$3.99 Chardonnary? Go Ahead...I Double Dog Dare You...

If anything is indicative of your twenties, its the use of your smart phone in practically everything you do. If there is anything else that is completely indicative of your twenties, its the fact that you live on a budget.

So guess what happens when you suddenly lose your $800 iPhone 4S at a bar & don't have insurance on it?

You drink $5 dollar wines for the next month... or more...

May I introduce to you my under $5 drink of the night: Double Dog Dare Chardonnay.

This wine actually surprised me with a candid drinkability. What poured from the simple yet fun bottle was not what I had (quite biasedly) expected, that in being a wood chip oaky California Chard, but rather a clear pale straw colored wine showcasing fruit & floral notes. (Note: oak influence in white wines will leave you with a golden or deep lemon color).

On a side note: People commonly ask me "What differentiates a cheap wine vs. an expensive wine?" Answer: if the wine maker is pricing their product correctly, it is the complexity of the wine - or how many different notes, aromas, and tastes you can pull out of your glass. So you can imagine my surprise when I looked down at my notes after tasting this $5 wine and saw a small paragraph forming!

This wine, although seemingly simple with up-front notes of yellow apple & unripe nectarine, actually had several nuanced auxiliary aromas like honey suckle, white marble, & unripe pineapple (aka the green outside parts). It also featured a little bit of honey, which makes me think the winemaker has left an undetectable bit of sugar in the wine to help balance the body (This happens in more wines then you think).

Oh... and those are just my notes on the bouquet.

On the palate this wine was dry (mostly) with appropriate acid. Lemon juice along with the white middle fruit of a Red Delicious apple featured heavily here with some white grapefruit sticking around in the finish.

Sounds too good to be true right?

Well.... I would be lying if I didn't tell you it kinda is. What puts this wine back in the under $10 dollar range was a slightly more pronounced bitter flavor on the finish (from that unripe pineapple & grapefruit) as well as what could be deemed a slightly out of balance amount of alcohol at 12.5%given the fruit flavors noted above - making this wine tricky to pair with food. Also, while this wine had a finish (rare in the $5 wine market), it was short, lasting about 3 seconds.

Tasting blind, I would have put this wine in the $7-9 dollar category, making it budgetary steal at....only $3.99.

Given my typical $15 budget, this wine put me a whopping 1.5% closer to my new iPhone goal.

....Looks like we will be enjoying this category for a while ;)