J and I took a recent trip north to the Bay for a bridal shower. As I was not allowed to participate - curse the heavens! - I decided to get a little editing work done during the day. After a bit of this, my wandering mind got the best of me and I found myself walking into the small wine shop on Santa Clara avenue, (relatively) recently opened, called Du Vin Fine Wines.

Now, most of you will know that I lived in Alameda for a long, long time. Because of that, I have certain ideas about how Alameda goes about its business - in short, not very quickly. If I go to a store, I expect to see certain things that real Alamedans expect, because businesspeople are generally savvy about understanding things like this in a generally fuddy-duddy community like Alameda. So if I walk into a new wine shop in Alameda, I expect it to go about its business in specific ways - ways that don’t rock the boat. Not that this is a terrible thing, mind you - Farmstead Cheese and Wine in the Alameda Marketplace is a real non-boat-rocker of a wine store, but it still has a lot of great bottles, many of which I’ve tried and can recommend wholeheartedly.

So you can imagine my shock when (as if you haven’t already guessed this and have been waiting impatiently for me to arrive where you’re standing) Du Vin turns out to be a crazy little wine store, the likes of which I have pretty much never seen in California. OK, it’s got some run-of-the-mill wine store stuff - Lynch Bages, Silver Oak, Duckhorn, JC Cellars. All good names, of course. On top of that are some names I’ve seen in stores that put an emphasis on boutique wines, like Sean Thackeray, Neyer, and  Roger Perrin. Hm. Shelves dedicated to wines from South Africa and New Zealand. Not bad. THEN you get to the back of the store, and that’s where they proceed to blow your mind. Just read the tops of the shelves: Greece. Turkey. Slovenia. Croatia. Hungary. Hungary makes wine??? OK, what do I buy?

Since we already had a full rack of everyday wines in our kitchen, I only made two purchases. But they were both interesting and worth mentioning.

The 2005 Tselepos Moschofilero “Mantinia” is a dry white made from the moschofilero grape, an indigenous grape to Greece that grows on the Mantinia plateau in north Arcadia.  The grape often compared to Gewurztraminer, which makes the fact that the Du Vin clerk compared this wine to a Traminer no surprise. In the glass, it is pale straw-gold in color, a little lighter than chardonnay. The nose is nice and friendly, with some notes of honeysuckle and peaches. On the palate, you can see where the the Traminer comparisons come in, as there are strands of pear and lychee on the palate. It’s lacking some of that richness you get from the better Alsatian Traminer, though, and it ends on a bit of a grapey note. Still, it’s a nice wine and at $16, not a bad investment if not the greatest one either.

The red I bought without recommendation, since the clerk hadn’t tried and and couldn’t speak for it. But I had to get something from Croatia, so I picked up the 2004 Dingac Plavac Peljesac for about $12. According to my books, the grape in this wine - Plavac Mali - can be used to make very big, tannic wines, but this wine was far from that - it seemed more like a cross between gamay and pinot noir to me. In the glass, it was red/violet, fading away at the rim. One of the palest reds I’ve seen in a young wine. The nose was…odd. Is this the “wet dog” people refer to? More like “wet cow at the goulash farm.” Unique…but I’m not sure I like it. On the palate, this wine went through several stages. At first it was just a mushroomy flavor on the back of the palate, but as time went on it developed some tart fruit, like gooseberries maybe, and after a few hours, some cocoa as well. By that point I really came around on this wine, but it certainly took its time getting there. Good acidity, but not much of a finish - this isn’t really a wine built for storage, I think, but it was a fun bottle and I’d certainly consider picking up more, although I don’t know what I’d eat with it. We had salmon with this wine and it didn’t quite work out with the funky. Maybe next time.

Of course, I write all of this only to find out that Derrick Schneider over at An Obsession with Food put the Dingac in his “Wines of Germany and Eastern Europe” class, and Purple Liquid has already blogged about it. Oh well. It was a weekend for the bride, after all, and I guess I’ll have to play the bridesmaid on this one, too.