Rodney Strong Vineyards Charlotte's Home Sauvignon Blanc 2008, $11.99

OK. Everyone knows I prefer red over white. That's just who I am, which is sorta ironic, because my ENTIRE FAMILY prefers white over red. Go figure. (Shoutout to my dad, who will try any wine once: you rock for that! Even if he does prefer margaritas, from Margaritaville especially.) However, my wine fridge is pretty full on the red side. I have a dual-temperature, two-zoned wine fridge with two racks for white and four racks for red. You know it's bad when the white side is full of specialty beer and not white wine. So I asked Bruce at Stew Leonard's to pick out a good white for me, one that I won't feel guilty about drinking. You know, you tend to feel guilty when you open up a bottle that costs $30 or more just because you want a glass of wine. He picked this one out for me.

I have a problem, one that I'm still working on overcoming. I hate it when wines are a "popular" label. Take Robert Mondavi, for example. He's everywhere, from Woodbridge to the highest highs. It used to annoy me, until I took the wine seriously & tried it. Now I love Mondavi. I feel the same way about Rodney Strong. Plus, it's got a screw-top, which I feel gets a really bad rap in the wine world. So I took this wine and tried to love it.

Readers, I don't love it.

Now, to be fair, for its price point, this is a very good wine. It's got a decent alcohol content (13.8%) and a good taste. If I were blindfolded, I'd know without a doubt that I was drinking a sauvignon blanc. But that's as far as it goes. It's just not special.

This wine smells like alcohol on the nose, and its legs on the glass are nonexistent, really a fast-moving sheet that slides down the side of the glass like a kid down a playground slide. The back of the bottle claims that this wine has "ripe pear, spiced melon, citrus and a clean mineral character" contained within. I taste the minerals, I do, and I like them. I enjoy the mineral taste. (I wouldn't be drinking Fiji mineral water on a regular basis if I didn't enjoy mineral taste.) But, try as I might, I cannot taste the pear, the melon or the citrus, and I'm more than two glasses in.

I don't know what I was expecting. This is a very happy, easy-drinking wine, but it's not complex. Maybe I like a heavy, complex wine. Maybe that's my problem. But if you, the reader, prefer not to think about your wine and just enjoy it, then I'd recommend this wine in a second. You can learn more about it at www.rodneystrong.com.

Cheers!

Kate