bedfull_o_books prefers Shirazs. I figured it'd be fun to offer her a tasting flight of them. (There was no particular occasion for this, but I suppose we could break them open for her birthday.)Anyway, I'm doing this by the simple expedient of buying piccolo bottles (187mL, a quarter of a regular 750mL bottle) of various Shiraz wines. This is one and a half regulation UK mini-glasses of 125mL each, or a bit more than what the Americans and Canadians consider a standard glass of wine (5 oz and 150mL, respectively).
There are some fun advantages to this: the bottles are small and cute--always a consideration with
bedfull_o_books--and what's more a large variety of wines can be assembled for a very reasonable price. Most of the wines which are available in piccolo bottles are rather cheap wines, but that's not a problem; I'm just having fun with the idea of assembling a tasting flight.The only difficulties I've found so far are that a) this packaging tends to be hard to find and is often relegated to the "wine cooler"/box wine section when a store carries it at all and b) when one can find these bottles, they're generally sold in four-packs, which kind of defeats the purpose, at least for what I'm doing. Supermarkets, where this packaging is easier to find than in actual wine shops, often won't break up four-packs.
This evening, for example, I found a single bottle of Black Swan Shiraz, one of a few stray bottles in a display of four-packs, and Foodmaster wouldn't sell it to me. They lost a sale but I failed to find the wine elsewhere before closing time. So we both lost.
I suppose I could mail order but the shipping gets truly silly on individual piccolo bottles. I've been content to make the scavenger hunt a part of the process.
Thus far I've found shirazes from Fisheye Winery (California), Alice White (Australia), and Lindemans (Australia). (Well, I did find the Black Swan, which is also Australian, but I couldn't buy it.) All of them really quite inexpensive.
I'll keep looking. I have a list of fifteen wines, some Shiraz/Syrah blends with other varietals. If I find them all I'll be quite surprised, but it'll be a fun search.
If you know of any places that sell wines in these piccolo bottles and are willing to sell individual bottles out of their four-packs, I'll be glad if you let me know!
