2016 Girl Scout Cookie Wine Tasting

We held our seventh annual Girl Scout cookie wine tasting this past weekend. To heighten the fun this year, one of our guests proudly brought her Girl Scout sash from 35 years ago!!! Sadly, we learned that there isn’t a Girl Scout award for cookie and wine tasting. I was hoping to be able to reward my friend with a new Girl Scout award. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Our Approach

As usual, we started the tasting in a traditional way, tasting each wine with wine-friendly appetizers (cheese, crackers and fruit). We then embarked on the wine and cookie pairing, letting everybody try every wine with every cookie in the order they chose. You can see that people got very into enthusiastic about figuring out which wine paired best with which cookie 🙂

The Wines

Because wines should be sweeter than the desserts they are served with, I selected WineShop At Home’s sweeter offerings:

• Petit Cadeau Semi-Seco Sparkling – This sparkling wine offers a nice balance of sweetness and acidity, with aromas of green apple, pear, flowers, orange and anise.
• Fleur Bleu 2013 White Bouquet – This is a blend of Viognier, Muscat Canelli, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay. It is a refreshing and pleasingly fragrant wine with aromas of lime, lemon, grass, flowers, nutmeg and white pepper.
• Gemme Cellars 2014 Gewurztraminer – An off-dry Gewurz that is truly delicious.
• Lumiere De Vie Reflexion – An easy-drinking Rosé that has a nice sweetness to it.
• Table Red – Our porch-pounding, food-friendly Table Red is a blend of Grenache Noir, Ruby Cabernet, Zinfandel and Carnelian. With this wine, you get a lot of berries coupled with pepper and tobacco flavors.
• Gemme Cellars 2014 Petite Sirah – Petite Sirah, which was created in the late 1800s in France, is a perfect wine grape for CA. So it’s now thought of as a CA grape. This wine is very round and fruity, with jammy black currant, pomegranate and blackberry notes.
• OZV 2014 Zinfandel – One of our guests brought a non-WineShop At Home wine for us to add to the mix. It is a beautiful jammy, peppery old vine Zin from Lodi.

The Cookies

We tasted seven Girl Scout cookies:

• Savannah Smiles – Lemon-flavored dusted with powdered sugar
• Rah Rah Raisin – Oatmeal with raisins and Greek yogurt-flavored chunks
• Do-Si-Do – Peanut butter sandwich cookie
• Tagalong – Layer of peanut butter covered in chocolate
• Samoa – Toasted coconut, caramel and chocolate
• Trefoil – Traditional shortbread
• Thin Mint – Mint-flavored covered with chocolate

The Results

Table Red and Gemme Cellars Petite Sirah were the wines that were liked the most  across all of the cookies. OZV Zinfandel got very mixed reviews. Half of the people liked it with the cookies, and half didn’t. The cookie that was liked with the most wines was Savannah Smiles, followed by Samoa and Rah-Rah Raisins. Happily, Thin Mint showed up as a favorite with Table Red. Do-Si-Do, while liked with a number of the wines didn’t get enough votes to show up as a favorite with any of the wines.

Wrapping Up

I can’t tell you how much fun it is to do a Girl Scout Cookie wine tasting. Hopefully many of you have tried it. I would love to add some other specialized tastings to my line up. So if you’ve done any unique wine pairings, please share your experiences here. Thanks!