Wine News:

• On Saturday November 1 Cork will be a featuring Bryan Forsgren of Potomac Selections who is presenting seven Rieslings from Rudi Wiest Selections, including Schäfer-Fröhlich Estate Riesling Kabinett 2007 and Monchoff Erdener Pralat Riesling Auslese 2006. The tasting starts at 3:00 and costs $50 per person. Call Cork for reservations. Unless you're a huge Riesling fan and have money to burn, skip this.

• Tattoo Bar on K Street is having a "bar food"/wine pairing on November 6 at 6:30pm. They're teaming up with Big Tattoo Red (no surprise there) and for $10 you can taste their wine with cheesy, greasy, cholesterol-laden treats.

• Is it news? No. Do I consider this a valuable public service? Yes. Dear readers, please don't be this guy.

These days if there's a cheesy holiday, you can bet there's a wine tie-in. While I still have yet to see Flag Day wine, Kwanzaa wine, or President's day wine I'm pretty sure these are just around the corner. Likewise, there's Halloween wine. This is actually some schtick I can get behind. Slap a zombie on something and I'll be chomping at the bit. But how can you tell between what's good and what's some rotgut with a picture of Count Chocula stuck on the front? Good question.

Here are recommendations and to mark the wonderful return of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society to metro-accessible DC, here are some of my favorite Halloween/B-grade sci fi flicks to go with 'em. Picking the wine was the easy part. Picking specific B-movies was infinitely harder as I love really cheap, really poor quality, really unbelievable B-movie horror flicks. Pop open a bottle, fire up the TV and settle in to some silky tannins and unbelievably crappy scenery as we enter….

THE WINES OF THE DAMNED!!

Vampire Cabernet Sauvignon

The label looks like something a fourteen year old Judas Priest fan drew on his Civics notebook in 1986, but don't let that get to you. This wine is cheap ($8), and relatively good at that. I wouldn't serve it to the Queen, but it’s more than sufficient for a Halloween shindig. It’s aged in French and American oak, giving it just a slight vanilla taste on the finish, and has a lot of berry notes on the nose making it very approachable. For an $8 Cab Sav it’s awfully smooth.

This is my favorite of this motley crew so it gets paired with one of my favorites, the original House on Haunted Hill. It’s not exactly B-grade, but neither is the wine; the movie is actually pretty good, the wine is worth drinking outside of Halloween, and Vincent Price is more than a man and less than a god. It was very hard to pick just one Vincent Price movie for this wine. My idea of a perfect weekend would be to lock myself at home with a case of wine and a “best of” collection of Vincent Price movies.

Upon further reflection, that sounds a lot creepier than I thought it would.

Zombie Zinfandel
To give you an idea, the back reads: “2004 Zombie Zinfandel is blood-red in color, horridly rich in concentrated fruit flavors with a finish that never dies.” For that alone I love this wine. I’m not a big Zinfandel person, but again for this price ($10) and a delightful flesh-eating zombie on the front I’m sold. This paired wonderfully with my friend Molly’s delicious Alaskan salmon spread, made from salmon her Alaskan parents caught THEMSELVES. Oh Alaska. You're like God's personal haunted fun-house full of conservative whack jobs and deviants, much like Twin Peaks.

This gets paired with a seminal favorite, Dead Alive. The carnage is completely unbelievable (both in scope and in the sense of “they really can’t expect us to believe this”), Catholic priests are apparently Kung Fu masters (guess it comes with the collar) and it answers the eternal question of “can zombies do it, and if so do they get knocked up?” This wine pairs beautifully with buckets of fake blood soaring in every other scene.

Pure Evil Chardonnay
…is anything but. This is an Australian chardonnay I’d drink year-round, regardless of the name which could be easily marketed and sold at area Hot Topic stores. That remark is in no way a compliment. The flavor is great; medium bodied, not overly oaky at all with some citrus and mango notes. Even better? It’s $9.

I’ll stay away from the obvious dingo-eating-baby reference and pair this with Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Folks, this actually exists. Someone in 1988 thought that producing this film would be a good idea and I want to shake their hand for it. Shannon Tweed plays a feminist (let’s suspend disbelief here) who encounters the Amazonian tribes of Piranha women, uber-“feminists” who adhere to a strict diet of eating men with guacamole. I suggest this movie because this chardonnay would go well with guacamole dip and maybe male flesh, who knows. If you're low on flesh, curry and zucchini filled pumpkins will nicely fill that void too. Comment if you'd like the recipe.

Egri Bikaver
In my research I came across something billed as the “quintessential” Halloween wine, Hungary’s Egri Bikaver, known internationally as Bull's Blood. This legendary Hungarian wine is known for its deep, dense color, velvet tannins and an eventual tie-in with Red Bull (okay not really, but I can imagine).
Legend has it that the local wine was served to the soldiers guarding the castle of Eger, north of Budapest. They were given the wine to strengthen them approaching Turkish troops. It apparently worked, as the Turks were led to believe that the wine dripping from the beards and tunics of the Hungarian men was actually the blood of bulls, resulting in an easy victory for some wobbly Hungarians. I haven’t found it locally, but online it sells for as little as $5 a bottle.

As I’m mystified by this wine, I’m pairing it with an equally mystifying B-grade scary movie, the 1958 version of The Blob. It’s mystifying because….well, the whole time you’re sitting there going “what the fuck?” Steve McQueen is in this…what the fuck? Burt Bacharach composed the score....what the fuck? Why are people running from this god awful excuse for a monster? It’s a fucking slug, get some salt already.

And lastly…

Poizin Zinfandel

Another California gimmick wine and zinfandel at that. The big selling point on this one is that it comes in a coffin…..ooooh! Scary! And the name is a misspelling of “poison”. Oooh, witty and scary! This one claims to have notes of dark fruit upfront with Petite Sirah added for structure and tannins. I say “claims” because I haven’t had it. The big selling point is….you guessed it….the coffin packaging. I don’t know if that’s enough for me to drop $25, but wine blogs seem to go crazy for this stuff.

This wine strikes me as lame (c’mon, a coffin? What, were they out of plastic vampire teeth?) so I’m pairing it with one of the lamer B-movies I’ve ever laid eyes on, Omoo-Omoo, the Shark God. In brief: sea captain steals prized jewels of a Sumatran shark god, god gets pissed, a very high body count ensues. I do not recommend this movie sober. It’s best viewed under the influence of Poizin, or perhaps something a little stronger, but it will be the most unintentionally hilarious 58 minutes of your life.

In the spirit of all things campy and Halloween, I leave you with this gem:

*photos courtesy of Molly M.