huevos con vino

Hello, and welcome to a new blog that chronicles my experiences as I become increasingly familiar with the world of wine. 

First, a few important details.  I was born in 1976, so I’m young enough that I rarely get noticed in wine stores (despite my beard).  However, I’m old enough to have tasted a good number of wines, developed a good palate, and learned about wine production processes.  But in every sense that counts, I’m a novice when it comes to enjoying wine. 

I have been drinking and actually enjoying wine for a few years.  The first wine that really, truly sold me on wine as my beverage of choice was Harlan Estate.  Quite a place to start, I know now.  A few of us were eating at the Metropolitan Grill in Seattle.  My friend paid for the bottle; I don’t know the vintage.  We had already consumed a few other notable Cabernet Sauvignons at the Met in the past (Caymus, Groth, Silver Oak) and that night we had a Caymus reserve wine that cost about $250 and tasted amazing.  We decided to up the ante, particularly since most of us weren’t paying for the wine, and the sommelier (Steve, I believe) suggested an off-the-list selection: Harlan Estate.  It cost about $800 and it was frigging amazing.  To this day, I am totally overwhelmed by that wine…it absolutely blew away the Caymus, and that’s kind of disturbing.

When I drank that wine, I realized I could smell an entire world of different scents and taste an entire array of flavors previously unfamiliar to me in a glass of wine.  Until that glass, wine tasted like delicious grape juice with alcohol.  After that glass, I began to differentiate the flavors and aromas more successfully.  My palate is still very much a work in progress, of course, but it’s a fun process.

Another important detail of my background as a wine enthusiast is that my fiancé had a liver tumor that nearly ended her life at 25.  She had a 50/50 chance of surviving a 10-hour operation to carve more than 90% of her liver away.  She survived the operation and has grown a new liver over the last 2 years.  Impressive.  Unfortunately, because of her illness (which was unrelated to alcohol consumption), she doesn’t drink very much alcohol.  She is allowed to have a glass of wine or two with dinner, but she only drinks on rare occasions.  I, on the other hand, would drink several glasses of wine every day if I had the time, money, and drinking companions. 

This detail is important because as much as I would like to drink a lot more wine, I can’t.  I don’t see the point of opening a bottle just to watch 80% of it go to waste 5 days later.  It’s not very much fun to drink wine by yourself while your fiancé is watching and drinking water.  I’m trying to resolve this issue, although I console myself by knowing that I’m not headed for a liver transplant anytime soon.

Which leads to my final background detail: I don’t work in the wine industry, or in a wine store, or at a business that has anything to do with wine.  Also, I don’t really know anyone who works in any wine-related capacity.  The closest I come to knowing an expert or insider is my father, and while he loves wine too he isn’t all that knowledgeable compared to, say, Robert Parker.  While I live in the Seattle area, which is only a few hours from the best wine region in Washington State, I’m not a frequent winery visitor.  But I do love to visit wineries…my favorite at this point is Domaine Drouhin in Oregon.

One last detail: The name of my blog is stupid.  I think pretty much every blog name is stupid, but at least my name has some strange meaning to me.  I picked the alias “huevos” when I started my first e-mail account in college (in 1994), and the name has stuck as my handle there ever since (as a student and as an alumnus).  Therefore, “huevos con vino” is something of an inside joke for the 3 or 4 people who know me well enough to get it, although I doubt any of those people will read my blog.  Maybe it should have been “vino con huevos” to play on the double meaning of the word “huevos.”  Whatever.

So, this wine blog fills a very specific niche.  I don’t feel qualified to write reviews as such, but I do feel qualified (if such a thing is necessary) to provide my opinion about wines I’ve had.  I also feel slightly qualified to discuss wine prices, Internet sales trends (since I monitor that sort of thing a lot), and local shops and restaurants.  Finally, I am a writer by trade, and a good one in general, so I feel qualified to use the English language.  Therefore, in this blog, I will try to disambiguate some of the traditional nonsense (what the hell is a “fruit bomb” anyway?) you see in reviews and elsewhere (how come some people use a 100-point scale and then give relatively bad wines scores of over 80 points?).  but I won’t go too far in this direction since I’m not a critic, nor do I aspire to become a critic.  I’d rather be known as a drinker than a critic.