Day 10: 2014 Espiral Vinho Verde

Here’s a name that keeps coming up during this series: Trader Joe’s.

Trader Joe’s is a chain of grocery stores that’s a go-to destination in the U.S. for wine shopping, for good reason. They’re convenient and interesting. They carry fresh produce as well as their own lines of staple products from pizza sauce to meringues to dog food. And they stock wines from a range of price points.

Like the $2 and $3 wines my friend O. mentioned yesterday. You buy lots of them during college and then eventually you grow out of them, and move up the price scale a few dollars at a time. Which, at Trader Joe’s, means you just step a few inches further down the aisle.

Like my friend M., who told me about the Espiral Vinho Verde from Portugal. It costs about $6, it’s also available as a rosé, and M. buys it “two cases at a time,” especially in the summer.

“Two cases at a time?” I asked.

“We drink a lot of it during the summer, when it’s so hot,” she said. “We go through it like water. Before we know it, we’re on our second bottle of the night.”

“How do you drink it?” I wondered.

“You get a glass, not even one with a stem,” M. said. “Put some ice cubes in it, pour in the wine, squeeze in a wedge of lime and then toss that in too. The best part is that it’s already got a spritz.”

I didn’t have the wedge of lime with me tonight, but that green citrus flavor was fresh in my memory because I know this wine the way I know how to drive a stick shift: familiarly.

There’s a little boost, a little juice — from the spritz, I think — that gets easier to manage the more you do it. There’s nothing complicated about it, and it’s perfectly enjoyable.

And it’s FUN. (Must be the spritz.)

Quick Background Note: The Blue Collar Wine Guide is a 30-day, 30-wine experiment that looks at some of the world’s most popular, consumer-friendly wines. The idea is to take off my wine-writer shoes and stand instead in the shoes of Jane-and-Joe-in-front-of-a-wall-of-wine. Thank you for reading today’s post!