Apple Wine Taste-off

My husband and I like to travel to Dixon on occasion, especially since we know some cool cats out that direction, and one of our favorite places to stop is the Crystal Cork.  It's a cozy place with beautiful wooden floors, lovely photography and art from local artists, and some dang good wine.  They even let you order food in to enjoy with your wine, from the Thai place next door or the pizza joint down the street.

One of their wines in particular is a favorite of mine, the Washington Hills Sweet Riesling.  I am normally not very impressed by white wines, as dry tannic reds are my choice, but this is Amazing! It has a great, bright green apple like fruity flavor, and while sweet, is not actually sugary.  The best way to describe it is mouth watering, because that's what happens after one little sip.

The downside of this great wine is that it seems to be impossible to find in our local stores. So we picked up another apple wine to do a comparison.  The Illinois Cellars wine is a good runner up, and very drinkable and tasty, but just not the same.  It has a more buttery flavor and texture, perhaps more mineral-ish, and is not nearly as bright.   It is a bit cheaper, which is a perk, but we think we'll head back to the Crystal Cork and stock up!

You may notice that there is a cork floating in the Illinois Cellars Bottle.  That would be because my husband forgot to take the protector off of the pointy part of the wonderfully effective corkscrew that my grandmother gave us for Christmas (see the red shiny thing) so it shoved the cork into the bottle.  We knew something was wrong due to the fountain of wine that erupted from the bottle both times.   The funniest part is that he did this twice, because after the first time the protector got jammed on and he forgot he needed to grab some pliers and take it off. Silly, silly! :D