Good Grape Wine Company

February 28 2006

No “Burnt Ember” or “Dusty Leather”

My wife is a huge Harry Potter fan and bought one of Jelly’s Belly’s Harry Potter gift sets at a Border’s when one of the recent books came out.  I was fascinated and disgusted at the flavors that were included ... ear eax, bacon, booger ...  and, just in case you think it might be a ruse and the Jelly Bean’s actually taste like artificially flavored Tropical Punch, no so fast.  They actually taste uncannily what your mind’s eye would have the flavor taste like.  I say mind’s eye because nobody is going to cop to knowing what a booger tastes like.

I did taste the vomit and sure enough, it was so gross, I had to spit it out after two chews.  Think of the smell in the hallway in grade school with the institutional kitty litter soaking up the mess.

That notwithstanding, Wine X Magazine, in a moment of inspiration has created the Jelly Bean Wine Bar Kit. 

I love this idea.  And, the flavors are true enough to life that I think it really could be a tool for education.  The Wine Aroma Wheel was created in 1990 by Ann C. Noble--a professor at UC Davis, if I’m not mistaken.

In essence, this is a tool to enhance your wine tasting enjoyment by refining your ability to uncover the nuance in wine aroma’s--we smell more then we actually taste with our olfactory glands really being the key to our taste buds.

Since then, scores of people have done imitations and close approximations to this thinking.  Then Joshua Wesson created a new categorization for wine at his Best Cellars and that similarly is being widely copied in an adaptive sense.

This is all good for wine and wine education, but the Wine bar kit is so genius in its simplicity.

Really, all you have to do is find a tasting note of a wine that you have on hand, taste the Jelly bean and sniff the wine--and that’s if you want to get that complicated.  You could really just refine this palate technique by just eating the candy.

I ordered a couple to give it a try--picking of the Chardonnay, the Zinfandel and the Deloach Pinot Noir.

There’s no vomit, but in the Deloach (a sponsor) Pinot Noir, there is pepper, cappuccino, Dr. Pepper and a pinch of dirt.

Simply put, this would be a crowd-pleaser of a game at your next soiree and is really a novel "A Ha" kind of idea.

Now, if only, I could be so lavish in praise for Wine X the magazine--the simple fact is, they are in a sweet spot for coverage of wine to a young audience, but they can’t publish their damn magazine.  I subscribed for an annual subscription about 14 months ago and have only received two copies.  Now, I see they are pimpin’ 8 issues a year in a promotion.  The magazine is painfully pretentious in its unpretentiousness, but I hold out hope that they’ll get it figured out what with 70 million Gen. Y folks coming of age.  And, they also tend to include recipes from the Surreal Gourmet, who had a Food Network or HGTV show for a cup of coffee.   That guy is annoying, but, thankfully, in a magazine format you can turn the page. 

Buy and try the Wine Bar kit, you’ll appreciate the fun factor.

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