What I'm Drinking: Oliver Winery Soft Red Wine

This month I've 'uncorked' a bottle of Oliver Winery's Soft Red Wine. And by uncorked, I actually unscrewed, as Oliver Winery has switched to using screwcaps for their Soft wines. Screwcaps offer a few advantages over traditional corks, but the main is that it better preserves the taste of the wine. For wines which taste better with age, a traditional cork is the way to go, but for a wine like this Soft Red wine, the bottle will not taste perceptibly better a year or more from now then what it does today.

A nearly empty bottle of Oliver's Soft Red Wine

The aroma on this wine is light. It has a rather clean scent to it with a light hint of grapes. Aerating the wine, did not intensify the simple bouquet a considerable amount.

As for the taste, picture a glass of grape juice which contained alcohol in it, and you would have a good idea of the taste. Concorde grapes, which is used to make most grape juices in America is the main grape of this wine. This taste is the strongest, with a light tannic taste. It is sweet, but not as much as a dessert wine. It has a light finish and all around is a very accessible wine. In fact, these attributes make this a good starter wine for those unaccustomed to drinking wine.

Like most red wines, this wine tastes best around room temperature. Tasting it chilled mutes the flavors a bit. Overall, this is a simpler wine than last month's wine, though they both have the same level of sweetness.

For next month, a different comparison: Oliver Winery's Soft White Wine.