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January 10, 2006
Lindemans
I am a man for whom restraint really means something.
Not much. But certainly something.
With that in mind, I am always looking for good values in wine, if only to somehow reduce the crushing financial burden of a Domaine de la Romanee-Conti-driven life.
(Did this disgracefully aging gentleman really understand when he allowed himself to get locked into this awful habit?
Well, no, your honor. Certainly he understood the dangerous pull of golf, black holes and rip-tides, but what man, what tender innocent, can ever comprehend, a priori, the awful, inexorable lure of the grape???)
In any case, in an effort to make this habit somehow financially manageable, I drank a lot of Lindemans wine in graduate school. Somehow I got away from that (the possibilities for living even farther beyond my means offered by a steady full time job helped, in a sense). Recently I was poking around a Harris-Teeter supermarket while my wife was doing the weekly shopping. I was drawn to the wine section (on reflection, it probably isn't necessary to explicitly mention this). There I found myself scanning the very modestly priced offerings from Lindemans and eventually purchasing a case or two. (After all, this is all about really understanding the quality of the wine-in a statistical sense, of course-and as an econometrician I am all too aware of the dangers of small samples.)
Well, the first results are in: for the money (most bottles were $8-$10), the various Lindemans cabs, shiraz, and cab-shiraz blends that I sampled ranged from very good to excellent. While they are not necessarily particularly complex (these are the sort of wines you drink, as opposed to negotiate with), they are consistenly very good at what they should be: fun, fruity and satisfying everyday wines that stand up to a wide range of food pairings. I have to say that I have not yet had one for which I truly did not care.
Posted by dag at January 10, 2006 6:33 PM
Comments
If you like Lindemans, I can recommend a number of Aussie wines that are excellent values. Same thing goes for New Zealand. New Zealand, btw, is one of the three greatest Cabarnet-Sauvignon regions in the world (the other two being Bordeaux, mostly the left-bank, and the Napa valley).
Posted by: The Good Rabbi at January 10, 2006 8:52 PM
The three greatest Cab regions...hmmmmmm, nothing like an uncontroversial statement ;)
Posted by: dag at January 10, 2006 9:43 PM
True enough, I suppose. I came to that conclusion the old-fashioned way: by drinking a whole tone of wine from different regions, and I stand by it. :-)
Posted by: The Good Rabbi at January 15, 2006 7:32 PM