My mom enjoys a glass of wine now and then, and I’d like to think that I’ve helped her with that. She reads the blog, and is better informed when she walks into a liquor store to buy a bottle.
Which is one of the reasons why the Tariquet ($10, purchased, 11.5%) is the wine of the week with Mother’s Day coming up. Yes, I’ve praised this wine many times before, and it has been in the $10 Hall of Fame since 2009. But its great strength – and I don’t know that I’ve emphasized this enough – is that it’s table wine the way it should be but isn’t often enough in this country. You don’t need to be a wine geek to enjoy it. You don’t need to have piles of money. You don’t need to read the Wine Magazines or to parse scores.
All you need is $10. Good wine shouldn’t be more difficult than that, should it?
This vintage of the Tariquet isn’t as grapey, which is one of the things I always enjoyed about it. Look for more citrus, probably because this year’s blend has sauvignon blanc in addition to ugni blanc and colombard, the classic grapes of Gascony. But the wine is still balanced, clean and fresh -- very well made and not only among the best cheap wines in France, but in the world. Highly recommended. Drink a toast to mom with it on Sunday; I know I will.


From the scores are stupid department: Someone on CellarTracker, the blog’s unofficial wine inventory web app, gave the A to Z chardonnay an 85. If this wine is only an 85, I’m going to start writing rave reviews of over-oaked, too alcoholic California chardonnay.
The sweet wine craze, for some reason, has not really included wines that were available before sweet wine got hot. This is particularly true of riesling, which has been the world’s best-known sweet wine for hundreds of years.
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