The Last Century

Well, I suppose that it's really the First Century that's behind us - not the "last." In any event, I thought that I'd recap the wines that made up the first 100 on The List. I thought it might be interesting to see if any trends are starting to show up.

The first fact that caught me unawares is that the first 100 wines was actually 101. There were two #24's. I'm not inclined to go back and re-number all the posts, so there'll just have to be a bonus wine. I'll just blame it on the fact that I was still learning the ropes on how to keep up with the numbers on the blog. It does NOT have anything to do with the fact that, after all the wine, I had simply forgotten how to count past 20.

I can't say that there are trends to the bottles we sipped from, but it seems pretty clear to me that we're experiencing a good, if not wide, range of wines. Out of the first 100 (101) wines, there were 78 different wineries represented. That number likely would have been a bit higher except for the fact that Burrowing Owl and Golden Mile (now Road 13) accounted for 11 wines between the two of them - simply because I dedicated a round of the Canucks' run in the Stanley Cup playoffs to each winery.

It's probably not that much of a surprise to see that a big majority, 41 bottles, were produced in BC. In general, BC residents are rather well-known for their loyalty to local producers. It certainly doesn't hurt that we're making some darn good wine nowadays as well. I was rather surprised, however, to see that the next largest region/country was Italy with 13 wines. I've never really thought we drank all that much Italian wine, but we've clearly gravitated there - either because of the visit last fall or the fact that it matches well with our eating habits. I was equally surprised to see that we drank more French than Aussie wines - although not by much, 11 bottles to 10. In the past, I pretty much always reached for an Aussie bottle if we weren't drinking local that night.

The break down of the types wines didn't catch me off guard at all. We drank 57 reds, 34 whites, 1 rose, 3 sparkling wines and 4 dessert wines. A couple of years back, the percentage of red wines likely would have been higher, but as I learned more about matching wines with food, I figured out that we used to "drink red, but eat white." We don't get caught up in the old, hard and fast rule of "red with meat, white with fish." But a good match between the style of wine and type of food really can enhance your enjoyment of both.

The final component of The List that I checked out was that we drank a good number of blended reds - 8 different blends (from Bordeaux/Meritage to GSM and Super Tuscans) representing 22 bottles. No surprise there. I'm a big fan of taking the best attributes of each varietal and matching them with other grapes to make a "better" whole. When not blended, we drank 15 different straight red varietals and 13 whites. The most common single red varietals were cab sauv (7), followed by syrah/shiraz and pinot noir (6 each). I hadn't expected that since I almost always look first to shiraz.

The breakdown of white varietals wasn't quite so distinct. We drank 5 pinot gris, followed by 4 rieslings. I was maybe caught a tad unawares in that we only had 6 white blends out of the first century.

But, perhaps the bigger surprise was how quickly we made it to 100. No doubt a big help in that aspect was the odd 5 to 8 wines in a single evening at dinner parties or tastings. They add up quickly. It might not take 5 to 10 years to reach our 2001 after all.

All in all, it's an interesting start - only another 1900 bottles or so to go.