Our wine tasting group reunited this weekend.  For a decade plus 8, we’ve been blind tasting wines, rating and ranking them, discussing their attributes and testing our ability to guess varietal, vintage and more.   This time we tasted zins from Dry Creek.  Living in the bulls-eye of California wine country, in Sonoma, we have more wineries than fast food joints, and plenty of wines to choose when putting together a wine tasting dinner party.  The winning wine, scoring number 1 by 6 people was 2008 Mauritson Dry Creek Zinfandel which costs $28 per bottle.
After we finished, we shared supper together.  All of us are good cooks and so it works to do an “assigned” pot luck.  What stands out most in my mind about our meal last night was the wine pairing with the first course….off the hook!  When I first tasted the wine, I didn’t like it.  Without food, it was flat, stale and tasted like water that has been in a water bottle for too long.  My friend Susan made a green salad, with shrimp and hard boiled eggs with a cayenne pepper spicy mayonnaise dressing.  That’s where the magic began.  One bite of the salad and a sip of the gewürztraminer and my palette did a 180.  The wine was transformed into a pleasantly sweet antidote for my hot tongue. It was so remarkable that I thought it needed to be memorialized here in my blog.  Put this on your table next time you serve a spicy meal:    Arista  Anderson Valley 2006 Gewurstraminer