A couple of weeks ago, we had some old friends come into town for a visit. We hadn't seen them in quite a while so needless to say there was a lot of celebrating to be done. On this particular night, we were mixing a little work with pleasure. Our guests were making us steaks that had been marinated for 48 hours with something called Shio Koji. This is a fermented Japanese marinade that enhances the umami (or richness) of meat. (Side note, it is delicious!) We planned to have these steaks right after we shot a video for some marketing content for Simply Unwined. Since we were asking several friends to participate, I opened this bottle of wine for a little happy hour. My original thought was to have some of the wine for the shoot, and the rest would be the perfect compliment for our steaks. I couldn't have been more wrong! This was gone in NO time and every guest that tried it commented on how delicious it was. (It was really that good!)
Tasting Notes from the Winemaker: Mature red fruits with a cloak of enveloping spicy notes and hints of chocolate and liquorice.
Two things to note. This wine retails on average for $24 a bottle, but if you are one of the millions of people who have a Costco card, then you can get this for just $15. Fast math...that's almost two for the price of one (and if you are having people over as we did, you will need that second bottle!). The last thing to note, don't do this Italian wine a disservice and drink it out of your cheap glasses...get out your nice glasses for this wine and then get The WINE Brush to simplify your clean up.