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When you want to impress someone with your wine knowledge, but you only drink chardonnays or sauvignon blancs, it's time to ask for an Albariño. This relatively obscure Spanish grape hasn't received a ton of publicity, but it is increasingly popping up on progressive wine lists -- especially now that Spain is the new France. The best thing about it: You want to drink Albariño young and bottles usually go for less than $20.
Unlike the honey-colored chardonnays, this is a paler yellow white wine. It's immediately refreshing, very crisp and supremely clean. You may taste some peach or apricot, but grapefruit is the dominant flavor -- tart and sweet at the same time. The finish hints at green apples. Albariños go especially well with shrimp -- any seafood really.
To help you serve the stuff properly (most folks drink whites too cold), this particular blue bottle has a temperature-activated boat that appears on the label when the wine is ready for drinking. The boat disappears when the wine is too cold or too hot. It's a wonderfully simple solution to an ages-old problem. Now if they could just adapt this technology to help us understand women
-- James Oliver Cury
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