Winey Tasting Notes: Go Northwestern! The 2012 Gator Bowl and Klinker Brick Farrah Syrah
New Year’s Day in the Winey Household is a fairly typical celebration. Sleep late. Watch bowl games. Eat lots of buffalo chicken dip. Sound familiar to you? (You can insert your own favorite dip – it just happens that we are on a buffalo chicken dip kick this year.)You can also add one other typical event to our household: Northwestern University will lose whatever bowl it’s in.
Let me start by saying that the Winey Hubby and I are both proud graduates of Northwestern. We loved it there. Wonderful friends, great education, gorgeous campus. Football powerhouse? Um, well, during our tenure there, the Wildcats set the NCAA record for all time consecutive losses by a Division 1 football team. But really…it was a minor thing. That is, if you consider a headline in a major news magazine that reads “Interstate 95, Northwestern 0” a minor little jab. Ouch. Still, we loved our school and still do. Had the Winey Son not become the Winey West Point Cadet, it’s entirely likely he would have been a Wildcat. Winey Daughter is not thrilled with Chicago weather and has her sights set somewhere more southern at the moment. But there is still time to brainwash convince her.
And then, it all started to turn around. Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl in 1995 (the birth of the aforementioned Winey Daughter 13 days before the game kept us from attending, though). And since then we’ve been on an upswing.
We just couldn’t win any of the bowls we went to. We won the Rose Bowl in 1949 and that was it. UNTIL THIS YEAR!!! When our beloved Wildcats slapped the Mississippi State Bulldogs with a loss of 34-20. The joy was great in our house. It’s not every day you break a 64 year old record. (We tried to ignore the word “finally” that seemed to appear in every game re-cap afterwards. Usually in the headline.)
As it so happened, I had decided that our array of Bowl Winning snacks (did I mention cheese, sausage bites, pepperoni bites and sea salt chips?) would go very nicely with a bottle of Klinker Brick Farrah Syrah (2010, Lodi, CA, 14.9%). I figured with all those tastes going on, a Syrah would be able to hold its own there!
This wine (Farrah is the winemaker’s daughter, FYI) starts off with a nose of earth and dark spices, a hint of bacon. It tastes of coffee, tart cherries and some green spices like oregano and tarragon. It is pure velvet in the mouth. Smooth and supple and many layers of well behaved tastes. It finishes with a lovely fruit tannin that lingers on – such a nice surprise! This wine retails for $20 but boy, you’d think it cost a whole lot more – it was that good! Well worth ordering if you can’t get it locally.
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| 2013 Gator Bowl Champs Photo from NU’s Facebook page |
I was sent this wine for review purposes. The opinions are my own. And yes, it is also my opinion that Northwestern is one of the finest institutions of higher learning in this country. Go ‘Cats!
