugal and Spain. We found it delicious, with nice apple and pear fruit and a very clean finish. A nice break from more typical wines. Freja was the Norse goddess of fertility and the label shows her riding Odin’s horse. (This is the interesting background info I mentioned above.)
Truchard Syrah Caneros – 2020, California. A straightforward wine – big and delicious. Medium tannins keep the jammy red fruit from going overboard. By the standards of this tasting on the expensive side at $35 but worth it.
So that’s our verdict – YMMV of course. I don’t think you can go wrong pairing one of these bottles with your next dinner at Evening Star or an upcoming holiday meal. Happy sipping.