A mysterious wine on the rack

Last night it was just my 14-year-old steak-lovin’ son and I home for dinner, so I pulled a big steak out of the freezer to defrost in the morning. Mid-afternoon I went to my drink-anytime wine rack* to choose a wine to go with the steak dinner. I often choose my wine a couple of hours before dinner. I look forward to preparing the meal when I know there’s a bottle waiting for me to enjoy a glass while cooking.

I chose a bottle of 2009 Bodega Ovidio Garcia Temprenillo from the Cigales DO in Spain. This bottle is a Crianza — a Spanish wine style that indicates how long the wine has been aged in oak and how long it’s been in the bottle before release. For this region, a Crianza must be aged for at least 24 months, of which at least 6 months is in the barrel. (Source: Cigales D.O.)

It wasn’t until I was silently praising myself during dinner for having chosen such a good wine to go with the steak that it occurred to me: I didn’t know how this bottle came into my possession.

I searched though my emails to see if it had been sent as a media sample that had been put in the drink-anytime rack by mistake. I contacted a few people. I looked it up online to see if this 2009 was still for sale thinking maybe I had picked it up on a whim recently while perusing a Spanish section in a wine store but simply forgot. It doesn’t look like it’s still available so that probably isn’t how I got it. I don’t remember the bottle even being on the rack before. It’s like someone snuck into my home and put it on there.

Which sorta stinks because this is a really good bottle of wine. It’s peppery with a little spicy heat. It’s a very warm wine. It had the flavors of blueberries, cherries and the earth with great tannins that worked so well with the steak. I would drink this wine again, but alas, I don’t know how I got the bottle or if I can ever get another bottle.

But, if you see a bottle of the 2009 Bodega Ovidio Garcia Temprenillo grab it. And then let me know where you got it — please!

*My drink-anytime wine rack has bottles that are inexpensive that I wouldn’t mind opening on a Monday night all by myself. They are good wines, but they are not sentimentally special wines, bottles that are media samples that I need pay special attention to when I drink them, or bottles I definitely want to keep to share. Basically if you walked into my house and wanted to open a bottle of wine, there isn’t a bottle on that rack that I would look at and say, “Not that bottle.”