Casal da Eira Red revisited

Remember the wine that had the privilege of doing the honours of this blog's opening?

Well he is back... partially back. I've stored the remaining wine inside the carton in the back of the fridge to make it once again the main star of my Homemade Portuguese style Vindaloo chicken.

All you need:

• leftover bad wine (zurrapa) al gusto
• minimum 5 minced garlic cloves
• paprika al gusto
• salt and pepper al gusto
• 1 or 2 laurel leaves al gusto

The result of the wine recycling can be seen in the video right after the jump.

Casal da Eira White

For the second entry I present to you the white counterpart of the inaugural Casal da Eira. Like its ancestor 'bottled' in an easy to open carton.

Shows up the glass with a citric and pale yellow almost transparent 'water-colour' aspect. In the nose a quite fresh and intense lemon mixed with white fruit pulp. Really not bad in the nose given that we are appreciating it at 12ºC. A mere 2ºC above that temperature and the aromas start to go less enjoyable and more acidulate. I wonder how it goes on in the palate...

Here things get quite aggressive. One can feel some inicial citrous freshness but after that hint it all goes pretty much unbalaced and quite but quite quite acidulate. It holds up to 1/2 of tongue and leaves a fresh dangerously bordering the zesty aftertaste.

I think it holds up better in some clams!

In the side of the carton it says it has a citrous colour (checked), fresh (well if you take from the refrigerator it sure is) and fruity. In this last item I cannot be too sure but only if you taste it in the temperature interval between the 10º and 12ºC.

Thinking upon all the white wines I've tasted so far I could not grade anything above 5 for this wine. What saves it from a poorer review is the quite good nose profile below the 12º C or else it would be worse.

Casal da Eira Red

OK let's start...

The 'numero uno' is the Portuguese popular, king of the home chefs, delight of the rabbit and hard veal meat vindaloo ... Casal da Eira!

It comes neatly packed on a carton that can be of 250 mL or 1 L and showing a 11.5 alcohol volume.

It's made of a blend of several CE country wines and it proudly bears that in the package.

On the side of the carton its brags about having a fine bouquet and an excellent taste let's leave that for later...

This wine is well known to figure in the bottom scale of the wines and is intensively used as a bottom of the chart comparison wine from were no wine as ever returned.

Let's see how it fits in the nose and in the mouth at the convenient temperature of 15ºC.

In the nose shows some slight hints of red fruits though very moderate - way down in the bottom - grasping the vegetable aroma. As it gets hotter - the alcohol starts to kick in and oh boy forget those fruits and hello green grass!

In the mouth is almost tasteless, just a hint of red fruits - they're really there so it seems - but the aftertaste is remarkably long and a bit - less than I thought - acidulous. It goes up to 3/4 of the tongue and it considerably dries up all your palate leaving your tongue and internal cheeks like a napalm swept area: dry and tingly.

After all my memory was trying to make this wine worst than it really is... all things considered it deserves a 8,5 out of 20 which is by no means all that bad... even for a wine that is commonly used in binge drinking mixed with different kinds of sodas. Oh... and it costs 0,49€ a 250 mL carton... take that into account!
It may be re-evaluated after tasting other zurrapas of its kind.