As we mentioned in a post a few weeks back, there’s a great wine store down the street in park slope, brooklyn that has started private labeling their own wine from a vineyard in sebastopol, ca. we were a bit skeptical of this bi-coastal project since there such a great variety of grapes to choose from and facilities to produce wine within spitting distance of the borough.  we unscrewed ourselves a bottle of the feliz red ($13.95 at the source) and sampled darrin and adam’s concoction. The first few sips of the zin/barbara/syrah blend where disappointing with its overpowering big oak oakiness. I swear I couldn’t taste a grape in there – it could have been anything in that glass.

to be fair, i let it get a bit of air – and in about 20 minutes it transformed into a nice velvety red and where there was oak, now there was chocolate. surprised indeed. we had the bottle open for two days (in the fridge) and it actually got better. i’ll put it on our ‘drink it now’ list – not only was it a good accompaniment to our bar-b-que chicken for our sunday meal, but it will be a great novelty to take to those rooftop parties in the other boroughs.