So my wife quit smoking five months ago, and now all she wants to drink are wines with seriously smoky/tobacco flavors. She’ll sample some Sancerre or bubbly or rose’, but she lusts for “juice” that might as well be called Vino-tine Patch.

Actually, her timing is pretty good on this, since I’m now getting more sample bottles than anyone’s liver could possibly handle — have I mentioned that this job does not blow? – and so we have on hand a lot of wines that work for her and otherwise might be one-sip-and-down-the-drain deals.

Last night we landed on her favorite smoke-o-rama wine to date, a Dry Creek Vineyard Somers Ranch zin that had flavors of both smoked and raw tobacco. She was in heaven, and I rather liked it as well. Sundry syrahs and cabs have worked well for her, too.

Point it, our palates change. Sometimes it’s a gradual thing; sometimes it’s brought on more quickly by something we do (or something that happesn to us) physically. A few years back, we cut sugar out of our diets, and soon thereafter our affection for fruit-bomb reds from California subsided. Certain zins and pinots and even a “romantic dinner” standby, the Marietta Angelli Cuvee, lost their magic; we still liked them but no longer found them intoxicating (except physically).

But even without such lifestyle changes, our tastes evolve. In recent years I’ve given wines that I thought I basically didn’t like — chenin blanc, Extra Brut bubbly, anything red from Greece, and just recently kosher wines — and enjoyed them, sometimes mightily.

That’s one of the things that makes wine, as Donald Rumsfeld might put it, an unknowable unknown. Or something like that.

Everything we know isn’t necessarily wrong, but it might not be spot-on right, either. Next time you get a chance, consider trying something you think you don’t like.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.