Stuck in France

I get stuck in food/taste ruts quite often. I'm not sure what to call it but it's categorized by long bouts of eating the same thing, until I overload my taste buds with the same tastes and swing in a drastically opposite direction. I'm in a yogurt and granola rut right now. Organic blueberry flax granola and greek honey yogurt... I could eat it for every single meal, all day long, for the next two weeks. Last time, it was Pace Medium Picante salsa and Mission Tortilla chips. I ate jars and jars worth of salsa. I can't say it's healthy, but it's taste-bud satisfying and it makes for easy bulk-shopping.

It seems to be the same with alcohol. You can probably chart my wine drinking ruts through this blog. Right now, I'm smack dab in the middle of a Cotes Du Rhone binge. I don't want to drink anything else. And seeing that there are about 2 worthwhile Cotes Du Rhone wines in my price range, there isn't much differentiation in my drinking habits. As for beer, I'm only drinking IPAs. Nothing tastes as rich or as refreshing as a really good, 6%+ IPA. So it's Cotes Du Rhone and a variety of IPAs (Deschutes Inversion IPA and Ninkasi Total Domination IPA, primarily) at our apartment right now and I can't seem to break free. My last alcohol rut was probably Cabernet Sauvignon and Porters... I suppose the difference isn't huge in this case, but I certainly have my patterns.

The weather has been insane here in Washington lately, a big snowstorm (for us) with some nice snow days off of work, an ice storm immediately following, and then big puddles from the snow melt and a bunch of rain. Though the temperatures have been warming up, it's a great time to be drinking rich red wines that serve as fantastic alternatives to turning the heat up all the way to the "Comfort Zone" range. At a dinner party we had last night, a friend brought over a Malbec and Cabernet and Ben, after having a small glass, remarked that he forgot how good a nice glass of red wine can be (the beer drinking seems to have erased his memory) in the chilly weather. I was the designated driver and so I didn't try the Argento Malbec, but everyone around the table seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

And so the Malbec realization and the wine rut realization merged and I've come up with a resolution (a little late, I know) to drink more variety, beyond the usual big reds I like (into France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Mendoza, South Africa, some more of California and Oregon, and finally into some richer white wine territories). And then I want to pick up writing about it again. I know the blog has fallen off a bit lately with work getting busier and busier and my spare time now filled with using my KitchenAid mixer rather than my Waterford decanter. But, I think it's a ridiculously easy resolution on the scale of self-improvement resolutions.

So off into the wine world 2012 I go. Let me know if you have any pressing recommendations or suggestions on how to break out of ruts - a particularly good varietal would suffice!