Grog Files

Looking for a taste of our adventures from the comfort of your living room?  Or perhaps you’d just like to sample a drink from a foreign land and don’t know where to start? 

The Grog Files are just for you.  Being sailors –  hence the name, kind of a theme here 😉 – both of us enjoy a nice glass of wine with friends or a few beers after pulling into port.  You won’t see either of us passing up a tasting without good cause.   We are mildly acquainted with rum and a few other liquors, and our home has previously played host to both the good Captain Morgan and his cabin boy 2 Buck Chuck (we miss you Trader Joe’s!)  We have come across many regional wines, some local brews and a couple more unusual things as we’ve wandered the globe.  As we’ll eventually want to remember what we liked to outfit our own cellar when we get home, we figured we’d take some notes and put them here for you to read.

Here’s the rating system we’re using:

Our tastes:  We’re typically wine drinkers, although our travels have familiarized us with some very nice beers and mixed drinks, so we’ll be reviewing everything we encounter along the way.  In white wine we heavily favor sweet over dry.  Ice wines are right up our alley and personally, if they would just ferment sugar Greg would drink it (oh, wait, they do…).  Tiffany’s not as into sweet as Greg is, however she really avoids the dry stuff.  In reds, we prefer a smooth taste with a minimum of bite or bitterness in the aftertaste.  If that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about it.  If you’re new to wine the only way to figure out what you like is to start tasting.

For this project, we will also focus drinks that you can actually afford to buy and ship and not feel bad about.  We love a good bottle of expensive wine as much as the next person.  However, we’ve lived an hour from Napa Valley, so we have often found that the price and the quality of a bottle of wine rarely have anything to do with one another.  (Except for the extremes of the spectrum on both ends!)

Go ahead and hover over the navigation bar above to see the current listings of countries we’ve sampled from.  We’ll keep adding pages as we travel, so check back for more updates!

Grab your favorite grog and let’s start drinking our way around the planet!

 

Mexico

Chocolate Tequila, Beer (duh) and wine!  Did you even know Mexico had wine!?

 

French Polynesia

How does one grow wine grapes on a coral atoll with no soil?  and how would it taste?

 

The Cook Islands

They make wine from bananas and yams here, which actually tastes pretty good!

 

The Kingdom of Tonga

They only have the one beer, but being how it’s JUST THAT GOOD, why mess with perfection?

 

Italy

A few years ago we got married and went to Italy for our honeymoon.  We found a wine so good that we bought out the B&B to bring some home for our friends.

 

Texas

We know, we know, “What!? Texas makes wine!?”

Why yes, we discovered, yes they do.

 

New Zealalnd

What it comes down to is this: It’s an easy thing to find a good drink and good company to have it with in New Zealand.

 

Australia

Australia has a great libations industry –

It’s just not where you’d expect to find it.