Had crab cakes -- special crab cakes, made with fresh blue crab from the Gulf of Mexico from an old friend of the family -- on Saturday night, so I opened a bottle of Shannon Ridge sauvignon blanc ($16). Drank one glass, and opened something else.
This is not my annual plea for winemakers to cut back on alcohol content (I'll save that for the spring). Rather, it's an example of why I need to make that plea. This wine is 14.1 percent alcohol -- 1.1 points higher than Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc, 1.3 points higher than Bogle sauvignon blanc, and 2.1 points higher than Chateau Bonnet blanc. And that's almost three times the alcohol content in a similar serving of beer.
The Shannon was not fresh or vibrant or lively, all trademarks of sauvignon blanc. It was not food friendly, and if we had sipped it with the crab cakes, we never would have tasted the crab.
It did not taste like sauvignon blanc. There was almost no fruit and very little acidity -- just an overwhelming heaviness that made me think the wine was spoiled or that it had been aged in oak for 24 months. But it was not spoiled and it was aged six months in stainless steel. The only explanation was the high alcohol, which robbed the wine of of its character.
Why make sauvignon blanc that doesn't taste like sauvignon blanc?
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