Edamame and Wednesday wine

Not together, thankfully.

Today is Wednesday, and that means Wednesday Group wines. 20 more wines this week -- mostly old world. Over half were young German wines left behind from the tasting -- ones we hadn't yet gotten to over the past weekend. Two stood out as exceptional -- and both were from producers who didn't necessarily grab my attention at the German tasting this weekend. I'm coming to realize just how diverse riesling is as a wine grape. In addition to the different harvest times and sugar levels refelcted by classification (ie, Kabinett, Spatlese, auslese), vintage and terroir both matter SO much to these wines. Get a California cab (or merlot, or zin), and you pretty much are drinking the same thing, regardless of producer, vintage, etc. (Yes, this is an overstatement, but not by all that much.). Rieslings, not so much. 2007 produced some of the most complex, big wines throughout Germany; 2006 were somewhat simpler, and less developed. Jury is still out on the 2008; the ones available are largely still rather unsettled from very recent bottling. And each region and vineyard has unique signatures. A few of the guys in our group could probably identify vintage, producer, and even vinyard within German rieslings. I could only wish to some day have a tenth that good of palate.

One other wine just blew several of us away -- it was the Castano Monastrell. This is a downright cheap wine--about $7/bottle--and it drinks with that violet-tar-fruit mix that just screams mourvedre (or monastrell--french and Spanish, respectively). This could age for several years without much problem, but is already drinking nice now, if a bit big and wild.

Now, to the edamame. Being that we wanted a quick dinner, it meant Sloppy Joe's tonight. We thought about making fries with it, but that was too much work. So we hauled out some frozen in-shell edamame (Soybeans) and boiled 'em up. I'd been telling Julie for months how good this could be. She's always been afraid of it, saying, "ick". Well, she tried 'em, and found them remarkably nice. Yay for me!