The Last Eleven, #10: Peller Estates, Cabernet Franc Ice Wine, Niagara Peninsula 2013

I will try to keep this one short and sweet because it’s about a 187mL bottle of ice wine. Get it??

Anyway. During fall break of senior year, my best girlfriends and I planned a trip to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with our boyfriends. We had a ball doing all the touristy things: going to the falls overlook, taking a ride in the big Ferris wheel, adding “eh” to the end of all our sentences…the usual. One of the days we also spent toodling around the wineries of the Niagara peninsula, which you may not have known existed but they’re actually making some pretty rad stuff.

One of our first stops was Peller and it was probably my favorite of the day. I loved their sparkling wine because the dosage was ice wine, something I'd never seen done before. And like, yum. This particular bottle of the still dessert wine I picked up because it was tiny and cute and, honestly, at the register when I was checking out with a bottle of the bubbly. I think I intended to try the dessert wine next to the sparkling wine to compare but ended up drinking the sparkling at a birthday dinner and forgetting about the ice wine.

Since then, all of the relationships that were on that trip have ended. Whoops. It doesn’t tarnish the memory though because the girls I was with are still some of my closest friends. Despite living on different coasts, we visit each other as often as we can and we can always pick up where we left off like we were never apart. So, the moral of this story can boil down to hoes before bros.

In accordance with that, I opened it with my best friend here when we got home after getting my first tattoo and treating ourselves to a nice dinner. She too is one of those people that I know no matter where we are in the world, nothing will change. The fact is, when you find the kind of person that will be there whether you’re doing the crossword on a Sunday afternoon or puking your brains out at 2am on a Thursday, you don’t let them go. You do whatever it takes to keep them around because that kind of relationship only gets better with time.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for this wine. It was long past drinkable. Again, whoops. I suppose the fact that nothing lasts forever is just another reason to hang onto the things that do.