Hi.
I haven’t written about wine in almost a month. That is a sad thing.
But now I have! And that’s a happy thing!
REVIEW OF:
Altalaya do Mar Godello, 2014
Monterrei, Spain
??? Something less than $15. I bought this a while ago.
I do have good reasons for the dry spell — namely, that I’m taking a trip to Spain next month (!!! — the onset of March means I can say this now) and wanted to lose 10 pounds before so doing. Because beaches.
Since I’ve been meaning to lose the five pounds I kept as a souvenir from grad school — and the final 15 from my 85-pound-planned-loss-that-tured-out-to-actually-just-be-70-instead — for something like three years, I signed up for a service called DietBet for some monetary motivation.
It worked: I’ve lost ten pounds! The program definitely kept me motivated, but it also kept me out of the booze. Because booze has (lots of) (empty) calories.
Including wine. Sad times.
However, I’m at the lowest consistent weight of my adult life, and on track to lose ten more pounds to achieve my original goal. Even though the bets are only something like $30 apiece, there’s something about having tangible loss hanging over your head that really makes you stick to your guns. Even in the face of wine.
However, last night, I arrived home to discover that my house keys had mysteriously escaped from my keychain, although I’d had them when I left — the door was locked. Being as the clip on my lanyard is loose, I’ve been worried about this for a while, and apparently was right to be. They weren’t in the car or on the stairs or anywhere else I looked, and are honestly probably lying somewhere lamely in Vinoy Park, where I’d been walking.
It was 8:30 p.m. I’d been up since 5 a.m. and out of the house for thirteen hours. I was hungry, I was exhausted, I had my dog with me. I had to pee.
I needed to call a locksmith. And I definitely, definitely needed a glass of wine.
Spanish Whites
Although I’m a red wine girl through and through (can you tell? I think I’ve only talked about one white so far on this blog), white wine keeps better longer in the fridge, and dieting means downing a whole bottle in two days (and okay really one) is… inadvisable. At least if you plan on eating anything but baby carrots.
Have I mentioned that I’ve been eating a lot of baby carrots?
With my trip to Spain on the horizon, this Spanish white was the perfect pair for the beet-and-artichoke salad I made last night.
To be honest, I don’t know very much at all about this region (Monterrei) or this grape (godello), but the trusty Googles have informed me that the region is in the northwest part of Spain along the Portuguese border, and the grape is… yeah, nobody really knows about it.
But it has enjoyed popularity in the past and may be on its way back into the spotlight now — Gerry Dawes, who writes a lot about Spanish wines, called it “Spain’s emerging hope as an equivalent to the great white Burgundies.”
That might be a little ambitious (although what do I know with my $15 bottle,) but it’s not a bad wine. This one’s bottled under synthetic cork printed adorably with seahorses and is floral on the nose, with maybe some melon characteristics.
On the palate, it’s got a nicely-balanced medium acid and a creamier body than I’d expected, and flavors of soft, fleshy fruits — ripe to over-ripe golden delicious apple, white pear, maybe some honey. I would bet it’s undergone malolactic owing to its soft mouthfeel, and it may have seen some brief oak.
Altogether, a nice wine, although I’ll admit I was wrong about the salad, as it clashed a bit with the artichokes. That’s in part because it’s a much fruitier wine than I usually want out of my whites — I prefer red, black, and blue fruit flavors, and red’s structural complexity, very strongly, so when I reach for a white I’m usually looking for a pretty straightforward acid bath, with maybe some citrus and grass (hi, sauv blanc!).
But it was nice to have a glass (okay, two) of wine and to feel satisfied by it. And it’s nice to have this guy in the fridge for next time I need just a little splash after a long day.