Chateauneuf du Pape or Chateauneuf du Poop?

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Rick Steves is a great guy. If you need a cheap hotel in the center of a city, Rick is your guy. If you want a reccommendation on wine, don't ask Rick. We stopped at the place reccommended by Rick in Chateauneuf du Pape. This grape growing region lies just north of Avignon and is world famous for it red wines. I have only had one bottle of this wine before and I was impressed. We could of driven from winery to winery to sample wine, but when you do this you are expected to buy wine and Rebecca and I did not plan to drag several bottles of wine to Italy and then home. Rick reccommended this one stop cave where you could sample 5 different wines and buy many more. I thought this was the best idea instead of rolling the dice on picking one winery and hoping that we liked the wine.

I was wrong. Two of the five wines, actually we were allowed to sample six wines, were white wines, not what this region is known for. The first wine had a fruity nose and tasted like rubbing alcohol. The second white wine did not have a fruity nose. Two of the red wines he allowed us to taste were made by the proprietor. He does not grow the grapes, but buys the juice and makes the wine. The last two samples were from the same winery. All of the red wines we tasted lacked character and their overwhelming characteristic was alcohol. Our tasting was not a wide ranging as I had hoped and at the end I was kicking myself for not just pulling into one the winerys and taking the risk.

Since the tasting was free, we were obligated to buy a bottle. Rebecca picked an older wine since we planned on drinking it right away. They searched all over the cave for the bottle. After twenty minutes and lots of talking in French between the proprietors, we left with our wine. When we got back to the hotel, it was the wrong winery and the wrong year. Ironically we drank that bottle the next night sitting in a city park in Avignon and eating a picnic dinner, we both enjoyed it more than any of the wines we sample. For some reason in Avignon dogs are not allowed in this park, but wine is okay. I sort of like that.

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