Wine Dinner Blog

 On March 3rd, 2023, my girlfriend and I took a trip to Zeppoli's Italian Restaurant in Blacksburg to do our three-course wine dinner. We started the night by looking over the wines they had available by the glass and trying to figure out which wines sounded like they would go with the food we were going to get. There weren't many wines available by the glass from this restaurant, they mostly sell wines by the glass or generic house wines. 

Our first course consisted of herbed ricotta spread on top of toasted bread and drizzled with honey. To go with this first course, we selected a 2021 white blend from Montebuena. By itself, this wine has notes of green apples and pineapple on the nose and has carried those apple notes over to the palate. The wine had a good deal of acidity. The wine also had a slightly dry finish. When we started sampling the food and sipping the wine after taking a bite of the food, the acidity from the wine was noticeably lighter, but the fruit notes on the palate were also diminished. Since the ricotta had honey on it, sampling the wine after the honey and ricotta made the wine seem much dryer than it was on its own. When sampling the food after taking a sip of the wine, it seemed that the dryer wine brought out the honey and really accentuated the creaminess of the ricotta. If I had to say one element or the other overpowered either, I would say that the honey and ricotta overpowered the wine due to the extreme sweetness of them together. This means that the food we ordered was far too sweet for the wine. 

The first course of our meal

A picture of me with our first course

For our second course, I got a pasta dish that had both chicken and shrimp together in a creamy tomato sauce. They called the dish shrimp and chicken rose. To go with our main dishes, we both got a glass of the 2019 Malbec from Ménage A Tois. On its own, this wine had plenty of fruit-forward notes on the nose and was slightly smoky and spicy on the palate. The notes I was able to pick out from the nose included sweet, ripe blackberries, jammed or stewed berries, and some slight hints of sweet tobacco. On the palate, this wine dropped the fruit notes in favor of notes of tobacco and light smokiness upfront. There were also plenty of tannic notes present. On the back of the palate, the fruity notes of the wine did carry through after the other upfront flavors had passed. When I sampled this wine after taking a bite of my food, the smoky tobacco notes were much more prevalent, while the fruit notes were much more muted than they were before. When I took a bite of food after sampling the wine, it was a similar story to what happened with the first course, the dryer nature of the wine brought out the creaminess of the sauce the pasta was tossed in. The sweetness levels of each of these pairings were pretty much balanced for this course. For this course, the wine and the dish paired nicely with one another; neither one overpowered the other. 

A picture of me with the second course

Our final course consisted of a chocolate mousse cup paired with a yes-way rose from Cotes de Provenance. The wine for this course had a nose full of strawberries, yellow apples, and pears. The fruit-forward notes from the menu led us to believe the wine would be sweeter than it ended up being. The palate had an immediate dryness to it with more apple flavors. The palate then morphed to have notes of cherries and grapefruits before coming to a dry finish. When I tried the food after taking a sip of the wine, it made the wine taste even drier. It amplified the tannins and buried the fruit flavors. The chocolate taste of the mousse that was left over was intensified, mainly the bitter chocolate flavors. When I sampled the food after taking a sip of the wine, it made the mousse taste like chocolate strawberries and amped up the sweetness of the dessert. In addition to the strawberry notes, there were some possible strawberry and cream notes. It seemed like the sweetness of the desert started to overpower the wine, but the fruit notes of the wine brought it back into balance. Tasting the wine before eating the dessert definitely made the food taste better, but the sweetness definitely overpowered the wine when I tried the wine after the food. 

A picture of me with our last course

A picture of my girlfriend with our first wine