Time for Cheap Again With a Sinful Grin

Sinful Grin Petite Sirah 2018California 

I am in the mood for cheap. So tonight we are having $7.99 wine with a $3 salad kit and blueberries from Lidl paired up with a Publix $6.99 lemon pepper rotisserie chicken. This is one good, but very inexpensive meal.
Mrs. Dan and I were at Lidl last Sunday afternoon and I naturally wandered over to their wine aisle. When they first opened years ago their wine display was fancy and had everything displayed by value and was pretty snazzy. No wines you’ve ever heard of but they were pretty good. Now it’s down to some simple shelves and about 1/2 the selection of different wines. Cheap is still the mainstay here.
I saw this one lonely bottle, the only thing on the shelf, and it called to me. The fact it was under $8 had something to do with it too. I got the last bottle of Sinful Grin Petite Sirah. I’ve had several of their Sinful Grin varietals over the years and have been fairly pleased. A quick internet search found that this wine won several medals and Best of Class at the Indy International Wine Competition in 2017. Must have been a good vintage.
This one met my expectations… tasted red, didn’t taste like a cab, and was not terribly dry. The label read “This inky, purple-hued Petite Sirah is dark and intriguing with loads of black fruit and spice. Full-bodied and mouth-filling on the palate with chewy tannins and a long finish, this wine is wickedly tasty.” It is inky purple-hued. It has lots of black fruit and spice. What I struggled with is what spice and whether or not the intrigue was good or bad.
I liked this $7,99 bottle of wine. I don’t think I could pull it off as an expensive bottle on my friends… sorta like the story about the couple at a NYU restaurant, this week accidentally served a carafe of $2,000 Mouton Rothschild while a table of businessmen who ordered it got their $18 bottle. The story said the guy who ordered the expensive wine was talking about how great it was. (the restaurant fessed up and ate the expensive mistake).
I think that $18 bottle was probably better than this Sinful Grin.
I can’t say I’ve had a bad Petite Sirah. But that’s probably because most I’ve had came from Dennis’s wine cellar. This one doesn’t remind me of those. But it was dark in appearance and flavor and did go nicely with the chicken and the guac Mrs. Dan made (this hunter-gatherer provided the chicken and the wine). The sides of my mouth felt a bit of lush dark flavors but the center of my tongue and roof of my mouth was dry and tannic.
The bottle recommended it be served from 60-70 degrees. I tossed it in the freezer to see if a drop in temperature changed things. Well, I got tied up with this dumb ass going bankrupt on Wheel of Fortune getting greedy with the $10,000 stop so the drop in temp was more to the 40-50 degree range. Now it had very chewy tannins and the fruit wasn’t so dark. It was more like bright cherries. As it warmed I thought the better flavors in the mix improved and were more like very dark under-ripe plums.
In the end, it was still a nice $7.99 bottle of wine. I’m sure that wasn’t the last bottle that Lidl will have of Sinful Grin Petite Sirah. They were probably waiting for me to leave so they could put out another single bottle for the next cheap wine bastard to walk by.
Cost: $7.99 (I think-Looking for the receipt)
Size: 750ml