5 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon wines - BLIND TASTING! Episode #581

Gary Vaynerchuk tries 5 wines blind and sees which tickle his palate, as we continue the Napa Cabernet theme this week!

Welcome to Common Man Cocktails. I’m Derrick Schommer. This week we’re going to do yet another thanksgiving style drink for the holidays. Last time, it was a thanksgiving special if you’re a big fan of gin. This time, we’re going to go cranberry and a little vodka. This drink will be called the gobbletini, yeah. It’s from bar.com, at least that’s where the original recipe was found. The gobbletini is going to consist of a few cranberry style flavorings. First, a twist of cranberry from Smirnoff, you could get cranberry, there’s actually not as many cranberry flavored vodka as I had thought it would be. There’s a lot of vodka when you go to the liquor store. It’s a whole wall of vodka but not so much cranberry, lots of raspberries and berries, citrons, and limes, lemons, but very much on the cranberry front. So with the Smirnoff, it has everything so we went with that one. We’re going to complement that with a splash of cranberry juice. Pick your favorite flavor; I usually go with something that’s 100% natural because it’s better on the sugars I think and a little raspberry. Now remember the Irish candy, we had used raspberry. I bought this specifically for the Irish candy. Now we have a second reason to use it. So if you followed along and you bought this, now you have one more drink you can make it with coz it’s not a normal alcohol. So we’re going to do 1 ¼ ounces of the vodka. Let’s start with that. Here’s our standard ounce, pre-iced, one and a quarter. We’re going to do 1-¼ of the raspberry because the stuff--when you take the cap off and you smell it, the last thing you want to do is overpower your drink. You want to give it a flavor that people have to find. You don’t want to give them a flavor that people are going to just gag. And we’ll do a splash of cranberry juice. That’s good. And you’re allowed to make a mess if you’re supposed to splash it. So, mix that up. Now you’re going to use your cocktail/martini glass, so you don’t want to put ice in here. You could chill it, put it in a freezer for a couple of hours or couple days or a week. I keep mine in there until I need them. Just if you put them in the door and open it too quickly, you just going to pick it every now when they fall on the ground and shatter. Now you can garnish this if you like too with 3 cranberries. I’m not going to do that because like most people, I don’t have cranberries readily available in my house. If you’re a huge cranberry fan, you might have that. It’s just not me. I think it looks kind of sexy though. Check that out. It’s kind of a ruby. Is that a ruby color? Ruby, red, ruby, it kind of looks red and purple. It looks like a really cool looking martini. Interesting, interesting smell. You can smell the raspberry and cranberry kind of mixed together, almost like a juicy juice maybe, like a juicy juice type drink. Let’s give it a try. It’s pretty strong, can’t lie, it’s pretty strong. I think the kick is coming right out from that vodka. The flavor’s there so it’s well-balanced. So you’re not getting something to taste like ethanol. You’re getting what you think, you know what it is, it’s almost like you’re drinking cranberry juice straight and that extra alcohol is what’s kind of changing up a bit to give it that extra booze. So, I mean it looks like cranberry juice, maybe not as red, it’s pretty strong but tasty. I could actually drink this and to tell you the truth, although we know I live next to the cranberry state, Massachusetts, never been a big fan of cranberry, this is actually not bad. So there you go. This is the gobbletini. You could catch us at everydaydrinkers.com. You can also check us out at itunes, search for common man cocktail, or our audio podcast, you could search for everydaydrinkers and you subscribe up, send us some comments, send me emails dschommer@everydaydrinkers.com and like I said I’m Derrick Schommer and we’re teaching you how to drink.