Happy Hour in Alameda

This afternoon the Food Bank Director, one of our volunteers, and I stopped at Rosenblum Cellars Winery so the FBD could drop off something at the end of the day today. Conveniently, the tasting room was nearby so we went upstairs and tasted some wines.


We tried a chardonnay, a rose, a zinfandel, a petite syrah, a mourdevre, and a couple others, and I tried to follow the wine conversation. I'm barely above selecting wines by the labels, you see (though the last one we tried because of the label wasn't bad - Wilfred Wong gave it an 85). Turns out that the FBD knows more than a bit about wine, and the volunteer has done a great deal of traveling in Europe, and the guy who runs the tasting room is a friend of the FBD. I just nodded and tried to look wise when the three of them were discussing how French wines differ from California wines, that Cali wines are fruitier due to the longer growing season.


I've been reading about the Mondavis but chose to say nothing, which I think really was wise.


They had one of these gadgets in the tasting room. The guys I was with smelled and tasted a difference between the wine run through this thing and the wine that wasn't. The volunteer bought the one they had for his husband, because it is a pretty neat thing and it looks cool when the wine is going through it, too. I think that Zirpu would dig the Vinturi just for the physics of it, and when I mentioned this to the volunteer he said that he was buying it for his husband for the same reason - though they are going to France for many months next year and he's planning to take it along.