Tosca: The Movie (2001)

  This is less of a movie review post than it is a wine review post.  As I mentioned in my last post, I do not drink....vine (10 pts if you get that reference) because I'm allergic to the grapeskins but I read a handy little trick about taking an antihistamine before drinking.  I don't know why I didn't try it before.  Probably because being allergic to wine doesn't really impact my life in any way.

Anyway, before we just blindly trusted some magazine article, Christy and I bought a bottle of wine to test it out.  I popped a Zyrtec and waited about an hour while we let the wine breathe.  The choice was a blend of petite Sirah, old vine Zinfandel and old vine Mourvedre bottled in 2007 by Bogle Vineyards.  It's called Phantom.

We hated it.

It could have been that we're not wine connoisseurs by any stretch.  I'm sure we could have researched the label and determined if that was a good year or even been more discerning in our selection by not picking the one with the prettiest bottle.

It had a very flat mouthfeel.  The first taste was very watery but if you let it sit on your tongue you could get flavors of dark cherry, a little bit of current, and the undertone of the cold clammy hand of death.  This wine tasted exactly how I would imagine drowning in a peat bog feels.  We ended up pouring it out and drinking a bottle of champagne I had in my fridge since New Year's Eve.

Oh, and we watched Tosca.  It's a French movie production of the classic Italian opera of a diva in love with a painter who has been arrested by a corrupt policeman.  It's not a movie based on the opera, nor is it a filmed production of the actual performance, but some weird hybrid of the two.  The black and white bits are the behind-the-scenes at the rehearsal or sound check or whatever and the color parts are the story.  I'm sure it would have been more appealing if we weren't half-drunk on wine made from the blood of dead hobos and bubbly.