Mon Ami: Lake Eric Niagara

For those of you who follow me on Facebook (at The Affordable Wine Snob), you saw I took a trip to Ohio a couple of weeks ago.  For me, Northwest Ohio is the Motherland – where I spent the first eighteen years of my life.  So there are certain things that “taste” like home to me.  Tony Packo’s chili dogs.  Roots Shredded Chicken sandwiches.  Ballreich’s potato chips.  And extremely sweet, cold weather wines from Lake Erie.

Yes, I realize I just fell a few “esteem” notches in many of your opinions.  But home tastes like home.

Mon Ami Winery is on Catawba Island Peninsula, near Sandusky Ohio.  (Home of the famous Cedar Point amusement park.)  Wine has been made in Mon Ami since 1873.  The restaurant is beautiful, the food fantastic, and the ambiance is something everyone needs to experience.  So make the stop.  Take a drive along the lake to get there.  You’ll be surprised at how beautiful that part of the country truly is.  (And try the Lake Erie Perch if you’ve never had it.)

Sadly, this winery doesn’t ship to Georgia.  So I’m out of luck in Atlanta to purchase a bottle on a whim.

Not all wines from Mon Ami are super sweet.  (But many of them are.)  On the back of the bottle, they have a handy dandy little chart that will tell you how sweet the wine is.  And they do Italian imports, too.

Now the Niagra.

Take a good smell of the nose.  If you don’t initially think “Welch’s White Grape Juice,” you need to go to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor to be checked out.  You can immediately smell the sugar in this wine.  But smell again.  There’s a deeper smell, a darker smell.  To my emotional attachment to the geography of Mon Ami, it smells like a cool night in October.  This is a desert wine – not something to drink on a hot summer day.

The flavor is really nice, too.  It does have overtones of a good white grape juice.  (Side note: don’t sit down and drink a whole bottle of this on your own.  The sugar content makes your mind think you’re not drinking “real alcohol.”  But there’s still 12% alcohol in this bottle.  Learn from my mistakes, young wine drinker.)  There’s a little mineral flavor under the sweetness – probably thanks to the limestone rich soil of northwest Ohio.

When you try this bottle, you can taste and smell the rock walls of a winery built over a hundred years ago.  There’s a lot of age and experience in the bottle.  It’s worth a try, even for the most snobbish wine drinker.

So if you’re ever in Northwest Ohio (maybe heading with the kids to see one of the top roller coaster parks in the world), stop in to Mon Ami.  Try some of their wines (tastings are generally $1 per taste).  Give their Cab Franc and other dry wines a go, but don’t forget to try something local and old, too.  Pink Catawba, Niagara, or their Port.  You might find something surprisingly good.