My wine club’s theme this month is “Wino Road Trip”. Its basically to encourage us to drink wines from the US that would not be in normal repertoire; so no wines from California, Oregon, Washington and no wines from Missouri or Illinois, since those are local to us. Since wine is made in all 50 states, this should be somewhat easy; of course not all states distribute and so it likely won’t be without some creative pre-ordering!
In my research, I found a blog post by Time Magazine’s Joel Stein: "Fifty States of Wine" in 2008 – you can find the article here. Its an old blog post, but funny:
“I'm not sure why my instinct, upon learning that all 50 states make wine, was to try one from each. If I found out that every state has a water park, I wouldn't try to go to each one. That's because water parks can't get you drunk.”
(he SO had me at this one!)
“I learned a few general truths. White is easier to make than red. Wines made at golf courses are not good.”…. “I also learned that you can make and apparently sell some truly disgusting wine: six of the bottles I tried with a dozen friends were unanimously deemed "undrinkable." But 11 of them were quite good”……
So, not counting Cali, Washington, or Oregon, the other states that had an “excellent” wine were: Colorado, Delaware, New Hampsire, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Pensylvannia, and Texas. (For the record, the wine from Missouri was “good” and the wine from Illinois was “bad”, although its worth noting that the wines were selected at random AND the blog post was from 2008)
You can find the list of all the wines where you can filter out the best (or worst) here.
Another more recent blog post can be found here. (and I apologize to the other five million wine bloggers, I don't have time to find all of your posts!)
So, I guess wish us luck, as we try some new wines out….and if you have any good recommendations, feel free to send them our way! Check back in August for the results!
