Columbia Winery 2006 Pinot Gris

The Winery: Columbia Winery
The Wine: 2006 Pinot Gris
The Price: $8.99 on sale at my local QFC.

I've been on a Pinot Gris kick lately. I don't know why, but I'll run with it. Generally, I prefer red wines, so when I am actually in the mood for any of the white wines, I'll try to get reviews done for them.

Columbia Winery is located in Woodinville, Washington (which is a suburb of Seattle). The winery was started by a group of ten friends, six of whom were professors at the University of Washington. I can derive one of two possibilities from this. The first possibility is that drinking this wine will make you smarter. The second possibility is that being a college professor is a job that drives you to drink. I suppose one could take the second possibility a step further and derive that public education does not pay well enough, forcing these guys to make their own wine since there is no way that they could afford to drink quality wine on the salary of a public educator. But I digress.

Interestingly (or maybe not), there is another winery in the area with a very similar name - Columbia Crest. I don't know whether the similarity in name was intentional or not, but several friends of mine have been confused by the similarity of the names. My personal feeling is that Columbia Winery is lost in the shadows of Columbia Crest. They have a simpler label and their wines seem to run a dollar or two less per bottle for a given wine.

This wine is a very pale yellow. It has a citrus smell to it. The wine is bright and refreshing with flavors of pear and apple, and maybe some honey thrown in for good measure. It has a slight spice finish. This wine was nearly half the cost of the Willamette Valley Pinot Gris that I reviewed last week, and compares quite favorably with it. Since I'm not sampling them together, I can't say for certain which one I prefer. But given the price difference, I'd be more likely to pick up the Columbia Pinot Gris rather than the Willamette Valley.

Oh, I do have one complaint about this wine. The bottle was corked with one of those plastic (or whatever they are made of) corks. My Rabbit Corkscrew had a very difficult time with the cork, both in removing the cork from the bottle, and in expelling the cork from the corkscrew. It was so difficult that I was concerned that the Rabbit would die for the effort. I've had this problem with other openers before, and only with the plastic corks.