Are you ready to MOOD MINGLE?

A major mission for Mood Wine is to reject ordinary and embrace extraordinary! Our Mood Wine online store is simply a conduit to purchase the extraordinary wines we are searching for. Our real purpose is to bring wine lovers together in social settings, so in addition to our quarterly wine club events in each club city, we also want to keep the groups engaged with Mood Mingles...

Welcome to Mood Mingle - Dining Out For Life!

Mood Mingles work like this... Jake and I will provide the wine for tasting along with a bite of something with each of the wines to show how they can interact with food...

Wine and Cheese A TROIS

Let me explain in a little bit more detail...

Our objective is to grow the clubs. We are hoping our club members will put together groups of friends that are interested in learning about Mood Wine and the Club concept and hopefully join with us in the fun - we will come to you, or you can come to us, if you're far far away, there's always SKYPE - you could put together a group and Jake and I could Skype in and talk with you about the wines... where there's a will there's a way!

For this one hosted by us at the LOFT, we took the three big reds from the current club shipment (if you click the link you'll land on a page with videocast explaining the wines) and put together a cheese tasting for each one...

Woodworth Pinot Noir with Triple Cream Brie and Black Cherry Preserves

This Pinot Noir is layered with classic "Old World" flavor profiles (earth, cherry, spice) so the earthy creaminess of the cheese along with the cherry preserves was a fantastic paring. 

Next in line was the Zinfandel...

Perry Creek Zinfandel with Pepper Crusted Goat Cheese Drizzled with Honey

This Zinfandel is more the style I enjoy, not as jammy, better balance and lighter. The grapes are grown at 2401 elevation so they don't get as ripe with heavy sweet fruit. This allows the wine to retain more acid and earthy notes... more like an Italian Primitivo. So the Goat Cheese with its creamy tang, the cracked pepper and the drizzle of honey created a nice harmony for the wine. One of the guests suggested I try green peppercorns for a more delicate flavor and I think I will next time! But it worked!

The third wine was the Fazeli Cellars Yalda - this is a red blend of Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvedre, and Cinsaut. It is a Rhone style blend. This is the biggest of the three wines and has a very robust, expressive profile. Smoke, Black Berries, Currant, Figs, Leather, and other stuff...

Fazeli Yalda with Manchego topped with Fig Jam and Roasted Almond

This was probably the best of the three pairings. The nuttiness of the cheese along with the sweet rich fig jam and the roasted almond was PERFECTION with the wine.

And of course, what really makes the MINGLE is the MINGLERS! These guys are all wine lovers with some amazing palates ... 

L-R, Patrick, Michael, Kevin, Jason, Glenn, Steven, Norman (Jake behind the camera of course)

Are you ready to MINGLE? Give us a shout... email me at southerncaliforniawines@gmail.com