My mom drinks olive oil straight up

[cjsmith]

Lately I've been trying to get a feel for my mother's taste in red wines. Last Christmas I struck out big time with a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, proving that indeed, one woman's trash is another woman's treasure. Her opinion was somewhere in between "WHAT were you THINKING?" and "Please pour the rest of my glass down the drain." I quickly snagged it from her and drank it myself. Man that's good wine.

On the way back from Yosemite I tasted two wines that I thought might work. Not too big or tannic, but peppery and not all that fruity. It's a hard balance to strike. I snagged a bottle of each.

Did you know that shipping wine is prohibited for random folk like you and me in the States? That (federal) law keeps getting changed and challenged, but at the moment, you can't do it without a license -- no matter the amount of wine, the distance, or whether it's to a family member or even yourself at a separate address. (Guns do better than that, if only because a dealer license is more readily obtainable. Stick 'em up! I've got a Chardonnay!)

Fortunately, it turns out that Mt. Brow Winery in Tuolomne County makes some lovely bottles of fine olive oil. They're dark red and quite tasty. My mother reports that their Sangiovese olive oil is particularly scrumptious. She likes their Zinfandel olive oil too. Woohoo! I score a point in the game of learning my mom's taste in wine fine cooking ingredients.

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[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I got my wine shipper by emptying my wine-of-the-month bottles out of it. Fortunately, UPS has no idea what is in a sealed box and won't open it except in the case of in-shipment damage. The helpful guy behind the desk told me that many things are shipped in that kind of package, and that it sounded *just like* a couple of bottles of olive oil. Heh.