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Monday, April 16, 2012

Ben's Bubbly: Wrap-Up

Ben - 1 year
Each of the past 52 weeks, my wife and I have opened a bottle of sparkling wine in honor of our son Ben's first year. The wines helped us celebrate moments from bringing our baby home to him running around and beginning to talk. We've taken him on plane rides and road trips. He's attended two weddings and is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a few new friends. We've had quite an adventure celebrating a year of firsts: the first time he rolled over, the first time he sat up, his first tooth, his first steps, his first signed word, his first spoken word, his first solid food, his first scratch, first day of school. I bet I could continue that list ad infinitum.

During this adventure, we drank 54 different sparkling wines (doubling up Mother's Day week and Valentine's Day) from 11 different countries. Here are a few statistics from this little endeavor:



The average price of these wines was $22.56.
The prices ranged from $6-$115.
The quality of the wines ranged from Poor to Excellent.
The average quality assignment was Good.
Only the final wine garnered the rare Excellent designation.
One other wine was worthy of a Very Good/Excellent rating.
I assessed 13 wines as being Very Good, 7 as being Good/Very Good, and 16 as Good.
Sadly, 5 wines were only Average/Good, 9 were Average and one was Poor.
We drank 14 wines from France (11 of which were from Champagne).
10 bottles came from California.
7 came from U.S. states not named California (Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon and Virginia).
Italian wines made 7 appearances.
Austria/Germany/Hungary accounted for 7 bottles.
Two wines were packaged in aluminum cans.
Argentina, Australia, China, South Africa, and Spain rounded out the rest.
Not unexpected, our favorite region was Champagne, followed closely by non-Cali American bubbly (largely due to three bottles of Gruet).

Even though this whole endeavor was embarked on in a celebratory manner, it just goes to show that sparkling wine is not just for New Year's Eve. I am both relieved and sad that this little experiment has run its course. However, I will not rule out doing it, or something similar, in the future (if someone else wants to foot the bill I would love to try Ben's Bordeaux: a year of grand cru classé...) I would highly recommend to anyone to try exploring one style of wine every week for a year. I know that this past year will always be remembered fondly for so many reasons!

1 comment:

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