bobgregg.com

We had our friends Bob and Xiao Qi over this evening. Bob used to teach Spanish, so he really likes Spanish wine. So I opened up a couple of different bottles, and one of them really surprised me - it was Don Salvador Monastrell 2004. This is available in a lot of places around here, and for under $10, so I wasn’t expecting much. But what we got was beautiful… dark fruits, inky juice, with just a little sweetness on the finish. This was just about the perfect wine to serve with some appetizers (you know the sort - some sliced Italian salamis, tapenade on crostini, and sharp crumbly cheeses), which is what we were doing. I think we didn’t even need dinner; we could have just sipped this all evening and pondered the imponderables.

Incidentally, Monastrell is the Spanish name for the grape the French call Mourvèdre. That’s the same grape used in the famous wines of Bandol. Wine columnist Jay McInerney had a good essay about the virtues of Bandol, both rosé and red, in his recent book “The Hedonist in the Cellar”.