What I Drank With Dinner (WIDWD)

After several weeks of cold rainy weather, we got a nice surprise with a pristine summer-like day yesterday with clear skies, warm breezes, and a late afternoon temperature around 70 degrees.

Kari went to the market and picked up a fresh whole chicken, ingredients for a Greek salad, some Greek yogurt and pita bread. With a beautiful summer-like day gifted to us, we were going to live as if it were still August: roasting a chicken on the grill, accompanying it with Greek side dishes, and dining al fresco during sunset. To complement this meal, I would have loved to have a bottle of Greek wine in my cellar, but unfortunately it was all drunk during the summer.

I decided to pull a J Christopher 2005 Pinot Noir Willamette Valley for the occasion, which ended up pairing well with the herb-salted grilled chicken with yogurt and a Greek salad. The J Christopher is priced at around $23 and is 13% alcohol. It was a nice wine, but not anything that captivated me to want to drink it again. The wine was consistent throughout the mail, but never really opened up to reveal anything interesting.

The wine's label tells nothing about J Christopher, therefore I went in search of a story online. On the third page of search results, I finally located the J Christopher web site, only to find it still under construction. Their single web page did offer some useful insights into where they are located and how they make their wines. To my dismay, there was nothing about the "who" behind this wine.

It still amazes me that folks can produce a bottle of drinkable wine, but do little in the way of connecting their customers to the who, what and where of their craft. And it's not like J Christopher was launched last year. They've been around for several vintages, which makes you wonder why they haven't taken the time to tell their story online. Like the wine in my glass, my experience trying to connect to this winery online left something to be desired.