Around the world in eight wines.
Hey everybody. I’m Scott with CoolToys® TV and we are getting ready for a new season playing with some Pan Tilt Zoom auto cameras, P T Z cameras. So you can see the camera follows me as I walk around. This is not a cameraman. Pretty neat AI. This one’s really inexpensive. We’re looking at some better ones because this one didn’t quite do what we wanted. It’s getting there.
Wine Tasting 101 At Home
But in the meantime, this is a wine episode for Beach Street News, and last night we had some wine. The goal was to see if we could taste the differences and more importantly agree with the experts on eight different sauvignon blancs from around the world. And I’ll talk about each of ’em really quick.
And I’ll tell you how we did it. We had kind of a party. We gave everybody a score sheet. Some notes about each wine and then we decided to let everybody taste one ounce of each and go through it and then write their own notes and see if anybody could pick it. For people that drink a lot of wine, I’m embarrassed to say the best score.
How We Scored
Two of the 12 people got three bottles right. My wife and I who are both WSET graduates and are in wine programs, we each only got one. So, That goes to show you there’s a lot more to wine than you think. But let’s go through ’em really quick. I’ll just show you eight, sauvignon blancs. Wines you might like out here at the beach on a summer day.
So, and I’m gonna start with the most surprising one. This is decoy by Duckhorn, sauvignon blanc. Very good flavor, light and easy to drink. Top three for everybody. And it’s the second label from Duckhorn. So that’s kind of their bottom, you know, their lower end wine one would think normally, right?
It Starts With Notes
And again, what we did is we had all eight wines listed with notes like citrus, grapefruit, apple, pear, those kind of things. And some of them we completely disagreed with. Some were really easy. This one had some notes on it about it being a little spritzy and grassy. With a, a little bit of a light finish, which it did.
And everybody of the group that got wines right, this was the one guessed right most often. And it ranked in the top three along with that decoy. So it’s polls. We got some crazy story that this was Princess Margaret’s wine from her wedding or something, we don’t know, but it’s a decent sauvignon blanc from Austria.
So we just went from California to Austria. And then we got thrown for a curve. This one, Alma, which is normally to us, a Sonoma County, California vineyard, but this sauvignon blanc when you read the back is bottled in France. So we were pretty surprised by that, that French wine in true to what I have found, what I like French wines, this was a very good wine.
More Wines
True to what I like. This is a very good wine. And I’m not even a white wine drinker. You know, usually chardonnays, that kind of thing like everybody else. And the old saying, you know, the new saying anything but chardonnay, ABC wine. So here’s a good option if you’re looking for a white French sauvignon blanc sold by Olema.
Really nice price point $15-$16 piece of cake. Wild Coast, South Africa. So we’ve gone California, Austria, France, unknowingly that we thought we were bringing in another California and to South Africa. Very different. This one was very earthy. It didn’t have the tropical notes that the other ones had.
Very light and easy to drink. The second lightest of most of ’em, in fact. And very inexpensive, and that’s the key to this one for an $8 bottle. This was actually quite nice. Then I’ll go to the lightest one HōM, which means “Heart Of Many”. It’s the abbreviation rather for Heart of Many. It is an organic wine grown in Spain, pressed and then shipped to France to bottle for some reason, and then shipped to the US.
Maybe there’s better taxes, I don’t know, but. Super light wine, almost no flavor left at all. We don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s part of the organic process, if it’s the Spanish grapes, what it is, but this was nobody’s top three list and not anyone really liked it or went back to it, which was a little surprising.
It Gets Better
The second most popular was this Mato Bay. It is a sauvignon blanc. This is their reserve. I don’t know if there’s a difference because when I scan the label with my cool little Cellar-Tracker app, I don’t get anything different. So I did go ahead and load this up today into Cellar Tracker to see if we can get a different one on there and if there is in fact a difference, not a bad wine.
It tied for most light. So the single biggest Duckhorn, bottom of everyone’s list. And three people, as soon as they tasted, they just said “Nope”, and put the glass down. This is supposed to be Duckhorn’s great, you know, their flagship sauvignon blanc, but it got kicked off the table by Decoy without a question.
It just did not cut it. It was very heavy, almost to the point of being syrupy and without being sweet. And that was the odd part. It had this very odd finish and. The South African one, this one had this very tart finish. So these two had these both very different finishes than everything else. The rest of these you could probably blend together pretty much and not see much difference. You’d like ’em.
The Bottom Line
And these two were the big standouts. Well, and I take that back Heart of Many, a little bit bland. Not a lot to it, but these two were the extremes. The Duckhorn was just this very overbearing almost typical of what a lot of people think of California Napa wines. There’s just too much going on in there, and that’s kind of how we all felt about the Duckhorn.
The Decoy for eight bucks less was a better deal. So think of it this way, you can have a Decoy and one of these for the price of that (Duckhorn), kind of silly. Now, the most popular wine threw us all off. This is a Chilean sauvignon blanc by Porta. It is a reserve 2021, and it is the number one hands down. It won.
It was number one on more people’s list than anything else, and it’s also the one that based on the tasting notes from the critics of grapefruit, tropical notes, citrus, apple and pear, everybody figured out this wine. This one was the one that was picked most often correctly, and it was also the most popular.
So very surprising and not an expensive wine. Really good deal on this one, like 12 to 15 bucks also. So again, you know, you look back and you go 25 bucks. And we actually paid 25 bucks for this one, but we have found it for 12. So we just paid at a very specialty store to get a nice little story about paying princess wine, I guess.
So that’s it. Next time you wanna try some wines and you’re not sure what you want, buy eight bottles, find a dozen friends. Let everybody try it and see how they do. See what they like. That’s it for this week on Beach Street News all about wine. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the sun outside and if you’re a little thirsty, grab some sauvignon blanc and enjoy.
Thanks for watching.
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