Leave it to Ms. Yoga to write to me about a couple of wines that she enjoyed, actually she bombarded me with six new wines. Some may not consider me a bona-fide wine blogger, because I tend to ramble on about wines, but that is just my style. I like to enjoy the moment and I like to have fun. Yes, wine can be very serious to me, but not at the expense of the moment. I guess that is why my collection of assorted wine drinking friends put up with me, because I guess I have a sparkle in my eye when the subject of wines arises. Ms. Yoga is an old friend of about twenty-five years and she and my Bride even have a longer run in friendship, and some how food and wine and merriment are always part of the equation when we are together.

Ms. Yoga does quite a bit of traveling in her present position and she enjoys having a glass or two of wine after hours, when she isn’t doing her yoga. Thankfully she does it, and not me, or I might be The Crippled Wine Raconteur. She usually drinks white wines, but she will never turn away from a red wine and she wrote to me that she enjoyed Apothic Wines Inferno 2015. I have had a couple of the wines from this winery and they are an enigma for the wine blogging community in that their wines are all “proprietary” which means that they do not list any technical information, in fact it is sometimes impossible to decipher what types of grapes that they even use. Their Apothic Red is a blend of Zinfandel, Merlot, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon while their Apothic Crush is a blend of Petite Sirah and Pinot Noir. The Apothic Inferno is unknown at the moment, but their selling feature is that it is blended in Whiskey barrels, which is not totally unknown as even the Robert Mondavi group have done this, and I have had two different wines that were aged in Bourbon barrels, including one that uses the famed barrels of Pappy Van Winkel. I haven’t tried the wine, but I am sure that it is a full-bodied wine like their basic Apothic Red with some whiskey traces and one day I may get a chance to try it.

The other enigma wine that she wrote about is Cooper’s Hawk Winery Sparkling Almond NV. Cooper’s Hawk Winery also has a chain of restaurants with thirty locations which also offer wine tastings as well, and I am not sure if Ms. Yoga went to one of their restaurants or had the wine elsewhere. Cooper’s Hawk Winery also produces about six-hundred-thousand gallons of wine per year, which is quite the amount of wine. The winery is located in Lodi, California, but the fruit I would hazard a guess is from many areas, as they offer scant information and no technical information. Even the grapes are not listed, though I did see one site that suggested that the wine is a blend of Viognier and Roussanne and steeped with almonds for flavoring and since it is a sparkling wine, I will go out on a limb and opine that it is probably produced by the Charmat Method, which is widely used for bulk production. Most of the reviews that I read about this wine were positive, and I think that I would try it, as I have very fond memories of a Tante from Milwaukee that I never met, that was a confectioner, and every Christmas while my Mother was alive, she would send her a twenty-five-pound box of hand-made and hand-dipped Marzipan; and that taste is what I compare to every piece of Chocolate Covered Marzipan that I have ever tried. So, Ms. Yoga is two for two, for two wines that defied any real research about the couple of wines that she enjoyed, but are worthy of a taste, if I ever encounter them.