Somerset Ridge Buffalo Red

Somerset Ridge Vineyard and Winery

After three months of dating, I decided it was time for the Scotch Man to meet the family. Dun dun dun! We chose Easter weekend, since both he and I had vacation the following week.

This bottle was a gift from my sister for Christmas, and she made me promise not to try it without her, so it seemed like the perfect weekend to open it up.

We drank this bottle with Easter dinner. It is definitely a dessert wine - it was very sweet. Maybe even too sweet for me! I was so full of good food that I didn't have enough room to finish my wine. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so for that I'm glad.

Everyone else also seemed to like the Scotch Man, too, which I am also very glad about.

The bottle for this wine was neat - Kansas and buffalo seem to go hand and hand - and I always like to try local wines. Somerset Ridge Vineyard and Winery is a decent drive from town, so I've never been, but I'd like to go do a wine tasting there someday. Ever since my day picking grapes at Davenport, I've been crazy about local vineyards. I'd like to tour them all. It might be fun to put together a Kansas wine tour.

Layer Cake - 2009 Malbec

The Scotch Man wanted to relax the other night. Wine and a movie, he said. I thought maybe wine and writing, which is one of my favorite combinations.

I now have a new favorite combination: wine and Wii!

I'm finally almost recovered from my never-ending illness, and it was the first night I had been feeling like myself for weeks. I was feeling silly. In a brief moment of actual wine research, we both swirled our wine and sniffed our glasses to try and detect what we smelled, using what we learned at our wine tasting last month. After some debate, we decided we smelled black licorice and pencil lead (although I think he was kidding when he said that).

But after half a glass of wine, there was nothing on TV, and in order to watch a movie, he had to move plugs from the Wii to the DVD player. So instead of flipping endlessly through Netflix menus, I told him we should just play Wii, since it was plugged in.

So we did.

The most entertaining part of the evening was when we were attempting the balancing exercises for Wii Fit after 2-3 glasses of wine.

We managed to kill the entire bottle of Layer Cake. It was very full bodied and dry, and actually reminded me a bit of the Birthday Cake martini I had at Johnny's Tavern West one night when all of us writers got together. That's not necessarily a compliment, since neither one really tasted like cake and both were kind of painful to drink

But that's ok. Both nights had another thing in common, as well: good nights with the Scotch Man.