Triple D Winery – Tasting Part 1

The Thursday night before the Grape Festival in Brownfield, we headed out to Triple D Winery and Event Center (website) in downtown Brownfield. We arrived an hour before closing, but the “family” at Triple D was gracious enough to start a tasting for us.

I say “family” because by the time we left (3 hours later), we felt like family. [More on that later…]

This post will cover the first half of the tasting – so mostly the whites and rosés.

Paris, the tasting room manager was amazing – and we kicked off our adventure with a charcuterie board and samples of their chicken salad and pimento cheese.

Sweet Sister Love

Paris described this as “sweet with a mango and spicy finish.” My husband was polite enough to not wrinkle his nose in front of her, as he’s not fond of sweet wine. However, skipping ahead, he did say “I’d have never picked it, but now I’ll look for it.” And so two bottles came home with me. This has solid stone fruit scent and really does taste like cold mango (not the kind you can find in the US – but the kind you can buy in the markets in Costa Rico). It hits all the notes of an ice wine with out being sticky sweet. There is no acidity and we decided it was a porch wine (to be enjoyed) – not a porch pounder (to be drunk without thinking or appreciating). But definitely a Thursday or Friday – sit on the porch and enjoy the sunset wine.

Texas Moscato

Not to be confused with their American Moscato (which we did not taste but you can find online). The grapes for this one are grown in Tokio, Texas. It wasn’t as sweet as the first wine and I got a lot of flavor of a typical West Texas wine – rubber, plastic, petroleum when sipping it on its own. However, putting it with the Bacon Jam and cream cheese brought out the smokiness of the jam and smoothed out the wine. So, this one needs food, and something with a bit of a strong flavor to hold up to it. This is a Monday wine – treat yourself with some chocolate chip cookies to get the week off to a good start.

Vino Blanco – Wilmeth-Hart Label

This is a collaboration between the Wilmeth’s (who own Triple D) and the Hart’s that also grow grapes in Tokio. It’s an “American Wine” according to Paris, as they did use grapes from outside of Texas to create it. It smelled a lot less like grape juice compared to the Texas Moscato and was a lighter color. However it had a great honeydew flavor and wasn’t too sweet. However, we agreed that the finish on it just kind of fell flat.

Vina Rosa – Wilmeth-Hart Label

Paris said this one had a hint of strawberry flavor to it. It did not – it had an amazing strawberry flavor that reminded me of sitting on my grandmother Bibby’s porch in the summer eating melted strawberry Blue-Bell ice cream and licking the bowl to get all of the flavor of this summer treat. I ended up having another glass of this one – it was so good. And I can see sitting on the porch with a good British murder mystery book and just whiling the afternoon away trying to determine the killer and sipping this wine.

“The Pink Stuff”

Another collaboration between the Wilmeth-Hart’s, the full name of this wine is Pink Gewürztraminer. But as Paris said, no one can say that, so they call it the “pink stuff.” We tasted the 2017 vintage. It smells dry, but it’s a bit astringent. It’s very drinkable. As one of my friends would say “It goes down, way too easy.” We got flavors of grapefruit and blood orange. Surprisingly – this wine while good chilled, is also still good warm (room temperature). We put it as a Thursday – since you now have an all day meeting on Friday.

Mary’s Viognier & Ty’s Viognier

A bottle of each of these came with us, so more on them in another post. Just know that Mary’s Viognier is dry. Ty is the sweet viognier. I would have expected the opposite – until I met Mary and Ty halfway through the red tasting.

Albarino

This smelled sweet but was astringent. It brought out the spice in the Jalapeño Pimento Cheese. I would pair it with my favorite green curry (with eggplant) or with the Lemon Chicken TV dinner from Lazy Dog. You can almost taste coconut with this one. I noted that I would cook and serve with this Wednesday wine, as I have several risotto recipe’s that call for white wine and this would be perfect.

Final Thoughts (for now)

That covers the first half of the tasting, and you can see a few pictures below. I really should have taken more pictures of the tasting room, as it’s lovely – but Triple D has an amazing Facebook page (page) where you can see more. It’s a very relaxed atmosphere and the food was good – as was the wine.

So, we’re now a half hour past closing time and we said we’d be happy to finish up and leave so they could get home. Nope – apparently we were all having too much fun (as were some of the regulars, which we got to meet a few), so we kept going. More in the next post.