Italian Beer Tasting and Stump Jump Wine Tasting

By Greg B. So I traveled down to the Perfect Pour to check out an Italian beer tasting, once again bringing my labmates with me.  In this post, I’ll start with the beers, then move onto the wines.  Why, you ask?  Because I left any real good reliable note-taking material in the lab, so my notes are scattered and extremely illegible, even by my standards.  So here we go, Italian Beers!

I should probably take this first moment to say they were not really that good.  I guess it tuns out that the Italian beers (not Peroni or Moretti) are meant as dessert beers, and as such, they are made a bit differently, seemingly with a lot of wine added to them.  The first beer i’ve tried, I was here searching the internet for a link to show you all, but it seems that, after this post, this will be the first mention of this beer on the Internet.  Amazing.  Well, not really, as the beer was kinda ‘blah’.  It was called Cassissnova, since it it was made with currant (I think cassis is Italian for currant?).  I don’t have much to say about this beer… It was kinda bland, very sparkling though, with some acid that kind of add a sharp flavor right at the end.  not sure what flavor, but something, to be sure.  In my book: a pass.

Next we tried BB Dexi, a beer that had a very dark, rich pour with almost a chocolatey aroma, but not quite.  There was definitely red wine on the finish, and it was an interesting beer.  It had a lot of body at the start but lost it at the end and was very light.  Now, I don’t know that I would buy this beer if I was looking for a dessert beer, but maybe if you’re adventurous and your liquor store sells it, you should check it out.  It did have a very complex flavor, and I wished I could have tried a little more, but they were running out of the bottle, so I felt it best to move on.

There are two more Italian beers we tried, though I do not recommend them.  They are from the Baladin Italian Microbrewery (this time I was able to get a link!  ha HA!).  We tried both the Wayan and the super Baladin.  Lets start with the Super Baladin (8% abv):  Grainy beer with a strong barley aroma.  Tasted slightly sweet…. but, if you have ever boiled a bag of grains in water, this is what I imagine the boiled mash tastes like.  No real flavor, just the aroma of boiled barley and slightly sweet/water taste.  Kind of gross, actually, my tasting notes here read “Pure H2O with some malts”.  The Wayan (5.8% abv) had no nose to speak of, it was sweet but very winey, tasted like someone poured white wine into a cheap beer.  My notes here read ‘eh’.  And that’s pretty much what I think about Italian beers, at least their craft beers.  I’ll stick with Peroni or Morettifor Italian beers, thank you.

For the wine tasting, we got to try several wines from “The Stump Jump”.  Below I quickly list some tasting on them… overall I would say it’s actually not a half-bad winery and I was impressed by many of the bottles they had available to taste that day!

Stump Jump Riesling 2006 - low on color, but nice and tart.  Aroma is kind of floral, but also get hints of apple in there, possibly green apple since it is so tart.  The wine is not sweet but instead is rather dry, which is nice.  I recommend this wine to try, seafood, scallops, perhaps?

Stump Jump Grenache Shiraz mourvedre 2006 - Excellent!  It has a body to stand up to it’s own acidity, with a light dry finish right at the back-side of the tongue.  Kind of fruity on the nose and even on the taste a bit which was nice.  I really recommend this wine!

Stump Jump D’Arenberg 2005 Mclaren Vale - Great wine also!  This was actually a treat to drink I think, had a medium dryness to it which I really like with a lot of body and mouthfeel.  Small spice right at the start of the tasting and a really big nose of spices.  I forget the price, but it was around the $10 mark.  Absolutely a must-buy for this price range if I do say so myself!

Stump Jump Love grass 2004 shiraz - Really great smell of spices on the nose, I mean, a really big nose full of them!  Great body to the wine, but it had a bit of a sour finish which I don’t really like in a red wine.  Still a rather decent wine, there were some complicated flavors in there that I wasn’t able to determine with the amount of wine I had.  Maybe a bottle will help?

Finally, we tried the Chambers Rutherglen Muscadelle - Wow, talk about sweet, this was basically pure honey in a liquid drinkable form.  Honey on the nose, on the taste and even afterwards.  If you’ve ever eaten honey right from a hive or from the honeycomb, it has this aftertaste which is exactly what this tasted like at the finish and for a while afterwards.  I don’t know that this is anything I’d want to drink again unless accompanied with a really really sweet dessert (baklava wouldn’t be sweet enough).  It was a big change from the Shiraz wines we tried earlier.

In all, the stump Jump winery really impressed me with their selection and with their wines.  I basically enjoyed almost all of them, which is a rare thing PLUS they are cheap, around $10 a bottle.  I don’t even think Mike can get wines this good for $10, and in this article I ask him to give them a shot, as they come very highly recommended from me, the beer guy, as the kinds of wines that are a little rough around the edges (rustic) but extremely drinkable and enjoyable, with food or friends, or possibly, friends AND food, if you are so fortunate!