Boring Wine

This is one of those wines I talked about last week that landed me in boring wine land. Boring wine land seems to me the wino’s equivalent of purgatory—being stuck drinking wines that make you think “meh” instead of making you want to dive into the glass and swim around or at least appreciate the wine for being a good value or some such feeling that’s not just “meh.” I find that around the $10-$15 price point there’s a lot of “meh” wine, but there are gems too and that’s what makes me keep plugging away, looking for that inspiring great value well made $10 wine. Of course, I might just be searching for the Holy Grail, but a wino’s gotta dream, right?

I picked up the Riondo Pink Prosecco at the Madison Wine Exchange. I think it cost about $13, weighed in at 10% alcohol by volume, and had a cork closure. Earlier this year I’d tried the Riondo Prosecco and found it to be pretty good especially given you could buy it for $10. So I pretty much expected a decent inexpensive bubbly…nothing to ponder too long, but at least something worth drinking.  While I loved the color on the wine, I found the nose to be waxy, with strawberry and candy and nothing else.  It had extremely tiny bubbles and not in the good these bubbles are tiny and there are lots of them kind of way…in the, these are tiny bubbles and there are hardly any of them kind of way. In the mouth, the wine was overly sweet, with not enough bubbles, some candied strawberry and pomegranate.  I ended up thinking it wasn’t worth the calories so I dumped it.