Estancia Pinot Noir 2017, California

"A Family Affair"

Price at Purchase: $11.99

Location: Costco

Every so often, we get ahead of ourselves and need a good kick in the pants to bring us down a few notches. We thought we were SO CLEVER and totally had a refined enough palate to compare the 2018 Estancia Pinot Noir to 2017 version of same label and varietal. Could we tell the difference? Absolutely not. Did we drink it all the same? Duh.

We had a guest celeb this time around—our cousin flew up from Los Angeles, and we were hoping to capture some of his horticulture skills (he has 80+ plants, but decorated in the most aesthetically pleasing way that it belongs in a magazine) in this wine tasting. But instead if us chatting about wine, we all ended up laughing about glazed ham. You had to be there.

This wine was such a deep burgundy color—but definitely see-through. To prove this last point, my uncle proceeded to throw up the middle-finger behind his wine glass to prove just how transparent it was. I guess you can take the adult out of middle-school, but that humor is eternal.

At first, we got an abundance of blackberry, with other sweet notes to it. Tasting it though, we all got HUGE amounts of cherry and strawberry, with no blackberry to be found. Some phrases that were tossed around during this tasting:

~“a strawberry jam reduction”

~“this bottle came from row 3, vine 2 of the vineyard”

~“it reminds me of tanbark” <-- this one was my contribution. And that led to us going on a tangent about how we grew up with our playgrounds covered in that stuff and we were essentially playing in woodchip pits. Not hazardous at all.

This bottle is very light, so perfect for a summer day. Or as my cousin specifically described, “This is ideal for 4:00pm on a Saturday, when you want to stop drinking rose, but you don’t want to fully switch over to red.” I’m assuming there are other use cases for this bottle, but that one seems like the most fun. Just remember to invite me, and I promise to tell you the story of the glazed ham. Trust me, it’s a doozy.