Originally published on October 31. 2009.
So Halloween is today and Tribeca’s little people will be on a trick-or-treating rampage. All the stores decorate and offer goodies to all the neighborhood kids. But their adults need something too, and at Frankly Wines, we happily oblige.
Our Halloween spread will include the three wines on offer in our latest 3-Pack. The two reds, the Velvet Devil Merlot and The Chocolate Block, may not win any cool-kid-my-palate-is-cooler-than-yours contests, but they are quite tasty. As much as I love turning customers onto wines that qualify as “weird but good,” Halloween is not the night to attempt the hand selling required to do it well. No, on Halloween, I want to open something yummy and crowd pleasing that doesn’t require an explanation.
On that front, we have The Velvet Devil Merlot 2007 from Washington State and The Chocolate Block, from South Africa. Charles Smith (not to be confused with Charles Shaw of Two Buck Chuck fame,) makes the Velvet Devil.
Boekenhoutskloof, best know at Frankly Wines for fan favorite, Wolftrap, makes the The Chocolate Block. These are both full-bodied wines with plenty of fruit and a balancing, earthy (and in the case of The Chocolate Block, funky) complexity.
But our third wine does manage to fall off the beaten track. It’s a sparkling apple cider from Normandy with one of those typically romantic wine story: sommelier at Three Star restaurant in Paris can’t resist the pull of the old, old apple and pear trees on his family’s property back home in Normady. So he leaves the big city to tend the orchards and make cider from the fruits of his labor.
And the ciders are very good. They taste like autumn in a bottle. We’ve included the Cydre Doux in our Halloween tasting. It’s a lightly sparkling, slightly sweet apple cider. The sweetness doesn’t really come off as “sweet,” but more like the sweet spice/warm apple tastes of apple pie. But a very grown-up apple pie. Eric also makes a sparkling pear cider, Poiré Authentique, and a couple reserve bottlings from only the exceptionally old (as opposed to just “old”) apple and pear trees on the property. I had the Authentique recently and it’s very tasty and would be fantastic with cheese. It’s a definitely more thought-provoking than the Cydre Doux, but on Halloween, I don’t really want to deal with thought-provoking. I want tasty and immediately lovable. Which is the Cydre Doux. It happens to have wine geek cred as well, but that’s just bonus.