Friday, December 19, 2008

Fifty nifty American wines

Have you see this? TIME's Joel Stein tested a wine from every single one of the 50 states.

I love how there's a photo of every single bottle and you can click on it for the results.

Top-rated? California (DUH!) and my own current state of Washington, plus some others.

Minnesota landed in the second-highest category, "Good." There's also a "Bad" category, and many states fell in there.

Undrinkable? Georgia, Wyoming, Indiana, North Dakota, South Carolina and Massachusetts. Massachusetts, in fact, sounds like a horrendous wine, which kind of surprised me.

Stein's comments are pretty hilarious, too, as with this summary of the North Dakota wine:

"The wine-tasting party had warmed up to non-grape wines, and we were pulling for this winery, which in 2002 helped North Dakota become the very last state to start making vino. Yes, it tastes sour and sweet, like some knockoff brand of Smarties, and it smells like an unclean guinea-pig cage. But the desire to defend North Dakota was so great that as we were talking about how bad it tasted, someone yelled, 'What kind of wine would you make without grapes?' Point made. This was the best damn elderberry wine I've ever had, North Dakota."

This comment on the Indiana wine was pretty fun, too: " It smells like something bad happened at the frat house that no one wants to take responsibility for."

And this Georgia comment cracked me up: "To be fair, this is made by some kind of golf resort. Still, I have no idea how someone made this, tasted it and thought, Yeah, we should put this in a bottle and give it to people. I did not know so many things could be bad about a single wine: it's watery and yet it tastes like sweet gasoline at the same time. "

2 comments:

Wendy said...

Yeah, the elderberry wine tastes like shite. However, there's some Honey wine that isn't too bad if you like sweet or dessert wines. Coming from a North Dakotan.

briank said...

Not to carp too much, but the Massachusetts vineyard he chose isn't exactly known for its fine wines. They mostly sell wine made from cranberry juice, and most of that is sold to tourists.

If he had sampled something from this winery instead, the result would have been quite different.