Cabot Cove Body Double
TASTING NOTES: “Our Merlot is smooth and lush with notes of plum, black cherry, chocolate and sweet brown spice. Silky tannins balance the wine’s velvety texture, which finishes with brambly fruit and a hint of sweet French Oak that lingers on the finish.” (AbV 14.5%)
VARIETALS: 86% Merlot, 8% Petit Verdot, 6% Zinfandel
BARRELS: 100% French Oak
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Mendocino, the county on this label, spent twelve years pretending to be Maine.
Murder, She Wrote is set in Cabot Cove, a fictional fishing village in Maine, but the cameras were mostly pointed at Mendocino, California. The town was settled by New England lumbermen who built it to look like home, so a century later it could stand in for the original without much effort. The house in the opening credits is a real inn on Mendocino’s main street, and I’m fairly sure that is the most peaceful building ever used to introduce a show about homicide.
What I want to know is what the locals made of it. A tidy coastal town of a few thousand people becomes, on television, the deadliest place in America, where a mystery novelist can’t attend a dinner party without a body turning up by dessert. Meanwhile the real version is down the road making wine. I like to think someone at the farmers market in 1989 was asked “isn’t it dangerous there?” by a tourist and said, “Only if you’re Jessica Fletcher’s nephew.”
