Drinking Wine from Tea Cups at a Taiwanese Restaurant

For several years now, my friends and I have had a sort of "family dinner" every Friday at the same Taiwanese restaurant in Denver. We've gotten to know the owners, who consider Monica, Dave and Sean to be their kids. We'll clear tables and take orders if they get overwhelmed. So whenever we bring beer or wine in to share over our potstickers and dumplings, they don't mind.

I've been looking for an excuse to open the dessert wine I bought on my day trip to Palisade, Colorado two weeks ago. It's called "Vin au Chocolat". Red wine infused with chocolate. Its maker, Garfield Estates, only sells it in its tasting room.

Garfield Estates was my last stop on my whirlwind wine trail "Get the Hell Out of Denver for a Day" roadtrip. To be perfectly honest, while their traditional wines were not by any means bad, neither did they blow me away. However, I was getting a bit tired of tasting wine at that point, and my wallet was beginning to feel uncomfortably light, so my taste buds were demanding brilliance or nothing at all.

And then the lady pouring for me broke out the Vin au Chocolat. Now, I'm not normally all that big on sweet wines. The fruity sweetness is so much of why I have traditionally disliked white wines. But this one, a chocolate infused red, was a stroke of sweet tooth genius. I generally can't pick out flavors for tasting notes, but this one to me was distinctly raspberries and dark chocolate. It was divine.

So I took it to dinner with me tonight, to our little Taiwanese dive. We drank it from tiny Chinese tea cups over dumplings and sesame cold noodles while the swamp cooler whirred nearby.