Wine Wednesdays: Provenance

Being that wine runs like water out here, Mike and I thought that it would be fun to take the grocery store wine steward up on his recommendations, and then of course blog about our winners and losers. And because Wine and Wednesday both start with the letter, W, it seems only fitting for this to become a regular weekly blog on Wednesdays.

All wines that we typically buy are Cabernet Sauvignons, so you won't get much variation with our recommendations but we will try to make it as informative and entertaining as possible.

So here's how our rating system goes...
[1 star] Mike will not finish the bottle (but I will because it's wine and that would be a waste)
[2 stars] Will finish the bottle, but will not buy it again
[3 stars] A good wine, very drinkable and one that we would likely buy again
[4 stars] A wine we will most certainly buy again and rave about on the blog
[5 stars] Completely out of this world (and probably out of our price range...) but still everyone deserves a treat!


[1 star]
Provenance is from Napa and the only reason I know that is because I can read it from the label above. This wine was memorable in the way that we won't be buying it again. It was expensive in the $40 range (with our Safeway Grocery discount card), and was not a smooth drinking wine at all. We asked the Safeway wine steward to give us a few recommendations at different price points and this was in the above $35 category that he recommended. He asked us if we liked a vanilla note. We weren't sure if we did or not but he said most Cab drinkers like the hint of vanilla. As it turns out, we aren't typical. Vanilla = not so good! Mike really didn't like this at all and didn't finish his first glass, which of course meant this was the bottle of wine that I would tackle for a good week or so before I finally threw in the towel and poured it out. Overall, it was strong in a strange (i.e. vanilla) way and too expensive. The only bright spot of the bottle was the really sweet label. You see without the wine steward around to recommend wine, I typically just buy a bottle for its sweet label.