Taking a Flight in a Restaurant Wine Menu

Yes, you’ve guessed it, the CorkNoob has tried wine flights! This week, I wanted to try my hand in ordering from a restaurant wine menu. In this case, Ibiza Wine Bar in Pittsburgh’s South Side was where I “took a flight.”

After meeting a friend of mine at the new Steel Cactus Restaurant & Cantina in South Side Pittsburgh, where she also works a few days a week, we had a bite to eat, or should I say some seriously delicious Mexican grub from the menu. With my friend’s discount in addition to happy hour, it was a real steel. Although I attempted to order wine from their menu, it seemed I had already tried a great deal of the options since most were available at every wine and spirits store in the area. I felt I hadn’t gotten a true taste of something new, so we found Ibiza Tapas & Wine Bar a few blocks down East Carson Street.

I knew this was a legitimate wine menu when the bartender handed me what looked like a photo album of her entire family history, except when we opened it up, literally every nationality was listed. As we flipped through the multiple pages with our mouths half dropped, you could tell we had no idea which wine we should order. I noticed the wine flights, which I thought were particularly funny since they were listed under different countries. I suppose this is the whole idea – having a taste of each locations wine stylings is like taking a trip to another region. We asked the bartender, which she thought, would be good to try. Since there were four of us, we decided to share two flights. I told her I normally like dry wines – cabernet reds or pinot whites. She suggested the South America selection, and touted the red malbec. I’m still not quite sure why my friends picked the Spain selection. I’m sure the price came into consideration for both of us. The French & Italian wines were much pricier, the American wines were the cheapest, and also ruined the fun of taking a flight somewhere new.

When she lined up all of the glasses of wine, we couldn’t help but laugh. What were we getting ourselves into? We decided to try each and pass them down the line as we attempted to pronounce them one by one. At this point it came to my attention that my friend had no sense of sounding out words; we had the others take turns at pronouncing. (Sorry, Amanda!) Each wine was lined up from sweet to dry. Although the sweeter wines were delicious, more than a sip would be hard to stomach. As we moved down the wine row, the Spanish Bodega Tintoralba was one of our favorites – We lovingly referred to that one as Jessica Alba. Both the South American Astica Malbec and Tierra Brisa Cabernet were also very good, and now I can sound like I know what I’m talking about when I order those again. None of us liked the Santa Carolina Chardonnay – yuck! It tasted and smelled like stale cheese. I did find a new wine category that I hadn’t tried before – Rosé! The Crios Rose Malbec was drier than I expected from a rosé. When I see pink, I immediately think of fruity, sweet wines. This was much different.

Overall, we had a fun, new experience tasting wines outside of our comfort zone and decided we needed to take another flight soon.

Have you tried wine flights? Which wines should the CorkNoob try next? Leave us a note in the comments.