Wine Number 7 or "The 1st Truly Bad Bottle":

Clinch Mountain Winery Vandergriff Reserve:

You see... I have this sickness, and it has several symptoms. I'll be in a winery tasting wine, and the wine will taste fine, in most cases even good. I'll want to walk out with a case, or at least a couple of bottles. Then I'll get home and the wine will definitely not be as good as I remembered, or worse even flat out poor. This has happened with Warwick Valley's Pinot Noir, and now with the Clinch Mountain selections I've purchased [I have two others].

Clinch Mountain winery is a winery nestled in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee. We visited while down there for my grandfather-in-law's funeral. In order to understand Tennessee wine, you need to know the following things about the state. 1st) The climate is actually decent, even excellent, for growing grapes. 2nd) The state's laws are debilitating to wineries. Wineries are restricted and must use a certain percentage of Tennessee grapes. They are also restricted to a certain amount of wine production per year. Of course if you make whiskey you can make whateverTF you want. Many wineries around the country grow their business by importing grapes from California and all over the world, thereby growing their customer base and perfecting their trade before they are able to use their own grapes. In Tennessee you can't do this unless there is widespread crop failure. 3rd) It is at the infancy of winery popularity, meaning you can probably count on 1, maybe 2 hands the amount of really GOOD wineries. 4th) Sweet, sugarfied wines sell like hotcakes. 5th) It is a FELONY to ship or receive wine as a private consumer. So you can understand what we're dealing with here. [Progress in this last avenue is being made, however, due to the increasing popularity of wine and the vino-biz.]

Tasting Notes: All that said, this wine is not good. Even the dry versions of the wines at Clinch Mountain are sugary. My tongue actually kind of hurt afterwards. I did get two grapes knocked out, though, because according to the website their Vandergriff reserve is made up of the Merechal Foch grape and the Campell Early (or Island Belle) grape. There better wines from Tennessee so I will wait to include that state.

Wine Count: 7, Grape Count: 8.