Hi! Today, we re-examine Hob Nob pinot noir, a cool designer bottle from France that was $11 for our last review. We concluded that Hob Nob tastes better than many other cheap pinot noirs, but it is often too sweet and is inconsistent from bottle to bottle. It couldn’t be recommended at $11.
But then I saw it selling for only $8 — holy mackerel, time for a re-review! So — this wine smells like, not cherries, but “cherry flavor.” Giving it a whiff, I’m not sure if I’m about to enjoy a glass of wine, or suck on a Luden’s cough drop. That’s fine — I’ve enjoyed many wines with unusual aromas.
As for taste, a young wine drinker who drinks “sweet nothing” wines might like this a lot. Hob Nob is fairly sweet, but not offensively so. For $8, it even has a nice little complexity to it, with a trace of tannins. More prominently, it has a heaping helping of cherry, with a cameo appearance by strawberry and Kool-Aid “black cherry” flavor. My throat feels better already!
But to me, the flavors in this wine seemed confused, mixed up with a hint of something hard to identify, but which you don’t really want in your mouth (isopropyl alcohol? sterno??). Finally — the kiss of death for most cheap pinots — Hob Nob pinot noir tastes almost nothing like pinot noir. It’s good for only $8, but these issues lead me to decide that it is:
Not recommended.
Next!
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