Bella Donna at Flo Wine Bar: a rare wine-jazz nexus

Bella Donna (from left): Matt Guinn, Liz Carney and Mike Williamson, who usually plays bass.

I experienced a rare wine-jazz nexus at Flo Wine Bar, listening to Bella Donna. It was rare in that I had never set foot in Flo, assuming it was way too upscale for me — but this was happy hour.

The visit demonstrated that not all businesses housed in office centers designed to mimic Downton Abbey are negligible.

I ordered a glass of Vina Zaco Tempranillo (Rioja). The tasting note, smoky oak, got my attention. The wine lived up to that description in the sense that there's probably too much oak, but so what? This smoky oak was similar to the approach to Norton of Tyler Ridge Vineyard Winery, just north of Springfield.

The rest of the tasting notes for the Tempranillo were black fruits and chocolate. I got the fruits but missed the chocolate. In my limited experience with Rioja wines, they're too lean to suggest chocolate. I was thinking of black pepper.

The jazz nexus occurred with Bella Donna's own listening note, gypsy jazz. I heard a little Django on one tune, which turned out to be an original. Most of the songs were jazzy, not gypsy except in the sense that a great deal of rhythmic drive came from the guitar. Then Liz Carney sang two songs in French, including "J'attendrai" (I could be wrong), associated with Rina Ketty, an Italian singer who worked in Paris in the 1930s. Amazing work by Carney, transporting me to some distant, totally lost world.

I worked at trying to hear the gypsy notes in the same way I was working my taste buds for the chocolate notes in the Vina Zaco Tempranillo, but so what? They weren't there, but so much else was.