Smoking Loon Chardonnay

2006
California


This is not a great wine. However, it's enjoyable and rather versatile and . . . cheap. Obviously, if you have guests you are trying to impress that also happen to be connosieurs, it won't be the night's best pick. But, if you're hanging with your best buds, laughing and relaxing and eating non-pretentious, good old soul food, "Smoking Loon" will advance the night just fine.

I have reviewed "Smoking Loon" Cab I believe in the past (or perhaps it was the Merlot). Anyway, whether the red or the white, this is a good basic wine for a casual gathering.

If you make my little pasta salad above (your favorite pasta type, fresh basil to taste, roasted pignolia nuts, grape tomatoes, black olives, cubed fresh mozzarella and drizzled olive oil and fresh lemon to taste with crushed black and red pepper) and partake in this Charonnay well-chilled, you will not be disappointed. The flavors marry each other in your mouth and the honeymoon
goes off without a hitch.

Reviewed accompanying my pasta salad:

8.0 out of 10
13.5% alc. by vol.
$9.99 / 750 ml. bottle
www.smokingloon.com


NOTE TO the Guy: My Cuervo Gold strawberry margheritas are not fruit smoothies. It is unwise to come in from a hot muggy day, grasp the brilliantly presented margherita and drink it down in 3 chugs (tops) as if it was a gallon of iced tea and then go to the computer and type your reports. It is to be sipped and savored over a course of at least twenty minutes.