There are wines meant to be mulled over, thought about, discussed, and dissected.This is not one of those wines.
It's a wine for drinking when you don't want to mull, think, or discuss. It's a wine for having with pizza while you're watching TV or a movie on the DVD player, or for buying in multiple bottles and setting in the middle of a long, family-filled table adorned with a red check table cloth and big bowls of spaghetti.
The 2005 Alovini Terra degli Eventi is a good QPR choice if you are looking for a simple, flavorful wine to go with traditional Italian-American dishes. ($8.95, Chronicle Wine Cellar; available online from other merchants for $13.95) This is a wine that can handle tomato sauce--lots of tomato sauce--with its aromas of sour cherry and medicinal notes of clove and spice. Blended from Aglianico and Sangiovese, the wine's flavors echo the aromas and are predominantly sour cherry with high-toned blueberry accents and some hints of baking spices. While this wine will do the business for the price, it's not a highly unique or memorable wine.
Italy produces a lot of simple, quaffable reds. They're perfect for pizza and pasta. My rule is, if the wine costs more than the pizza you ordered for delivery you've done something wrong. If it costs less than the pizza, don't think about it too much. Just pop the cork, open the box or pile some strings of spaghetti on your plate, and enjoy.
2 comments:
I have to admit that I struggle with food and wine in the sense of choosing what wine is best for a certain type of food. I'm a big fan of wine but to get the full potential and compliment the food I am eating is hard.
I use a great site for purchasing my wines from, their called Majestic Wines and even though their range is absolutely superb, a food and wine guide would be helpful. For example what wine best suits beef, chicken, fish etc?
I eat a lot of pasta. In fact my diet is largely Mediterranean. For this reason I am always on the lookout for a good quaffable red to go pasta and other Italian dishes. I am also a great fan of any wine with Sangiovese in it. Thanks for the tip.
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