Thursday, July 25, 2013

Celebrity Wine & My CNN Debut

So I'm sort of a wino and while some people might consider me a wine snob, I would prefer to say that my palate has just matured over the years. Last month I was invited by my local wine store, K&L Wines to participate in a blind taste test of some celebrity wines. Free wine caught my eye but the opportunity to be interviewed by CNN sealed the deal. I did not have any major expectations one way of another - I figured some of the wines would be good, some not so much. I was wrong, so very wrong.

We tasted 10 wines all in paper bags as to conceal the guilty...er I mean winemakers. We were also given a sheet with the list of varietals we were tasting on one side and a list of celebrity winemakers on the other. There were more winemaker options than there were actual wines so the matching game was virtually impossible. My friend Katie joined me for this event and due to her ferocious reality tv watching, she knew that one the of Pinot Grigios was a match with Ramona Singer of the Real Housewives of New York. I thought it was a match for Trader Joe's Two Buck Chuck. The rest were a total mystery though we made some guesses for fun. The only wine that was really palatable was my nemesis (well, nemesis to my ears) Dave Matthews' Cabernet Sauvignon. I'm pretty sure Fergie and Savanna Samson were trying to poison us with their wines.

The video below showcases my strong feelings about Fergie's wine in particular. Katie and I have two sound bites in the video though I would have loved to see the parts that didn't make the cut. There was probably enough footage of us to have a new show called "Wine Chat with Gretchen & Katie".

Have you tried any of the celebrity wines mentioned in this post of the video? Are there some great celebrity wines out there that we should have tasted instead?




If you can't view the video above, please utilize this link.