VINVENIO

Pacific Northwest AVAs

2010-03-29T15:37:00.001-04:00

The Importance (and Confusion) of AVAs

American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) are winegrape-growing regions that have been legally established by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB - created as a reorganization of the functions of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2003). The purpose of these regions is to allow wine producers to better describe the place of origin of their wines, and to allow consumers to more easily identify wines that they may wish to purchase. Simple enough. But this simple concept can actually lead to a lot of confusion. This post will detail the Pacific Northwest AVAs, and the next post will address some of the issues raised by the American Viticultural Areas system.

(A bit outdated, but the best map I could find to give you the total picture. Thanks to Quentin Sadler's blog for the map.)

Pacific Northwest AVAs

Before diving in to some of the complexity surrounding AVAs, and Pacific Northwest AVAs in particular, I wanted to list all of the AVAs, sub-AVAs and in one case "super-AVA" found in the Pacific Northwest as of March 2010 (as this is bound to keep expanding). A caveat - I'm an Oregon guy, so my coverage and knowledge of Pacific Northwest wines are jilted in that direction (a deficiency I am working (drinking?) to correct).

Willamette Valley AVA - the largest AVA in Oregon, and the one containing the highest percentage of the state's wineries. Has six sub-AVAs:

Southern Oregon Super AVA - This AVA was established specifically to encompass two already-existing AVAs in Southern Oregon. This was mainly done to allow the southern AVAs to better distinguish themselves from the much larger and more influential Willamette Valley AVA which, to many buyers, was simply synonymous with "Oregon wine". The Southern Oregon AVAs are:

Umpqua Valley AVA - Part of the larger Southern Oregon AVA, centered around the city of Roseburg, OR. Has one sub-AVA:

Red Hill Douglas County AVA

Rogue Valley AVA - Again, part of the larger Southern Oregon AVA, located just across the border from California. Contains one sub-AVA and two AVA-ish regions:

Applegate Valley AVA
Bear Creek Valley: not an AVA, but a distinct region named after Bear Creek
Illinois Valley: not an AVA, but a distinct region named after Illinois River

Columbia Gorge AVA - An approximately 40 mile long stretch of the Columbia River Valley, including land on both the Washington and Oregon sides. I can't explain it any better than Paul Gregutt did here.

Columbia Valley AVA - Starting just east of the Columbia Gorge AVA, the Columbia Valley AVA includes some land in Oregon and then follows the Columbia River north into Washington, becoming Washington's largest AVA. Paul Gregutt has an excellent description of the Columbia Valley AVA posted here. The Columbia Valley AVA includes eight sub-AVAs:

Horse Heaven Hills AVA
Lake Chelan AVA
Rattlesnake Hills AVA
Red Mountain AVA (hopefuly this page will be up and running soon)
Snipes Mountain AVA
Wahluke Slope AVA
Walla Walla Valley AVA
Yakima Valley AVA

Puget Sound AVA - Washington's "outlier AVA" (as described by Paul Gregutt here), the only AVA in Washington located west of the Cascade Mountains. Includes the entire Puget Sound region from the Canadian border down to Olympia.

Snake River Valley AVA - Idaho didn't want to miss out on all the fun, thus was born Idaho's first (and currently only) AVA (the Snake River Valley AVA also extends into Oregon, although I do not believe there are any wineries or major commercial vineyards there yet).

To help you figure out where all of these are:

The Confusion of AVAs

Phew, good to get through that list - and I think in reading over it you will already have picked up on several of the issues that make AVAs overly complicated. More on that in the next post.

Wine Closures Over Time

2010-03-25T16:28:00.006-04:00

After winemakers have spent so much time and attention birthing and nurturing their wines in the winery, they face a big decision when it comes time to send those wines out into the world - what type of closure to use on the wine bottle (or should they even use bottles at all)? This decision can have a huge effect on the aging and longevity of the wine, and it is a topic of hot conversation in the wine industry.

There is a lot I could say on the matter, and I will likely address this issue at some point in the future, but for now I simply wanted to share a graphic that very convincingly makes the point for why screw-top (aka Stelvin) closures need to be considered as the closure of choice, particularly when bottling white wines (thanks to @Herbguy for the link). Enjoy.

Vinvenio RESET

2010-03-23T18:08:00.007-04:00

SO, it has been almost 2.5 years since my last blog post. A lot has happened in those intervening years, and I feel like the time has come to jump-start this blog once more and slightly redirect it towards my current pursuits. But first...

A Vinvenio History
I started this blog in April 2007 when I was moving beyond wine as a mere hobby or interest, and heading into the realm of obsession. The wine bug had bit, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about, well, everything really, and I thought I may as well write some of it down along the way.

I started out fairly simple, blogging about different wines I was drinking, and why I liked or disliked them. This quickly lead to my desire to know WHY I liked or disliked them, so I began doing some background research on the varietals or regions of each of the bottles. The posts started getting longer, and started including links to various Wikipedia and other sources to provide a more complete picture of what was in the bottle. Then, I started working at a Virginia winery.

At first I worked in the tasting room, and found that you can learn a lot about wine by pouring a glass and then listening to how hundreds of people describe the exact same bottle. I was able to further educate tasting room guests about different varietals and just wine in general, and getting asked a lot of good questions had me do my homework so that I would be able to answer any questions I missed the first time they were posed to me. I then had the opportunity to step in to the cellar and help with the wine production.

I had never really seriously considered a career in winemaking, but after a few short weeks in the cellar, I was in love. My scholastic background is in molecular microbiology with a minor in geology, and then a graduate degree in environmental engineering; I found that winemaking combined everything I loved about all of my previous scientific fields of study, added in a distinct artistic element which I felt had been lacking in my career up to that point, and did so in a way that resulted in a bottle filled with a scrumptious beverage! (the importance of this last bit cannot be overstated - the existential joy experienced by producing a "thing", rather than just adding to the piles of paperwork in offices everywhere, is a large part of the appeal for me).

I tried to continue the blog with posts about my experiences learning winemaking, but was quickly overwhelmed by my full-time job in the "real world", my part-time job in the cellar, and my inability to find the time to post content with the thoughtfulness and attention I believed it deserved. So I stopped writing (but continued working in the cellar!).

Vinvenio 2010
Fast-forward 2.5 years to March 2010. I now live in Portland, OR, and have embraced winemaking with open arms. I am taking winemaking courses through Chemeketa Community College in Salem, worked the 2009 harvest at Beaux Frères (a northern Willamette Valley winery focusing on ultra-premium Pinot Noir), and am seeking out full-time employment in the cellar. My goal is to continue to learn about winemaking, and progress up from the cellar to assistant winemaker, then winemaker, at an established Willamette Valley winery. And hopefully sometime in the near future I will be able to become an indie winemaker, making a small quantity of wine under my own label!

Current Wine Interests
Since this is my blog, I'll use it to talk about stuff I find interesting. What might this be?

Winemaking, and learning more about winemaking.
Interesting wines / wine varietals (particularly those from the Northwest, or those I think should be planted in the Northwest) - especially interested in "lesser known" Northwest winegrowing regions such as the Columbia Gorge, Yakima Valley and Southern Oregon.
Sustainable winemaking practices, such as Oregon's LIVE (Low Input Viticulture and Enology) program, Demeter's Biodynamic wine program, and the new Oregon Certified Sustainable Wine (OCSW) label.
Technology, such as Wine 2.0 (the blend of wine and new technology, particularly social media and other similar tools to reach consumers); I am also interested in the adoption (or not) of new technology into the vineyard and winery as well.
The expansion of and/or opportunities with collective winemaking facilities, such as the Carlton Winemaker's Studio, and custom crush facilities, such as the Northwest Wine Company and Wine By Joe. Particularly interested in seeing whether there is a future for something like this within Portland.

Updating the Blog
Not only are the posts out of date here, but many of my initial links are as well. I'll slowly update these to 2010, and hopefully start integrating other social media like Facebook and Twitter. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Second Star to the Right and Straight on 'til Morning
So, hopefully you've got an idea on where this thing is now headed (at least, as good of an idea as I do!). Although I'm moving into the more "professional" side of the wine business, I hope to keep my posts at a level that anyone with an interest in wine can appreciate. I also may be using this space to post interesting articles I've come across, mainly so I can find them later. If other people find this interesting too, then that's just great. I'm really looking forward to the possibilities I'm facing in 2010, so hopefully I'll be able to share that with you.

Checking in on the Whites

2007-10-12T16:12:00.000-04:00

My last several posts detailed the harvest and initial winemaking steps for Three Fox Vineyard's Viognier and Pinot Grigio. As I mentioned, those grapes were harvested and fermentation initiated on September 7th. On September 8th, we received a load of Vidal Blanc grapes from a local grower for our "Appassionata" off-dry Vidal and started that in on fermentation. On September 13th, we took some Brix readings (the level of sugar - read my recent post for more info) to see how our fermenting wine was coming along. Here's what we found:

Viognier
Brix at Harvest (9/7) = 23.7
Brix on 9/13 = 9.0

Pinot Grigio
Brix at Harvest (9/7) = 24.9
Brix on 9/13 = 9.2

Vidal
Brix at Harvest (9/8) = 24.0
Brix on 9/13 = 10.0

The fermentation reaction takes the sugar from the grape juice and converts it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. [The generic chemical reaction for a fermentation reaction is C₆H₁₂O₆ → 2C₂H₅OH + 2CO₂ + 2 ATP, or in English: glucose (sugar) → 2 units of alcohol + 2 units of carbon dioxide + 2 units of energy (which is why the yeast are even bothering with this in the first place) ] So, as you can see after not quite one week our fermenting juice is well on the way to fermenting to dry wine (i.e., Brix is roughly zero, meaning there is no residual sugar left in the wine). Cool, eh?

Next post: First up for harvest for the reds is the Chambourcin grape. Reds undergo a slightly different process than the whites, as reds are fermented with all of the skins and seeds - not just the juice as is the case with the whites. More on that soon!

Viognier and Pinot Grigio Harvest in Virginia, Part 3

2007-10-04T00:14:00.000-04:00

My last post left off with us finishing the crushing and destemming of the Pinot Grigio, pressing it off in the bladder press, and pumping it back to a stainless steel tank for eventual fermentation. I mentioned that Three Fox harvested the Pinot Grigio and Viognier on the same day this year, so after we had finished with the Pinot Grigio we had to turn right around and repeat the process for the Viognier!

Deja vu with the Viognier
We went through the exact same process with the Viognier as I described for the Pinot Grigio - the freshly harvested grapes were dumped into the crusher/destemmer, where the resulting mixture of juice, seeds and crushed skins (called "must") was pumped into the bladder press. As you can see from the photo, Viognier looks much more like you would expect a "white wine grape" to look - green and gold, rather than the light purple of the Pinot Grigio.

Once the press was full, we closed the top and started inflating the internal air bladder. The one slight difference between our handling of Pinot Grigio and Viognier occurred at this step: with the Pinot Grigio, we inflated the bladder slowly allowing for some contact time with the skins in the press; the Viognier press run occurred more rapidly, with less time spent in the press in contact with the skins. The Three Fox winemaker/owner tells me that the additional skin contact on the Pinot Grigio leads to a richer color and lusher mouthfeel.

The pressed juice from the Viognier was pumped back into a separate stainless steel tank. We now had two tanks full of grape juice, and we were ready to start making wine!

The Numbers
For those interested in this sort of thing, we estimated our Pinot Grigio harvest at about 5,453 pounds (2.7 tons), which pressed off to about 456 gallons of juice. Our Viognier harvest came in at about 5,080 pounds (2.5 tons), and pressed off to about 381 gallons.

A little "wine chemistry"
So, now we're back in the winery with two tanks full of juice. When you're about to make some wine, there are really just three measurements you need to take to get all the information you need to know before starting off: brix, pH and "titratable acid" or TA. I feel we've covered brix pretty extensively over the last few posts. pH is a measure of acidity on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 14 (7 being neutral water - below that being acidic, above that being "basic"). Both our Pinot Grigio and Viognier clocked in at around 3.5 on the pH scale (we took the measurement with a digital pH meter in the lab).

A reading of 3.5 is pretty good - as you may recall from my cool graph two posts ago, pH starts rising as the grapes ripen. If your pH gets too high, it'll make the wines taste flabby (after all, we often describe the "acidity" of a wine when writing it up - acidity is what makes a white wine in particular sparkle on your tongue). If the pH IS too high, you might add tartaric acid (one of the three main acids often found in grape juice, along with malic and to a lesser degree, citric) to bring the pH down again. Luckily, 3.5 is a respectable number, and we could do what most winemakers prefer to do in these situations - nothing (why stand in the way of nature?).

The last measurement tells you about the "titratable acids", or TA in the juice. I just mentioned that wines often have tartaric, malic and citric acids to them (sidenote: wines that undergo "malolactic fermentation", or "ML" convert the crisp green-appley malic acid into a smoother "milky" lactic acid; many creamy Chardonnays have undergone ML). TA is somewhat related to pH, as pH does measure acidity, but TA specifically measures the amount of organic acids in the juice/wine. TA is what gives wine its "tartness". Our Pinot Grigio came in at 0.65 and our Viognier at 0.75. Our winemaker felt that both of these levels were good, and so we could again do what most winemakers prefer to do - nothing.

Get them Whites Fermentin'
S0, we have now determined that our grapes ripened well, and no manipulation was necessary in the winery to make some great wine. The only thing to do now is to add some yeast and get the fermentation going! As I mentioned before, our winemaker likes to use Lalvin D47 yeast for our white wines. We get our yeasts from Scott Labs, and it's really worth a look at their "Yeast Strains" website to get an understanding of what a huge selection of yeasts are out there. True, the main purpose of fermentation is simply to convert the sugar of the grape juice into alcohol, but different strains of yeast produce difference nuances of flavors into the finished wine, and it's only through trial and error that most winemakers find a "favorite yeast" that works for them.

At any rate, we added the specified amount of D47 yeast to a 5-gallon bucket with a couple of gallons of juice in it. Instead of adding the yeast directly to the tank, its good to "wake them up" from their freeze-dried slumber by adding them to a (warmer) smaller batch of juice so they are not immediately overwhelmed by their conditions. In a half hour or so, once the juice starts bubbling and fermentation is underway, you can then dump the bucket into the stainless steel fermentation tank to start the process in earnest. And this is exactly what we did with our Pinot Grigio and Viognier. Next up: how quickly do the yeast beasties munch on the grape sugars and convert them into alcohol? We take measurements of the fermenting wines, and perform some taste tests as well... More to come!

Viognier and Pinot Grigio Harvest in Virginia, Part 2

2007-10-02T00:56:00.000-04:00

So I was out at Three Fox Vineyards again for Sangiovese harvest and crush (our first red harvest! - which I'll write about as soon as I catch up with the whites), so I was able to copy down some of the relevant info about the Viognier and Pinot Grigio that I skipped in my last post! So, to continue - we had just learned about how to tell when grapes were ripe enough for harvest in a generic sense. Now, I'll tell you about our grapes in particular, and how our harvest went...

Viognier and Pinot Grigio Harvest
We harvested our Viognier and Pinot Grigio (same grape as "Pinot Gris" - just the Italian name for it) on Friday September 7th. The fun thing about harvest is that it's pretty easy for volunteers to get involved - Three Fox invited their tasting room volunteers and Vintner's Circle members to come out and grab some pruning shears and get in on the action! We also employ a team of professional harvesters, whose speed leaves most volunteers in awe, but there are still plenty of grapes to go around!

At harvest, our Viognier had a brix reading of right around 23 degrees, while our Pinot Grigio was around 24 degrees brix - nice and ripe. In my last post I described brix as the measure of sugar in the grapes, and it is this sugar that will ultimately be converted into alcohol during fermentation. A brix reading of 23 degrees will result in a wine with ~13% alcohol, so that's about typical for most table wines. We would normally also take a reading of the specific gravity of the juice using a hydrometer - this is a much more accurate measurement than the hand-held refractometer we were using to take the brix readings - however, hydrometers are fragile creatures and a well-meaning volunteer had accidentally broken our last one days before.

At any rate, harvest we did. First up was the Pinot Grigio. As you will immediately notice, the interesting thing about Pinot Grigio is that it is a pretty darn "red" grape to make a white wine. "Grigio" actually means "gray" in Italian (and "gris" means the same in French), so the name of the grape literally means the "gray pinot" grape (as opposed to the "black" pinot grape of recent Sideways fame - Pinot Noir, and the white pinot grape, Pinot Blanc/Bianco). They are thus named because while we think of wines as white and red (OK, rosé too, but that complicates my example), those wines are made from white and "black" (not red) grapes, respectively. So Pinot Grigio's name is a tip off to the fact that it occupies a slot smack dab in the middle of the white to black grape continuum, and appears dark pink/light purple in color.

So, to explain the picture above (and the harvest process) a bit: the metal box on the right is a crusher/ destemmer - as the name suggests, this machine both de-stems the grapes (separating the grapes and spitting out the stems - look at all of those stems!) as well as "crushes" them (slices open the grape skins so that the juice flows out more freely). There is a pump in the bottom of the crusher/destemmer (winemaking, I'm learning, involves a lot of pumps) which pumps the crushed grapes up and into bladder press (the big white thing on the left). You can sort of tell from the photo that the press is a large cylinder made from a stainless steel mesh.

There is a central bladder running the length of the press; once the press is full, we'll start it rotating. The simple act of rotation is enough to start the juice flowing from the press (indeed, since the grapes have already been crushed, there is quite a lot of "free-run" juice that drains out of the press before we even begin). But to really squeeze out all the good stuff, we start inflating that internal air bladder. This forces the contents of the press against the steel mesh, and allows us to get almost all of the juice remaining in the skins. From the press, the juice falls into a trough where it is captured and pumped into a waiting stainless steel tank. In a little while, we'll add a specific type of yeast to kick-start the fermentation process.

But right now we've got some serious cleaning to do - while we've been pressing the Pinot Grigio, our volunteers and field crew have been harvesting the Viognier, and we've already got over a hundred plastic "lugs" full of grapes ready to go! Since we've got but the one set of equipment, everything will need to be cleaned from the Pinot Grigio before sending Viognier through the system. I'll talk about the Viognier and initial winemaking steps in my next post - that will be the third and final Viognier/Pinot Grigio Harvest: then we're moving on to Vidal, Chambourcin (from which we make our "port alternative" Rosso Dolce) and Sangiovese!

Viognier and Pinot Grigio Harvest in Virginia, Part 1

2007-09-25T22:34:00.000-04:00

Our first harvest of the season at Three Fox Vineyards in Delaplane, VA occurred on Friday September 7th. It was a beautiful day, but the remnants of some tropical storms were supposed to blow through later that weekend, and we wanted to get the fruit off the vine before that happened. The last thing you want to have happen right before harvest is a big rainfall: the vines suck up the water and pump it into the grapes, effectively diluting their flavors at best, and possibly even bursting the fruit on the vine and losing crop. We had tested the fruit just a few days prior (more on that in a sec) and knew we were within the "harvestable" window, so rather than take the chance with the rain we decided to harvest perhaps a few days before what may have been the optimum time. This is not at all unusual, as especially in Virginia you are at the mercy of fickle weather systems and must adapt your harvest schedule appropriately.

Determining When to Harvest
To understand the decision of when to harvest, you need to know a little bit about how grapes grow and ripen. From the perspective of a winemaker, grapes go through two phases: an initial growth phase, during which time the berry size steadily increases, and a following ripening phase during which berry growth slows, sugar levels start increasing and acidity starts dropping (pH increases) [Ignore the anthocyanin in the cool cool graph I stole from the Texas Cooperative Extension page]. The transition between these two phases is called veraison - this is a French term which means "change of color of the grape berries". The berries start softening, and their color starts changing from fresh growth green to the color appropriate for their varietal (i.e., "red wine grapes" start getting reddish purple, "white wine grapes" start getting yellow-gold). Shortly after veraison is when you want to start taking readings of the sugar levels in the grapes to gauge how the ripening process is progressing.

Sugars levels in a liquid is measured in brix. The unit of measure- ment for brix is "degrees", so when you take a brix reading of the grapes, you'll record a result of something like "19.5 degrees brix". To take a brix reading of the grapes, you first walk around each "block" of vines (Three Fox "blocks" are 30 rows long) in the vineyard, and take a random sampling of 15 or so grapes. This random sample should include grapes from the beginning, middle and end of the vines, as well as from both of the East and West facing sides of the vines (Three Fox rows are oriented N-S). You then allow the grapes to rest a bit, and cool down to 65 degrees F or so (winery temps). Then you mash them up and use a refractometer (or fancier instrument, but a refractometer gives you a precise enough reading at this point) to measure the brix by placing a couple drops of the juice on the plate and looking through the viewer and taking your reading.

So, we had done this with our Viognier and Pinot Grigio a few days prior, and knew that we were within the "harvestable" window in terms of brix levels (I don't have my notes, so I can't tell you exactly what the brix levels were, but they were in the low 20s). Thus we decided to harvest the fruit before a possible storm could negatively affect their quality.

Next Up: Harvest and Crush
I think this has been a rather scary post for the non-technically inclined, with lots of weird terms like "brix" and "refractive index" thrown into it, so I'm cutting this one off. My next post will detail the harvest, crush, press and yeast addition to start off the fermentation of the Viognier and Pinot Grigio, and will have cool pictures rather than boring graphs!

A Mini-batch of Chardonnay

2007-09-25T13:47:00.000-04:00

After our final bottling of the 2006 vintage at Three Fox, there was much cleaning of tanks and re-arranging of the winery that had to occur. Since our indoor temperature-controlled space is pretty limited, we had moved several (empty) stainless steel fermentation tanks outside to make room for the oak barrels that we aged the red wines in. Now that those barrels, too, were empty after bottling, we had to reverse the process, cleaning out the oak barrels with soda ash and moving the stainless steel tanks back inside.

Easing into the 2007 Vintage
The first harvest to come in was a small batch of 800+ lbs (not quite half a ton) of Chardonnay. Grapes come in to the winery in small, sturdy plastic containers called "lugs". Each lug holds approximately 30 pounds of freshly harvested grapes. (I have since determined that lug is a very appropriate term, as you spend a considerable amount of time and effort lugging them around!) Lugs are filled to just below the top of the container such that when they are stacked, none of the grapes get squished by the container above it.

Whole Cluster Press
For this small of a batch of grapes (~800 lbs), we have to use a small 1/4 ton press as there isn't enough mass to sufficiently fill our (much nicer, faster and exceeding less messy) 3 ton rotating bladder press (I'll show you this bad boy in subsequent posts). The "technique" we used for this Chardonnay was "whole cluster press", meaning the entire grape cluster (grapes, stems and all) are all dumped into the the press. An alternate method sometimes employed for whites is to send them through a destemmer first, to gently jiggle all of the grapes from the stems, and then only the grapes are pressed. Or, you may send the grapes through a crusher/destemmer, where the grapes are first destemmed, then crushed - breaking the skins and allowing the juice to flow freely out of them - before being pumped into a wine press. This last method is the one we used for our Viognier and Pinot Grigio, and I'll describe it in a later post.

So, here's a picture of the small 1/4 ton wine press we used for the Chardonnay. Grapes are simply dumped into the top of the press, which has a large bladder in the center of it. It's a bit tricky to see the actual press in this picture as it's been wrapped in plastic, but the wine press is made of wooden slats with a small space between each slat. These had been soaked in water for a day or two prior to use so that the wood has absorbed some water and swollen in size, pressing close together. Typically, you line the inside of the press with a mesh screen, which prevents grapes and seeds and things from squishing through the wooden slats, clogging them up and making a mess. We did not have such a screen available, so wrapped the outside in plastic to catch the "burps" of grape skins and seeds that would occasionally squirt out during press.

In the center of the press a large rubber bladder which will eventually be filled with water (this is a hydraulic press - our larger press is pneumatic and uses compressed air which is much faster). As the bladder expands, the grape clusters are pressed against the wooden slats, breaking them open and forcing the juice from the grapes. The juice runs down to the bottom of the press, where it is collected in a clean bucket. We then carried the bucket to a stainless steel fermentation tank, and carefully poured it in. Voila - we're ready to start making wine! And the only thing we need to do that is some yeast.

Fermentation
Since we want to end up with wine and not grape juice, we employ yeast to convert the sugar in the grapes into alcohol in the process of fermentation. Yeast occurs naturally in the environment, and there are generally several strains of yeast living on the grape skins, in the winery, everywhere. It is possible (even likely) that if we did nothing at this point, our grape juice would start fermenting naturally from the "wild" yeasts of the vineyard. However, each strain of yeast has its own characteristics and ferments in a slightly different way, some proceeding faster or slower, some producing hydrogen sulfide or other unpleasantness, having different alcohol tolerances, etc etc. Thus most winemakers like to stick with a known variable and add in a specific strain of yeast rather than take a gamble and see what happens to develop.

There are numerous strains of yeast commercially available to pick from. The type of yeast we used for this Chardonnay is called Lavlin #D47, which is especially recommended for white varieties. Much like the yeast you might buy from the grocery store for baking, D47 comes in packets in a powdered form. To determine how much D47 to add, we multiply the volume of grape juice in gallons by 0.75, and the result is the number of grams of yeast to add. The yeast is not added directly into the stainless steel tank however - you must first "wake up" the yeast from their powdered dormancy. To do this, we filled a bucket with a couple of gallons of the pressed juice, then added the entire amount of yeast for the whole batch into the bucket. We stirred this up, then let it sit for about 30 minutes.

When we returned, the brew was bubbling nicely (the result of the yeast releasing carbon dioxide) and the smell you would normally attribute to baking bread was in the air. Thus we knew our yeast had taken off and were happily munching on the grape sugars, so at this point we are safe to pour the bucket of yeast into the tank full of waiting juice. And that is largely the end of the story for this Chardonnay for several weeks, until the fermentation has concluded (i.e., all of the sugar has been converted to alcohol, resulting in a "dry" wine and killing off the yeast for lack of food) and we start racking the wine from tank to tank to remove the sediment ("lees"). More on that process in a later post. Next up: Viognier and Pinot Grigio!

Makin' Wine in Virginia...

2007-09-19T23:43:00.000-04:00

So you may have noticed my posting frequency dropped off a cliff. After a fun summer of vacations, I was ready to get back into the thick of it when an opportunity came along that I just couldn't pass up: starting in the end of August, I have been working as a part-time winery assistant for Three Fox Vineyards! Luckily I have been able to work some flexibility into my "day job" so that I can work at Three Fox on Wednesdays and Fridays (and my wife and I both continue to work periodic weekends)!

This has been an amazing learning experience for me so far - I started just as harvest season rolled around, and there certainly has been plenty to do! So I think I am going to start posting about the ins-and-outs of working at a small, family-owned winery during harvest for the next couple of months. I think this should provide whatever readers have stuck with me through my summer hiatus with an interesting and educational look at winemaking in Virginia.

Out with the Old, In with the New
One of the first things we had to do in preparation for the coming harvest was bottle up the remaining 2006 wine! We'll be needing those tanks and barrels that the wine is sitting in for this year's fruit, so time to bottle everything up. It doesn't make sense for a small (~3,000 cases per year) winery to own their own bottling equipment, and so what most folks do is rent out a "bottling truck". If you saw this thing driving down the highway, there's no way you would think it contained a mobile bottling lab!

It's a bit of a tight squeeze on the inside, with a bottle washer, wine dispenser, corking machine, foil - adder - and - heat - it - to - shrink - it machine, labeler, and conveyor belts everywhere (no, I have no idea of what everything is called, but it's fascinating to watch!). And let me tell you, this thing really MOVES - we were pumping out a case of wine approximately every 10 seconds! "Frantic" only begins to describe the sense of urgency you feel as more than one bottle a second is hurtling down the line at you, to be yanked from the belt and shoved into boxes by hand - there is literally no time for mistakes. Luckily, bottling is an entertaining enough event that we had a good crop of volunteers there, so someone could step in and swap out positions once the repetition of whatever it was you were doing started getting to you.

I don't have the exact numbers right now, but we ended up bottling several hundred cases of wine in the matter of a few hours. Not bad for a days work! And now all of our stainless steel tanks are empty and ready for cleaning in preparation for fermentation.

Timeline
So this final bottling run actually occurred in late August. Not to ruin the surprise, but we have already harvested our Viognier and Pinot Grigio and pressed them along with a load of Vidal from one of our growers and started their fermentations, and we've also received a load of Chambourcin grapes from one of our growers which we crushed and started fermentation. None of the other reds are ready for harvest yet, so I have a bit of a breather in which to catch up to the present with my posts. My next post will discuss how we determined when the Viognier and Pinot Grigio were ready to harvest, what goes on during harvest, and what wine chemistry we performed on the newly pressed juice prior to fermentation. So stick around - it should be an interesting next couple of months!

Summer = Vacations...

2007-08-17T22:06:00.000-04:00

Wow, so blogging in the summertime is a tricky affair. As a government employee, I'm blessed with a low wage but copious amounts of vacation and comp time. My wife and I have been putting that to good use this summer, and the results are showing in my meager blog postings. Our latest trip was out to Portland, Oregon and through the Willamette Valley wine country - I'll cover that in my next post. This post, I want to do a couple mini-reviews on a few of the more interesting wines we've had this summer...

I arranged the bottles in no particular order, so I may as well start left-to-right...

2006 Strauss Samling 88 (Scheurebe)
I think the important things to remember from that name are "Strauss" (the winery) and "Scheurebe" (the grape). Weingut Strauss ("Weingut" is the German way of saying "winery" or "vineyard") is an Austrian vineyard that makes a variety of interesting wines, one of which is from the Scheurebe grape.

The Scheurebe is a cross between Riesling and Sylvaner, and my immediate thought upon first tasting it was if Germans were to make Viogniers, this is what it would taste like. It has a flowery, peachy sweet nose that really jumps out of the glass at you, and some of that peach comes through to the tongue, with a stony mineraliness and a nice lemon acidity to it. It's sweet yet dry, which I find refreshing in German/Austrian wines as so many of them seem to contain a hint (if not more) of residual sugar. The Scheurebe also had an appealing golden yellow color in the glass, which added to its allure. Purchased for $12 at Finewine.Com in Gaithersburg, MD, I'd say this wine had Good Quality-to-Price Ratio (QPR). And if you bought it somewhere that wasn't Maryland, you'd pay several bucks less for it which would make it a great "alternative summer wine"!

2005 Pisano Cisplatino Tannat Merlot
Always bravely going where few have gone before (vinologically speaking), I picked up a wine from Uruguay a while back. I bet most Americans would have trouble naming the appropriate continent that Uruguay is located on (South America), much less point to it on a map. But regardless of where it's located (in between Argentina and Brazil along the Atlantic Coast), the important thing here is that they make some pretty good wine!

So the real reason I picked this up is because I saw that it was made with 60% Tannat (and 40% Merlot). I have encountered Tannat a couple of times in the past: it is a major player in wines from the Cahors region of Southwestern France; it is also grown at a handful of vineyards in Virginia, particularly at Hillsborough where they blend it into their Ruby wine (all of their wines are named after gemstones). But the interesting thing about Tannat (undoubtedly named due to its high tannin levels) is that, much like Malbec in Argentina or Carmenere in Chile, it has found a perfect home in South America - specifically in Uruguay, where it is considered the national grape.

Getting on to the wine - it had a very pleasant nose, spicy, some tobacco perhaps. The wine was lighter in color than I was expecting, given the whole tannat=tannin thing. It most closely resembled a grenache, actually. On the tongue was the spice, with black pepper and bright berries. I think this wine was around $12 at Total Wine in McLean, VA, and for that price I'd give it a Good QPR - mainly because it's "different", and I always like trying new wines.

2004 Mas de Guiot Cabernet-Syrah
I'm not sure what made me pick up this bottle in the store, but it sure as heck wasn't the label - I don't believe they could make this wine appear any less interesting if they made a deliberate attempt to do so. The French seem particularly afflicted with "lame label syndrome" - one of the many traditions that I think they need to change if they want to become more competitive in a global wine market... Anyway, I'm glad I grabbed a bottle despite the label, because it ended up being really good!

The wine was made from 60% Cabernet Sauvignon and 40% Syrah, and came from the heart of Southern Rhône near Nîmes. It had a big nose of black pepper and ripe cherries. On the tongue there was the ripe cherries in front giving way to deeper blackberry and tobacco, with a black pepper / spice finish. It had great tannin structure, and excellent overall balance. Kind of gave me the impression of a superb Argentinian Cab for some reason. For $16 at Total Wine, I'd give this a Very Good QPR.

2004 Hillsborough Opal
Hillsborough is one of our favorite Virginia wineries; they produce all blends, and as I just mentioned above each is named after a gemstone. The Opal is a blend of Viognier and Chardonnay, making for a crisp, medium-bodied white wine. It had a "timid nose" (to use wine snob speak), but quite a bit of flavor: lemon citrus, red apple, pineapple, and perhaps some peach notes. It was a bit sweeter than I was expecting, but it the cornucopia of fruit pulled it off somehow.

I didn't write down a price, but being a small boutique Virginia winery I'm guessing this was in the low $20s. Given that, I'd give this wine an "OK" QPR - you could probably find something similar for less, but probably not from Virginia. I think Virginia is starting to craft really distinctive wines with certain varietals, and Viognier is definitely a grape that is starting to thrive here. So the Opal should probably get some extra QPR points simply for being an interesting Virginia wine.

2005 Hacienda Araucano Carmenére
First off, I obviously need to apologize for the picture quality - it was late (and dark), I was trying not to flash out the cool watermarked image on the label, and I just snapped a single picture and hoped for the best. Clearly, the best is not what occurred. But you can see it well enough to identify it in a store sometime I bet...

So - another Chilean Carmenére: I told you before that I just love these wines! If you've never heard of Carmenere and what to learn a bit more about it, you can read my past post about Anakena, another Chilean Carmenére.

This Carmenére was also quite good. I misplaced my tasting notes, which were written on some scratch piece of paper while watching a movie, so I can't tell you exactly how it was good, but trust me that it was. :-)

This wine was purchased for $13 at Rodman's, and for that price I'd say the Araucano (like virtually every Chilean Carmenére that I've had) has Very Good QPR. It definitely gets a spot on my "buy again" list!

OK, mini catch-up post complete - more regularly scheduled wine commentary on the way!

Vote for your Favorite Virginia Winery!

2007-08-13T10:14:00.000-04:00

I have a big long explanation coming of why I haven't had any posts in almost a month now, but I wanted to sneak in a quick announcement first: the Virginia Wine Festival is coming up September 15th & 16th at the Morven Park Equestrian Center in Leesburg, VA. They have an online poll to vote for your favorite Virginia winery, and I think it would be really cool if Three Fox Vineyards, the winery that Kris and I volunteer at, won! We really do think it produces some of the best wines Virginia has to offer, but when you factor in the overall Three Fox Experience of visiting the winery, chatting with the owners, relaxing in a hammock down by the creek or playing horseshoes, croquet or bocce out on the lawn, we think it's tops!

If you've had the chance to stop by and visit and agree with us - please click on over to the Virginia Wine Festival Voting Page, and cast your vote for Three Fox Vineyards! And if you haven't paid us a visit, or live out-of-state, you could take our word for it that Three Fox really is terrific and click on over and vote for us anyway! :-)

Pesto Galore!

2007-07-18T23:26:00.000-04:00

Basil is definitely in full bloom here in the Mid-Atlantic! Not only do we grow some basil out in the yard, but we also belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) which bestows upon us massive quantities of basil each week. And what's the best thing to do with an abundant supply of basil? Pesto of course! I'm sure I will begin to tire of fresh pesto meals, but I haven't yet. In fact, the cool thing about pesto is that if you make extra, you can place it into an ice cube tray and freeze it. Then whenever you want pesto, just pop out a cube or two and throw it in to the mix and voila! Instant pesto.

So, when looking for a good wine match for pesto, I stumbled upon this SF Chronicle article gathering the opinions of great SF Bay chefs on the classic summer dilemma of pairing wine with fresh vegetables. Virtually all raw veggies are pretty wine un-friendly, and choosing a nice wine match for a meal starring even cooked veggies can be a challenge. So I was happy to find this advice for matching wine to meals made from fresh herbs, such as pesto:

"Green herbal and grassy notes in many New Zealand and some domestic Sauvignon Blancs, and other white wines like Albarino, echo summer herbs' freshness. Wines with intense fruit can work well, provided they doesn't have too much leftover sugar.

If the herbs are used along with richer ingredients like cheese or butter, a light red may be a good option. As for pesto, its intensity requires an equally intense wine.

Examples: Albarino; unoaked or lightly oaked Chardonnay; Gruner Veltliner; dry Riesling; Sauvignon Blancs with some weight, depth and grassy or mineral notes; Italian Sangiovese; light to moderately oaked Barbera or Dolcetto."

I was fresh out of my typical stand-by for such a circumstance, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc; but as luck would have it, I had a nice Gruner Veltliner patiently awaiting consumption in the cellar.

Grüner Veltliner
Never heard of Grüner Veltliner? It's definitely a grape worth remembering. As you might guess by the name, the grape is most widely grown in Austria (accounting for over 1/3 of all grapes grown there) although it is beginning to catch on elsewhere. I think of "Gee-Vee" as the Germanic world's New Zealand Sauv Blanc - minerally, crisp and fresh with a nice acidity, Gruner Veltliners are very food friendly, and are as age-worthy (if not more so) than dry Rieslings.

2005 Anton Bauer Gruner Veltliner
Tonight's wine was a 2005 Anton Bauer Gruner Veltliner. Besides displaying the typical GV characteristics mentioned above, this wine had some melon to it, and perhaps some white pepper. The overall impression though is of a fresh, clean wine which went spectacularly with our fresh pesto! (Thanks SF Chronicle!)

Selling for $11 at Total Wine in McLean, VA, I'd say this wine has a Good Quality-to-Price Ratio (QPR). I'll give it a couple extra points for variety's sake as it's an excellent alternative once you've exhausted your palate on Sauvignon Blancs and Unoaked Chardonnays during the hot summer months. If you've never tried one, give it a shot!

Vino in the BVI

2007-07-12T23:56:00.000-04:00

So, Vinvenio has been on summer vacation for a while here, with a nice chunk of that time spent sailing around the British Virgin Islands! Kris and I chartered a 45' sailing catamaran and cruised the islands - awesome. But even in the rum-soaked Caribbean, I still found ample opportunity to enjoy some quality vino! In fact, I think the American Yacht Harbor's Marina Market in Red Hook, St. Thomas had a better selection of American wines (California, Washington and Oregon) than I can find here in euro-centric Maryland!

2005 Rodney Strong Sauvignon Blanc
Yee-haw! I finally get to take a shot of a scrumptious looking bottle of white wine sweating in the heat of the day to rival those of Winedeb from Deb's Key West Wine blog!

This 2005 Rodney Strong Charlotte's Home Sauvignon Blanc was enjoyed with a chef's salad off the coast of Jost Van Dyke (pronounced "yoast van dike"), BVI. As you can probably tell by the picture, virtually any beverage is going to taste just splendid given the surroundings, but I think this wine really pulled through beyond that. This medium-bodied Sauv Blanc had a nice pear, citrus/pineapple and melon taste, with a mineral tanginess to it that refreshed the palate. I didn't record the price, but given the slightly inflated price of anything imported to the islands it may not have been representative of its US mainland cost (although I doubt it cost more than $20 even in the VI). Thus, no Quality-to-Price ratio (QPR) for this wine, but all I've mentally put this wine in my "buy again for a refreshing white" list.

2005 Estancia Monterey Pinnacles Ranches Pinot Noir
"Uncork & Unwind" says Estancia. And so we did! You definitely know you're not roughing it when you can not only find a bottle of Pinot Noir, but Port Salut cheese to accompany it! If you've never paired Pinot with Port Salut cheese, you must do so immediately - this is a match made in heaven, and you don't know what you're missing!

This Pinot had a nose of cherries, tobacco and spice. The cherries and spiciness carried through to the palate, which also displayed a nice earthiness to it. I must admit that Pinot Noir doesn't play a very prominent role in my day-to-day wine consumption. This is not because I don't like it - on the contrary, I love the versatility of a red wine that can be consumed slightly chilled (especially handy on 90 degree days), paired with fish (which goes well with my largely pescetarian diet), etc. No, the reason I don't drink much Pinot is that I'm a cheapskate. Everyone who watched Sideways now knows that Pinot Noir is a fickle grape, difficult to grow and offering lower yields (thus increasing its price). Well, I try to keep my typical wine consumption in the $10-$15 range, which in my experience excludes almost any Pinot worth drinking.

Thus my Pinot Noir palate is quite limited. But that limited palate has convinced me that there are two major styles of Pinots - velvetty and spicy. These two styles aren't mutually exclusive - there is certainly some overlap - but in general it seems to me that some Pinot makers bring out a spiciness, and others concentrate on a more subtle, smoother wine. This Estancia Pinot Noir was firmly in the spicy camp. In general I think I'm more of a "velvetty Pinot" fan, but at around $17 in the BVI, I think I'd probably buy this Pinot again. For a Pinot, I'd say this wine has a good QPR, especially if you're looking for a light, spicy wine. Me, I'd love to find some affordable "velvetty Pinots", so if you know of any please let me know!

Completely Non-Wine Related
So wine is obviously my alcoholic beverage of choice, but given my sailing/piratical leanings, I'm also a big fan of rum and rum drinks (especially while in da islands mon). Some hot summer day when you want to transport yourself to the islands, make up a batch of the best mixed rum drink ever - "Painkillers". This stuff is so good you're going to want to mix this up by the pitcher, so here's the relative proportions of the ingredients:

-4 parts (cups) pineapple juice
-1 part (cup) orange juice
-1 part (cup) cream of coconut (Coco Lopez brand at your local grocery store)
-2,3 or 4 parts rum (known as a Painkiller #2, #3 or #4)
-Pour into glass with ice and sprinkle with nutmeg

In terms of rum, I personally prefer my Painkillers made with Cruzan Rum (made in St. Croix, USVI - also a key sponsor of Kenny Chesney, who sings country songs about the Virgin Islands, but I digress). The "original" Painkiller was made with Pussers rum however, at this little beach bar on Jost Van Dyke called the Soggy Dollar Beach Bar (so-called because it doesn't have a dock, and sailors visiting the island would swim ashore thus soaking their cash). So Cruzan or Pussers - you'll be fine. As long as it's a gold rum, and not some nasty spiced rum like Capt. Morgan or something. :-) Enjoy!

Look at those Grapes Grow!

2007-06-17T23:16:00.000-04:00

Just last week the grapes at Three Fox Vineyards in Delaplane, VA were but babes - check 'em out this week!
Our baby grapes are well on their way to being all grown up...

We won't be volunteering out there again until mid-July, so this will be our last "grape update" for awhile... I wonder what they'll look like then!

A Tale of Two Rieslings

2007-06-13T18:30:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned in the past, I'd like to taste some more Rieslings. According to the wine goddess Andrea (Immer) Robinson, Rieslings are very versatile white wines that can pair well with food and are generally under-appreciated in the US. Since most of the food I eat on a regular basis (especially in the summertime) consists of veggies and fish, an exploration of Rieslings seems in order.

The two Rieslings I'm comparing here were not tasted back-to-back, but a couple days apart. And to foreshadow my conclusions here, neither compared to the Alsace Riesling we tasted during our "Big Six" tasting a couple weeks ago (I loved that wine!!), although one came close, and for almost half the price....

Bonny Doon vs Dr. Loosen
The two Rieslings tasted were the 2005 Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Dry Riesling and the 2005 Loosen "Dr. L" Riesling. In the traditional anti-establishment tradition of Bonny Doon, the Pacific Rim Dry Riesling was made from a blend of Washington State and Mosel (Germany) grapes; the Dr. L simply mentioned the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region of Germany
as the source. Both wines were purchased at Total Wine in McLean, VA for $10 and $11, respectively.

Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Dry Riesling
As with all Bonny Doon wines, you can tell right away just from the bottle that the wine is going to be a little "different". ("Different" doesn't even begin to describe Bonny Doon founder and wine philosopher Randall Grahm - just check out their webpage and you'll see what I mean).

So, the idea behind the "Pacific Rim" Dry Riesling is that Washington State is a wonderful place to grow Riesling as the long, cool growing season allows the grapes to fully ripen while maintaining good natural acidity; however, Bonny Doon felt that German Rieslings have a "haunting floral perfume" to them that can't be matched. So they blend in approximately 25% German Riesling into 75% Washington State, et viola - the Pacific Rim Dry Riesling.

(Just for the record, Bonny Doon Vineyard started off just outside of Santa Cruz, CA. Always looking to expand vinilogical horizons, they have spread out to producing wine from Washington State, Italy, France, and probably a couple other countries / locales).

Tasting the Pacific Rim Dry Riesling
So I wanted to highlight that word, DRY, in the title for a reason - I now know what I need to look for in a Riesling to enjoy it - it has to be DRY!

Dry is kind of an interesting word in the wine lexicon, since is doesn't have an obvious meaning. I mean, how can a liquid be "dry", anyway? A lot of red wines may make your mouth feel dry, but that is actually due to their tannins, and is not what the term refers to in wine. In the wine world, dry refers to the fact that all of the grape's natural sugars have been converted via fermentation to alcohol. (Paradoxically, a "dry" county is one that doesn't allow alcohol, so it's no wonder people get confused with this term.) Most "normal" table wines are in fact "dry". Even wines that may seem sweet (many white wines for example) usually don't have any residual sugar left in them and it's just their flavors that make them appear sweet (with the major exception of dessert and fortified wines such as port and madeira).

Getting back to Rieslings - an important thing to look for in Rieslings to clue you in to their style is either the word "dry" on the label, or more likely their alcohol content. This Bonny Doon Pacific Rim was 12% alcohol (the Domaine Trimbach Alsace Riesling I loved so much from our Big Six Tasting was 12.5% alcohol); the Dr. L German Riesling was 8.5% (and as you'll see, this was not what I was looking for). With Rieslings in particular, there are two distinct styles that crop up - sweet and not-so-sweet. The sweet wines are the ones with a lower percent alcohol than the "not-so sweet" dry Rieslings (in general).

End of tangent - now for the tasting notes.

The 2005 Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Riesling had a big nose of pear, maybe lemon and a hint of floral. On the tongue it was nice and crisp, but not overly acidic - very well balanced. There was a hint of crisp apple, with some pear and citrus coming through. Overall we thought this wine had a Good Quality-to-Price Ratio, and will go down on our "buy again" list! We paired this with Indian cuisine and it worked fairly well.

Dr. Loosen - "the Man" of Riesling
So I wanted to do some research here to be able to tell you how important Ernst Loosen (loh-zen) was to world-wide Riesling production, but I couldn't find any pages detailing his influence. So you're just going to have to trust my memory in that I'm pretty sure he's taken his years of experience in Germany and has helped vineyards get Riesling get established in both New York State and Washington State (probably elsewhere as well). So when it comes to Riesling, I think Dr. L is something of "the Man".

Tasting the Loosen "Dr. L" Mosel-Saar-Ruwer Riesling
So the big downer here is that I should have looked at the label before popping this one open for dinner - having recently experienced the joys of dry Riesling, I thought this may go well with some grilled salmon we were having for dinner. D'oh! That 8.5% alcohol meant sweet sweet sweet - definitely nothing you'd want to mix with salmon. So I was a little annoyed at this wine for tricking me from the get-go, so may have been less objective in my analysis...

The Dr. L had apricot, citrus, and perhaps cut grass on the nose. On the tongue it was fruity, maybe with some pineapple, had a bit of gravel to it and had only a bit of acidity. Since it was so sweet I think this wine would need to be paired with really spicy foods if it had any chance to pair well. It had a very nice finish though.

Overall impression here is that if you like sweeter whites, you'd probably like this wine - I could tell it was crafted fairly well, but it just wasn't at all what I was looking for at the time so I couldn't really get into it. We Vacu-Vin'ed it and popped it back in the fridge, but even drinking it on its own the next day just wasn't doing it for me. Again - I'm just not really into sweet wines, so I think this is simply my palate versus any fault of the wine.

In Search of Dry Rieslings
So now that I know the importance of finding dry Rieslings, I'm in search of good examples under $20 (preferably under $15!). Anyone have any favorites? I'd love to hear about them, as I plan to continue my Riesling exploration as the mercury continues to rise this summer! In the meantime, I'm now going to be sure to check out alcohol content on each bottle before I buy it, and try to find some 12.5+% Rieslings to enjoy!

A Quick Foodie Post-Script
So I've gotten comments from folks wanting to know more about the food Kris and I have made to pair with some of our different wines. Well, as I mentioned before we were hoping for a dry Riesling to pair our salmon with the Dr. L Riesling, which didn't end up happening. But here was our meal nonetheless...

The salmon was pretty easy - we just cooked it on the grill in a foil packet with some onions and green garlic from our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture - I love the food we get each week!!) The side was a Sweet Corn and Black Bean Salad - a recipe we picked up from Whole Foods. This salad rocks!! It's a cold salad with corn, beans, onions and red pepper and a simple rice vinegar, olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper dressing. This is a great summer salad, and I recommend anyone living in a remotely warm place this summer check it out!

And the grand finale of the meal was a raspberry rhubarb pie, again made from super fresh CSA produce! I'm a big fan of rhubarb, and look forward to rhubarb pies each summer. I also made a strawberry rhubarb pie with berries we picked ourselves down the road at Butler's Orchard, a pick your own fruits and veggies place. Overall, I think the raspberries blend better with the tarter taste of rhubarb than strawberries do, which I think are more traditionally used. But both pies rock!

Chilean Merlot - while I still can! (by Kris, not Nate) :-)

2007-06-12T21:08:00.000-04:00

Upon much prodding from Nate, I have decided to chime in and add my 2-cents for a wine blog here and there. It seems only appropriate that I start with my latest fascination, Chilean merlots! As June progresses and the summer continues to heat up, I relish the nights where it cools down below 70 degrees and I can still sneak in a glass of red wine (or two!). Nate and I have discovered the fantastic flavors and values of Chilean merlots and have been enjoying trying different bottles, to find a favorite.

We have somewhat recently adopted the Carmen merlot as our "house red" which we buy by the case and keep around for everyday drinking, a great second bottle, or just a guilt-free open. At only $6, this merlot is fantastic, (and has a high QPR, as Nate would say). :-) If we haven't written it up already, we should and will... However, recently we decided to experiment and see what a few more dollars would buy you from Chile.

Tonight's bottle is a 2005, Santa Rita Reserva Merlot from the Maipo Valley. The aromas are fairly intense, dark berries, currant (I have a story about that in a second) and distinct tones of vanilla. On the palate it is bursting with fruit, but is immediately balanced by the tannins and a hint of spice. I think this could be a red that could please both the "big-fruity" people as well as those liking their tannins and a bit more complexity. It's very enjoyable just sipping, but also went well with a polenta-veggie-lasagna I made tonight. What this Santa Rita has taught me is that while it is good to have a safe, $6 house read wine, when you want a treat, you don't have to splurge much more to get a large, lush and tasty merlot. This bottle cost $11 and I would definitely buy again when I want something a bit more special.

Now, since Nate always goes on tangents, I feel as though I need to follow suit....about currants: I had always seen wine described as having aromas or flavors of currant, but never had seen nor had a currant - we discussed whether this was an "old world" fruit that no longer is relevant as a wine descriptor today.... But, not more than a couple days later, while shopping at Trader Joe's, we happened upon a bag of dried currants and had to try it! To eat our words, (somewhat literally), we popped open the bag and tried our first currents! The flavor is intense, much like I would imagine a dried blackberry, mixed with a blueberry, and maybe a cherry too. Its tart, but also sweet, and definitely a flavor I have had in wine before. I really do think there is currant in the Santa Rita, although I admit to being a bit eager to find it in a wine - I guess I'll just need to eat a few more, and sip a bit more to be sure!

The Grapes are Growing in Virginia!

2007-06-10T21:15:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned before, my wife Kris and I volunteer in the tasting room at Three Fox Vineyards in Delaplane, VA. We were just out there this last weekend, and I thought I'd post a picture to show you that the grapes are starting to take form in Virginia!

More updates as the growing season progresses! I'm missing out on bottling next week or I'd document that for you, but hope to have pictures from different aspects of the winemaking process as it comes up!

We Have the Facts And Are Voting Pink!

2007-06-03T22:38:00.000-04:00

Pink is definitely shaping up to be THE color for wine this summer. Both Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast have run cover stories on rosés, and the general media at large have picked up on this trend and run stories in newspapers across the US, so rosé - your time is now!

Catavino's Virtual Rosé Wine Tasting last month really piqued my interest in pink, and I plan to continue my exploration of rosés this summer. As I mentioned in my previous rosé tasting notes, I'd been a bit traumatized by White Zinfandel in the past, so it's taken me a while to come around to the notion that not all pink wine is wretchingly sweet. Once I overcame that roadblock, I've really started enjoying rosés!

The bottle
So I admit, I bought this wine for no reason other than it had a really cool bottle. Seriously, check that out - how cool is that?! I'm all for more interesting bottles, as long as they still fit within a wine rack, and just as importantly, fit within a refrigerator! (I'm frequently annoyed with Rieslings and Gewurztraminers in their tall skinny bottles that only fit cock-eyed in the fridge).

So anyway, I really liked the shape bottle. I did look beyond the bottle shape enough to note that this wine came from Côtes de Provence, France before purchasing it - I figured the French abhor sweet table wine, so I was pretty safe in avoiding anything remotely resembling White Zinfandel. Plus, Wine Enthusiast claimed that 8% of all the world's rosé was produced in Provence, so I figured they'd be a pretty safe bet.

But back to the bottle - not only was it a funky shape, it also had a raised sun and palm tree on the glass: again, trés cool. I've mentioned before that I'm a total sucker for wine bottles with raised images... See, I wasn't kidding. We're going to have to keep this one and make it into an oil candle or something.

The Label
Besides stating that it was from Provence, in typical French style the label was very unhelpful in conveying any useful information about the wine (grapes used, brief tasting notes, pairing suggestions, etc).

What I'd really like to start seeing on wine bottles is a website address! In a recent post, Winedeb mentioned that she found a web address on the cork - perfect location! If you're in a restaurant and you find something you like, you can just take the cork home with you as a "business card" of sorts. Why don't more wineries do this?? I'm sure the corks must cost a little more, but I think the cost would be more than offset by increased sales as people would be much more likely to be able to find the same wine again. I think this would be particularly helpful with French, Spanish or Italian wines - I always have a tricky time trying to Google for particular wines from non-English speaking countries, so having their web address would really help (even if I had to have Google translate the page, at least I'd be starting off in the right spot!)

Since its label was so unhelpful, I went online hoping to at least find out if this wine was made from Grenache, Cinsault, or Syrah grapes - all of which are likely given its Provence appellation. But alas, a few minutes of searching turned up no pertinent information, so I'll just have to live in ignorance...

Tasting the Pink
This 12.5% alcohol 2006 Roque Martin rosé was purchased for $10 at Rodmans. As you can kind of tell in the photo, it was a nice dark salmon color. My first impression was that there wasn't much on the nose - this may have been because it was too cold, as I started getting notes of light berries, maybe strawberry, afterwards. First impression of the taste was similar - it made me think of Dr. Deb's recent description of a wine as "gravel with a twist of lemon". This wine was very minerally, with nice acidity and a slight citrus edge to it. It hardly had any fruit (although I started tasting berries a bit later) although it still came off with a hint of sweetness.

Overall Recommendation
This wine was thankfully not too sweet, so would work as either a summer sipper or paired with light fare, maybe even fish. I was not overly impressed by this wine though, and for $10 I would have to say it has just average quality-to-price ratio. I'm going to have to keep looking for the "perfect pink", and hopefully can find a favorite or two by the end o the summer!

Virtual Albariño Wine Tasting!

2007-06-01T01:19:00.000-04:00

The good folks from Catavino are at it again! The theme of this month's "Virtual Wine Tasting" - Spanish Albariños! As with all Catavino Virtual Wine Tastings, you don't need a blog to join in on the fun - just grab a bottle that falls within that month's category and post it directly to Catavino's website.

So - Albariño. I'd heard of this white wine before, even have tasted one or two in the past, but didn't have any distinct recollections to know what to expect, or to steer me in my wine selection. So I did a quick search of what Total Wine in McLean had to offer, and my "choice" became quite simple - they only had one in stock. Thus I ended up with a $15 2006 Val Do Sosego Albariño from the Rías Baixas region of Spain.

Albarino and Rias Baixas
The Albariño grape (called Alvarinho in Portugal) is grown predominantly in Galicia in Northwestern Spain, as well as just across the border in the Vinho Verde region of Portugal. As seems to often be the case in the world of wine, Albariños coming from these coastal regions are said to pair quite well with food common to such a locale; in this case, that means seafood. The Rías Baixas DO (Denomination of Origin) is particularly well-known for its Albariños (and not surprisingly, it's seafood!). For additional background info/chatter, check out the Catavino forum set up for this month's tasting where you can read about it directly from the Spanish wine experts (Ryan and Gabrielle).

Tasting Notes
The 2006 Val Do Sosego Albariño from the Rías Baixas was light gold in color with just a hint of green to it. This immediately made me think of New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, and that association was just strengthened by the nose, and again by the palate.

On the nose, I picked out lemon grass and green apple, and Kris was adamant about pear. On the tongue, the lemon-grass came through, and it had a very nice minerally-ness to it. It had a higher-than-average acidity, which made this medium-bodied wine nice and crisp. I've read this phrase a lot, but I think I'd like to use the term "racy acidity" here to describe it - it just seems to fit.

So, given that Albariños are supposed to pair perfectly with seafood we probably should have attempted to cook up some fish for dinner, but that wasn't in the cards for tonight. On a tip from some blog or another, we instead paired this Albariño with Indian food and I must say - it worked really well. It's always a bit tricky to pair Navratan Korma or spicy lentils with anything wine-related, so I was pretty happy with how to find a wine that could do it.

Overall Recommendation
This wine was *very* similar to many New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs I've had. I was a little disappointed, not because it wasn't good (it was), but because it wasn't that different from other wines I've had. This wine had a very nice acidity to it, but none of the smoothness or slight creaminess I have heard attributed to Albariños, nor did it have the supposedly-distinctive apricot or peach nose. So at $15 a bottle I thought it was a great wine, but I could pay a couple dollars less and get a very comparable Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that would do the same thing for me. Perhaps I need to try again in case this was an atypical Albariño, although this was the only one carried by my usual wine shop so I'd have to hunt around a bit. But from what I've read from others posting their tasting notes on Catavino, it may be well worth my effort!

Red Wine from Germany???

2007-05-23T02:05:00.000-04:00

So I'd decided I wanted to learn more about Rieslings this summer, and was reading about some German Rieslings when I came across a reference to a red wine made in Germany - a Dornfelder. Red wine?? Germany?? Those two thoughts had never occurred in the same paragraph for me, so I was very curious to try some.

Background
Since red grapes have trouble ripening in the colder German climate, most German wines have been white (which require less ripening time on average), or have been very pale, thin reds. The Dornfelder grape was bred to provide Germany with a grape capable of producing deep, dark reds with some tannins to them. Turns out the Dornfedler is a pretty new arrival to the wine grape scene: it was bred in 1955 at Staatliche Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Wein- und Obstbau Weinsberg, which as far as I can tell is a German viticulture and enology school. The grape was named "Dornfelder" after Immanuel Dornfelder, the founder of the viticultural school.

2005 (Weingut) Anselmann Dornfelder (Pfalz, Germany)
So German wines are a bit of a mouthfull to pronounce - probably part of their marketing problem in the U.S. This is definitely not an "easy" wine in name, region, or taste, so only the vinologically adventurous would likely seek this wine out for purchase.

This wine hails from the Pfalz (Palatinate) region, the largest wine-producing region of Germany. Pfalz mainly grows Müller-Thurgau and Reisling, although they have been diversifying of late, creating more artisanal wines as well as some different varietals (such as Dornfelder).

Tasting Notes
This Dornfelder was deep ruby in color. The label advised drinking it chilled - 55 degrees F or slightly warmer. This was far too cold for the type of wine I was anticipaitng, so this immediately sent up little warning flags for me - this is not going to be a "normal" red wine...

The nose was very subdued - likely due to the colder temperature stifling the aromas. On the tongue, the Dornfelder was sweet, with flavors fo dired fruits and smoked gouda. There were few tannins - I thought this was supposed to be a "real" German red, and to me that means tannins. This wine reminded me a bit like the sweet Banyuls I recently tasted for WBW #33 - and in this case, that was not a good thing. I thought that a red German wine would be a lighter Pinot Noir-like red, suitable for pairing with fish or lighter fare - not so, with this wine.

Overall Recommendation
I am always interested in trying something new, so was glad I gave this Dornfelder a go. However, I think I was expecting to taste a German version of a Pinot Noir or something like that, and this wine ended up so very different than my expectations. Possibly because of that, I just couldn't appreciate this wine. It was just too sweet for me, especially when I was anticipating something like a fruity, smooth Pinot. My recent experiment with Banyuls made me consider, and this Dornfelder experiment has appeared to confirm, that I just don't like sweet reds unless they're Port, Madeira, Sherry - the fortified reds. So unless you think you'd be a fan of sweet reds, I'd steer clear of the Dornfelder for greener, more fortified pastures...

2005 Anakena Carmenére

2007-05-23T01:25:00.000-04:00

OK, so I realize I've had an almost week-long lull in the posting action here - I've had one heck of a week! So I'm going to post-date these blog entries to when they were supposed to have been written up! I'll catch up and get back on track - I promise!

Brief History of Carmenére
So, as I have alluded to in several previous posts, I am totally loving Chilean Carmenére. Don't worry if you've never heard of "Carmenére" - it's a bit of an obscure grape, but one well worth memorizing. Carmenére is a bit of an outcast, and I think that plays in to the appeal. Carmenére was originally grown in the Bordeaux region of France, but its low yields caused it to lose favor when French viticulturists were replanting after Phylloxera invaded Europe in the 1880s. This resulted Carmenére becoming all but extinct in its native Bordeaux.

Prior to the Phylloxera invasion, several plantings of Carmenére made their way to Chile (along with other Bordeaux grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec). Carmenére found a natural home here, and really took off. Interestingly enough, wine made from Carmenére in Chile was inaccurately labeled as "Merlot" up until genetic testing in the 1990s confirmed its identity as Carmenére. "Oops" said the Chilean winemakers, who then hastily remade their labels to say "Carmenére" instead of Merlot. Carmenére and Merlot look extremely similar in the field, and the winemakers really didn't know what they were dealing with until quite recently.

Carmenére = Chile
Similar to how Zinfandel is now associated with California, Shiraz with Australia and Malbec with Argentina, Carmenére is now seen as "Chile's grape". What could have been a mini-catastrophe in mistaken identity with Merlot, Chilean winemakers turned into a boon by instead touting the benefits and unique characteristics of Carmenére. And lucky for all of us that they did, as Carmenére has ended up being a very fascinating wine - with generally lower tannins than Merlot and big juicy fruit and spice, Carmenére is a very versatile wine that can match well with a variety of foods, or just be enjoyed on its own.

Anakena Carmenére
Anakena makes one solid Carmenére. And for only $10 (at Total Wine in McLean, VA), this wine has Excellent Quality-to-Price Ratio (QPR). The best way I can think of this Carmenére is as "a Merlot, but more so" - it's spicier, fruitier and more in-your-face than a Merlot (in a good way!), but with subtler tannins. Alternatively, think of this as a toned-down California Zinfandel. Regardless of how you think about it, I strongly recommend giving a Carmenére a shot.

The Anakena Carmenére had dark, ripe berries and spices on the nose that carried through to the palate. Clocking in at 14.5% alcohol, you'd think this wine might be a bit "hot" on the tongue, but somehow it manages to avoid that. I've had this wine on several occasions now, and enjoy it enough each time to make a point of buying more on my next vino purchasing expedition. Hopefully you'll give it a shot - let me know what you think!

Tasting the Big Six

2007-05-21T23:42:00.000-04:00

Ever since I started flipping through Andrea (Immer) Robinson's book Great Wine Made Simple, I have been itching to try out her series of recommended tastings to train the palate and help you learn to identify certain aspects / flavors / styles of wine. Well, last weekend I finally got my chance, as Kris and I held a "Big Six" tasting event!

The Big Six
The idea behind the Big Six is twofold: First, by tasting the big six grapes (Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon), you will have tasted the "guts" of roughly 80% of all wine produced throughout the world; Second, you get the opportunity to experience the full range of "bodies" - light, medium and full- in both red and white wines.

Robinson helpfully recommends specific wines in "budget", "moderate" and "splurge" monetary categories that she thinks will best illustrate varietal character and appropriate body for each grape. I found her list a very helpful starting point, and I stuck to it fairly closely. She recommends that all wines be selected from within the same price category, as you don't varying quality of wine interfering with the point of the tasting, namely varietal expression and body.

Kris and I decided in advance upon the "moderate" category - we wanted wines that tasted good, and were of high enough quality to accurately express varietal character and body, but we wanted them affordable enough so that participants could consider purchasing their favorites for casual dinners at home. This goes along with our general philosophy that wine is an "everyday beverage" - we like good wines that are affordable enough to enjoy each evening with dinner without feeling like we are blowing our budget.

Our Wine Selections
On to our selections. As I mentioned, the purpose of the Big Six is to distinguish differences in body across the major wine grapes of the world. For whites, Riesling typifies light-bodied, Sauvignon Blanc medium-bodied, and Chardonnay full-bodied; for reds, Pinot Noir typifies light-bodied, Merlot medium-bodied and Cabernet Sauvignon full-bodied. The following wines were purchased from Total Wine in McLean, VA:

Riesling: 2004 Domaine Trimbach (Alsace, France) - $16
Sauvignon Blanc: 2006 Stony Bay (Marlborough, NZ) - $12
Chardonnay: 2005 Franciscan Oakville Estate (Napa Valley, CA) - $13

Pinot Noir: 2006 Sockeye (Chile**) - $14
Merlot: 2003 Chateau St. Michelle (Columbia Valley, Washington) - $11.50
Cabernet Sauvignon: 2004 Simi Winery (Alexander Valley, CA) - $14

**Note: This is what happens when you don't do your research. I am a Pinot Noir neophyte, but have been interested in trying some Oregonian Pinots. Sockeye (like the salmon) sure sounds Northwest-ish, and this wine was filed under "Oregon". Turns out Sockeye sources grapes from different locales, and their 2003 was from Oregon, their 2004 was from Australia, and as I discovered upon returning home, their 2006 was from Chile! I thought this boded poorly for the tasting, since I have heard of a lot of great wines coming out of Chile and no one has ever mentioned Pinot...

The Wine Tasting Setup
To really be able to directly compare the different wines in the Big Six, Robinson recommends using 6 different glasses so that all wines could be poured at once. Thinking that this could end up pretty chaotic, I made a nifty little tasting mat to keep the wines in the right order.

Note to my viewers at home: this is actually a legal sized sheet of paper (8.5" x 14") - a standard 8.5" x 11" paper was just too small to allow for adequate spacing between the glasses!

So, everyone was provided with 6 glasses and a tasting sheet listing the wines we would be tasting and allowing space for them to take notes and rate them. Kris and I own a fair number of wine glasses, but at six-per-person, we had to make this a partial BYOGlasses event. In terms of the rating system, I wanted to keep this fairly straight-forward so used what many are now familiar with - the Netflix rating system: 5 stars Loved It, 4 stars Really Liked It, 3 stars Liked It, 2 stars Didn't Like It, 1 star Hated It.

The Tasting
So how'd it all work out? I must say, I was quite pleased with the results - not only did all of the wines rock in my mind (with the exception of the Chilean Pinot, which was just "OK"), but I was totally getting the whole "body" thing after about 30 minutes or so! The "tongue memory" of wine body is slightly fading, and I'd love to do this sort of tasting one more time to really solidify it, but I think the Big Six is an excellent tasting to start training your palate, and really fun to boot!

I think I will follow up this post with a second one detailing exactly why the Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay (and I didn't even think I *liked* Chardonnay!), Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon rocked. But suffice it to say that I would rate them all as exhibiting Excellent Quality-to-Price Ratio (QPR).

So What's Next?
Having had so much fun with the Big Six, I am already looking forward to the next of Andrea Robinson's recommended tastings. This next tasting involves 8 bottles, and is designed to help illustrate exactly what is meant by the tasting terms "dry", "crisp", "oaky" and "tannic". You pit a Dry Riesling vs. a Sweet Riesling, a Crisp, High-Acid Sauvignon Blanc vs. a Low-Acid Sauvignon Blanc, a "No-Oak" Chardonnay vs. an Oaky Chardonnay, and a Low-tannin Pinot Noir vs. a High-tannin Cabernet Sauvignon. This grouping seems a little more intuitive to me, as I think you pick up these terms while tasting easier than you may with wine body. But I trust Andrea's advice, and figure it's just too much fun to skip a recommended tasting! I'll let ya know how it turns out...

Wine Blogging Wednesday #33 - Entry #3

2007-05-16T02:19:00.000-04:00

Yes, I really went all out for this, my inaugural Wine Blogging Wednesday (WBW) event, and tasted THREE qualifying wines. As I've mentioned in my previous entires, the theme for this month's WBW was "Mid-Priced wines from the Midi" (i.e., $15-$30 bottles of wine from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France, also known as the Midi). You can read all about it at the WBW#33 host's blog, Doktor Weingolb.

Saving what I hoped would be the best for last, my third entry into WBW#33 was a 2004 Domaine Le Pas de l'Escalette "Les Clapas". The label proclaimed it was from the Coteaux du Languedoc AOC, and it also mentioned Terrasses du Larzac. A little research determined that Terrasses du Larzac was one of the Northern-most regions of the Languedoc-Rousillon in Southern France (I guess that just makes it Middle France?). This wine was produced by the same winemakers as my Entry #1 for WBW#33, only this wine costs an additional $5 per bottle ($20 at FineWine.com in Gathersburg, MD) and carries that added designation of "Terrasses du Larzac".

Wine Labels
A good rule of thumb I've learned when reading labels is "the more specific the label, the better the wine". For example, you may see bottles labeled as simply a "California" Cabernet Sauvignon - this is likely of lower quality than a "Sonoma County" Cabernet Sauvignon, or better yet - a "Russian River Valley" Cabernet Sauvignon from Sonoma County, CA. And the best yet is often when the label designates a specific vineyard - this is about as specific as you can get. Thus I was excited to taste a wine that should be "one step up" from my WBW#33 Entry #1 wine.

Tasting Notes
Most of the time, Kris and I see pretty eye-to-eye when it comes to wine. This is obviously quite fortunate as it makes splitting a bottle much easier! This wine was a bit of an exception however; I don't know if seasonal allergies just had me stuffed up a bit so that I was missing out, but Kris was a lot more impressed with this wine than I was.

I thought the nose was quite subdued, with hints of old leather and spices. Kris was gushing over all of the bright, young fruit on the nose, which I missed completely. On the tongue, Kris continued to taste the fruit, whereas I enjoyed the tangy spiciness of this wine. We both agreed that it had very nice complexity, especially for grenache, with nice tannin structure.

As we drank it with dinner, the wine really started to open up, and *then* I was able to start picking up some of the fruit. By this point the wine was over half gone, and we were kicking ourselves for not decanting it in the beginning. I bet if we had, I'd have had a similar initial reaction as Kris.

Overall Recommendation
This was a very enjoyable wine, but at $20, this is several bucks above our usual $8-$14 nightly bottle. Considering that, I have to rate this wine as "OK quality-to-price ratio" - the quality was there, but the price was a bit high. Kris pointed out that it was probably pretty hard to get this much complexity into wines of this style, so for her it was a good QPR. Although she could have found a bottle she enjoyed more for less, she thought that this Les Clapas was a great example of what could be done with Rhône-style blends at a much more affordable price than a Chateauneuf du Pape.

In terms of this month's WBW theme, we both really enjoyed exploring wines from the Midi, and will definitely consider Languedoc-Roussillon wines in a restaurant or for adding to our cellar! Thanks for the great theme Marcus!

Wine Blogging Wednesday #33 - Entry #2

2007-05-15T23:12:00.000-04:00

For my second entry into Wine Blogging Wednesday (WBW) #33, I tried out a "vin doux naturel" from the Banyuls region of Languedoc- Roussillon, France. As I described in my first WBW#33 entry, the theme for this month was "Mid-Priced wines from the Midi" (i.e., $15-$30 bottles of wine from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France, also known as the Midi. You can read all about it at the WBW#33 host's blog, Doktor Weingolb.

The wine I selected for Entry #2 was a 2003 Banyuls Rimage Les Clos de Paulilles, purchased for $16 (for a 500 mL bottle) at Total Wine in McLean, VA. The Banyuls region is located in the far south of France near to the border with Spain/Catalonia. "Rimage" is a Catalan word meaning vintage, so much like a vintage Port all grapes for this wine came from a single declared year (2003, in this case). Also like a vintage Port, this wine has been fortified: neutral grape alcohol is added in a process known as mutage to halt fermentation, allowing some of the natural sugars to remain in the wine. The Clos de Paulilles Banyuls was made from 100% Grenache (noir) grapes.

Tasting Notes
Rusted red in color, this Banyuls had a bit of an astringent nose (not too surprising given its 16% alcohol; this is less than many Ports however, which can be in the 20% alcohol range). You'd think this may make the wine "hot" on the tongue, but it was quite smooth. On the palate were flavors of dried cherries and dried cranberries (my wife wasn't so sure about the cranberries) - the point here is "dried" since this was a rich, intense wine, almost syrupy sweet due to the concentration of fruit flavor. I also detected a hint of berries and chocolate.

Overall Recommendation
I'm a big fan of tawny Ports, so I was interested in trying something a little different, which the 2003 Banyuls Rimage Les Clos de Paulilles most certainly was. When judged on it's own however, I would only give this Good Quality-to-price Ratio (QPR). I was definitely enjoying the wine, but for the $16 price tag I can get a 750 mL bottle of a nice tawny that I would enjoy as much or more.

But then I broke out some Green & Black's 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate. YUM!! I frequently attempt to match red wine and chocolate, but I have to say I think this is one of the most perfect matches I have yet tasted. Once the dark chocolate entered the picture, the QPR shot up to "Great". If you're interested in trying Banyuls, do yourself a favor and make sure you've got a good bar of dark chocolate in the house!

I also think the 2003 Banyuls Rimage Les Clos de Paulilles would make an interesting choice for someone looking for a red dessert wine that hasn't found what they were looking for in a Port. The slightly lower alcohol level helps ease the burn, which is what I think turns a lot of people off of Port initially. So consider this a Port Alternative for non-Port drinkers.

Working at Three Fox Vineyards

2007-05-15T00:16:00.000-04:00

Kris and I started volunteering at Three Fox Vineyards in Delaplane, VA last weekend. This is one great little winery. The owner's Holli and John Todhunter are intimately involved in all aspects of operation, and they have (successfully) attempted to create a little bit of Tuscany and La Dolce Vita here in Virginia. If you are touring Virginia wine country, Three Fox is where you want to stop to enjoy the beautiful day, have a picnic lunch, play croquet or bocce ball, and sip on some of their fabulous Italian-styled wines.

We decided to volunteer at Three Fox to learn more about wine from a completely different perspective. It is our dream to someday make a life-long career move into the wine industry, so we thought that volunteering mainly in the tasting room (with additional winery and vineyard duties as they come up) would be a nice introduction to that.

Another big advantage is that Three Fox is very dog friendly, and allow us to bring our two border collies (Owen & Iris) as adopted winery dogs while we're working! Luckily, since they're border collies, they never wander very far and can mostly be found greeting new customers or chasing bees around the vineyard!

Our first day as volunteers ended up being pretty hectic, with two large (40-50+) groups arriving on tour buses, and a couple other large groups dropping in unannounced. Overall, we had some 220 something visitors, which seems like a lot for a small operation like Three Fox! I'll continue to provide updates on our "Will Work For Wine" volunteerism at Three Fox, and will try to remember to take some pictures of the 3-acres of new vines they just planted just so you can see how "baby vines" look when they're just starting out!

Wine Blogging Wednesday #33 - Entry #1

2007-05-14T23:43:00.000-04:00

We popped open this bottle of vino specifically for entry into this month's "Wine Blogging Wednesday" (WBW), the 33rd such event since its inception in September of 2004. The idea is that everyone in the wine blogosphere finds a bottle that satisfies that month's theme, then everyone drinks them and we all compare notes!

This month's WBW is being hosted by Marcus over at Doktor Weingolb. The theme is "Midi-priced Wines for the Midi" meaning wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France (often called "the Midi") that cost between $15-$30. For more information on "the rules", check out Doktor Weingolb's explanation of WBW #33. You don't need a wine blog to be able to participate - Marcus will be setting up a comment area where you can post your tasting notes directly to his site, so please join in! As with all things "wine", the more the merrier...

Wines from Languedoc-Roussillon
So this is the part of the post where I'd normally go into too much detail about where the wine comes from, or how its made, that sort of thing. However, since this is a WBW wine, Marcus has already done all of that background research for me! Check out all of the WBW#33 posts on Doktor Weingolb to learn more than you ever wanted to know about wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France. Being a wine-geek, I can't let myself off quite that easily though, so I'll recap.

The Languedoc -Roussillon region is in Southern France, stretching along the Mediterranean coast from near the Spanish border to just south of the Rhône. From the geography alone, I'm thinking this would be a fantastic place to visit - wineries and beaches in the same trip!

Within the Languedoc-Roussillon region, there is a mind-boggling number of subregions and appellations - luckily, Marcus has compiled a truly exhaustive list of all L-R regions.

If you actually click on that link, you'll notice that a lot of the names are preceded by "VdP", which stands for "Vin de Pays". This is literally translated as "wines of the country", and is a step or two up from the generic "table wine" designation allowed by France's strict wine labeling laws. Similar to my recent discussion about Super Tuscans, VdP wines are ones that "breaks the rules" of their appellation by creating wines with grapes or techniques not allowed in that region. Recognizing that the end result of many of these wines are quite spectacular, the "Vin de Pays" designation was created to recognize wines superior to simple "table wines" that would otherwise not be allowed under current wine law.

Domaine Le Pas de L'Escalette le 1er Pas Rouge
While I typically seem to be a fan of non-conformist rule-breakers, I apparently didn't end up with a VdP wine for WBW #33 - my 2005 Domaine Le Pas de L'Escalette appears to come under the Appellation d'Origine de Contrôlée (AOC) Coteaux du Languedoc. This wine was purchased at FineWine.com in Gaithersburg, MD directly from the winemaker during their recent French winetasting event. (I also purchased the slightly more expensive Domaine Le Pas de L'Escalette Les Clapas Rouge for $20, which I also hope to taste and submit for WBW#33!)

This wine was 13.5% alcohol, and made from Grenache, Carignan, Cinsault and Syrah - all grapes near and dear to me from my experience with Santa Barbara's Rhone Rangers (predominantly California winemakers, especially from Paso Robles / Santa Barbara, creating wines in the Rhône / Southern France style).

Tasting Notes
The wine was bright, light cherry in color. It had a fruity and spicy nose - so much so that I would have never thought of the wine as French (French wines always seem a little more subdued to me). The spice on the nose continues enthusiastically through to the palate, with smooth tannins and a fair amount of fruit.

Overall Recommendation
I see this wine as a good "transition wine" for white drinkers looking to try out some red. It is very approachable, yet has some depth with its fruit and spice to hold your interest. However, you may have been able to tell by the lack of specificity in my tasting notes that I was not totally digging this wine. It's not that it was bad - it was quite good, in fact - but at $15, I'm looking for more. So I would have to say that this wine has "just OK" QPR (quality-to-price ratio). Thus I would not classify this as one of the "wine bargains" that Doktor Weingolb has convinced me that the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France is capable of producing. Stay tuned for tasting notes from this wine's big brother, the Les Clapas Rouge - at $20, I think it may bump up the QPR rating quite a bit! I also have a "vin doux naturel" from the Banyuls - kind of like a Languedoc-Roussillon version of Port (more on that in a few days!).

Toscano v. Toscano (a pitched battle)

2007-05-11T12:56:00.000-04:00

Why open just one bottle when you can open two? That was my thinking in opening up both the 2001 Castello di Tavolese Rubicondo Toscano and the 2005 Per Me Sola Rosso Toscano.

Under the Tuscan Sun
I've never really gotten into Italian wines - I don't know much about them, and most of my previous experience with Italian wine has been with cheap Chianti in those bottles with straw wrapped around them. Speaking of Chianti, let's clear up some confusion about it: Chianti isn't a type of wine per se, its actually a region of Tuscany, famous for its red wine made predominantly from Sangiovese. Italy has 20 different wine regions, which label wine using a fairly comprehensive Italian appellation system. This system may ensure the quality, but it's also somewhat daunting to have to learn yet another system just to figure out what the label means on that Italian bottle of wine staring at your from the wine store shelf.

Well, I haven't learned that system yet, so I made my selection of these two wines based on the sole criteria of their being Tuscan. I'd love to visit Tuscany some day, and somehow by purchasing some Tuscan wine its like taking some baby steps in that direction.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's a Super Tuscan!
The Castello di Tavolese Rubicondo was described in Total Wine's write-up as being a "Super Tuscan". To explain what's meant by that term, we need a bit of a history lesson.

Italy has been making wine for a very long time, and because of this had some very old laws which prescribed exactly how certain wines would be made - which grapes would be used, in which percentages - if it was to bear the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) seal. In the 1970s, Italian winemakers started to question the wisdom of this stringent system, and began making wines that "broke the rules": perhaps they added in the non-Italian Cabernet Sauvignon to the blend, or aged the wines in French oak barrels. Whatever the transgression, these wines could not be classified classified under the DOC regulations (i.e., you couldn't call it a "Chianti" if it didn't follow the Chianti rules), so they had to be labeled simply "Vino da Tavola", or "Table Wine". This category had typically been reserved for the cheapest and simplest of wines, but Italian winemakers started using this term to describe their top-of-the-line offerings that didn't comply with Italian wine law. These "renegade" wines started gaining mass appeal, and were nicknamed "Super Tuscans".

(The DOC system has since been overhauled to allow for designation of these not-so-renegade-anymore wines using the Indicazione Geografica Tipica, or IGT)

Head-to-Head Toscanos
Enough history! Let's drink some wine!

Both of these wines I'm describing were made with 100% Sangiovese. Upon the pour, both of these wines were much deeper in color than I was expecting from Sangiovese: the Rubicondo was a deep strawberry reddish color with a hint of brown; the Per Me Sola was a deep purple-red, and more juicy-looking.

The Per Me Sola had what I can only describe as "cheap wine nose" - a very young, grape juice smell that I have found in cheap reds like Two Buck Chuck or a low-end Aussie Shiraz. Sadly, Kris and I made up a batch of Old Vine Zinfandel ourselves a few years ago (using excess juice from Lodi vineyards), and it too had this overly fruity nose to it. This was not a good sign.

I really enjoyed the nose of the Rubicondo - it had so much going on. There were some dark fruits (cherries maybe?), and an almost floral quality to it - I think this could have been a touch of vanilla blending in with the fruits. The vanilla makes sense, as one reason this wine is a "Super Tuscan" is that it was aged using French oak - a no-no under traditional Chianti rules.

On the tongue, the Per Me Sola was a bit harsh, some fruit to it but generally very simple with not much of a finish. It was medium-bodied though, which I wasn't expecting in a Sangiovese - I had always thought of them as lighter-bodied reds. Similarly, the Rubicondo was also medium-bodied (leading to believe that perhaps my association of Sangiovese as lighter-bodied was incorrect). It was very smooth and had a nice tannin structure to it, drying out your mouth just enough to appreciate their presence. The dark fruits on the nose came through, as did some oak, and it had an almost dusty finish to it (in a good way). My mind kept comparing this wine to a Southern Rhône-style blend, which is odd since this was 100% Sangiovese, but once the association was in my head I couldn't shake it.

Recommendation
So I said that this Toscano v. Toscano duel was a bit of a pitched battle - both wines were purchased at Total Wine in McLean, the 2001 Castello di Tavolese Rubicondo for $13, the Per Me Sola Rosso Toscano for $7. Between the age (2001 vs. non-vintage) and the price (the Rubicondo costing almost twice the Per Me Sola), I had a pretty good idea of who I thought the winner would be. But since both age and price are definitely not always accurate predictors of quality (especially in this "everyday wine" price range), I tried to keep an open mind going into this match-up.

However, as you can tell by the tasting notes, the Rubicondo was the clear winner. I'd say this wine has good quality-to-price ratio, and is worth trying out if you're feeling like an Italian wine. Although almost half the price, the Per Me Sola really came up short on taste, and I would say had a poor quality-to-price ratio. It was slightly better with food, but that was mainly because the food masked the wines general lack of complexity and finish. And if all you're going to use it for is simple table wine, you can buy it buy the jug for far less than $7.

I enjoyed delving a bit into Italian wines though - as I mentioned, I have limited experience with Italian wines from Italy (having tasted several versions of Italian varietals grown in California) so it was nice to go "to the source". If anyone has any recommendations on other Italian wines I should try, I'd love to hear them!

Spanish Cava!

2007-05-10T23:11:00.000-04:00

Summer is here!! I can tell it's summer and not spring because the humidity shot up to around 60% or so today - perfect Cava weather!

And Just What Is Cava?
Last month, I posted a mini-rant about Champagne; I'll save you the gory details and jump to the punchline: Champagne is the region of France best known for their sparkling (i.e., bubbling) wines, and is also the *only* region that can name sparkling wine "Champagne" (or even "champagne"). So while we often call anything with bubbles in it "champagne", that's kind of like using a kleenex or making a xerox of something - we've made a generic term out of something that was once very specific.

What does this have to do with Cava? Well, the French aren't the only ones who make their own bubbly -the Germans make Sekt, the Italians make Spumante, and the Spanish make Cava! (The French even make other sparklers not from the Champagne region - these are known as Cremant).

What Makes Cava Different?
I love Cava. It's the perfect summer sipping wine - it's very clean and refreshing, nice and crisp with good acidity. What's somewhat unusual about Cava is the grapes it is traditionally made from: 40% Macabeo, 40% Parellada and 20% Xarel-lo in the case of this Casteller Cava. Never heard of those grapes before? Me neither - they're all mainly grown in Spain, and mainly used to make Cava (although Macabeo is an important grape in its own right in Rioja, where it goes under the pseudonym Viura; also, Macabeo seems to have snuck across the border and is also cultivated in Southern France).

Casteller Cava Brut
The Casteller Cava Brut is pale gold in color, with plenty of nice bubbles! It has a crisp, fresh flavor, with tastes of green apple, citrusy lime, and just a touch of sweetness. It lacks the "yeasty" flavor that I often associate with Champagne, which I think makes it taste cleaner, and makes it such a good summer sipping bubbly. Purchased for $14 at FineWine.com in Gaithersburg, MD, this Cava has a good quality-to-price ratio. I suspect if I bought this in Virginia, it's cost a couple bucks less, making it an excellent QPR.

Do yourself a favor - don't save bubbly only for "special occasions"! Or at the very least, be vague in your definition of "special" such that a nice summer day qualifies. Then go out and grab a Cava, pop it open and enjoy the bubbles and the beautiful day!

Number of Calories and Servings in a Bottle of Vino

2007-05-08T23:46:00.001-04:00

This is one of those questions I tend to try to ignore - I know that alcohol has a lot of calories in it, and I'd rather not know how much for fear of feeling guilty while enjoying a nice glass of wine. Well, I finally decided to do the math, so here's what I learned.

Servings in a Bottle
One "serving" of wine is considered 150 mLs, which equates to just over 5 ounces. This means that each 750 mL bottle of wine has five servings. So if you split your bottle over dinner with your significant other, you're each getting ~2.5 servings of wine (if you play fair).

Calories per Serving
The amount of calories in a serving of wine obviously varies, with dry wines having less than sweet dessert wines. A good rule of thumb though, is that a glass of "regular" table wine, white or red, contains between 90 -120 calories. Using the multiplication-friendly score of 100, that means your 2.5 servings at dinner contain 2.5 x 100 = 250 calories. Not as bad as I was expecting, actually!

Amount of Alcohol
The general idea here is that one 5 oz glass of wine has roughly the same amount of alcohol as one 12 oz beer, or one shot (1.5 oz) of liquor. So drinking half a bottle of wine has the same amount of alcohol as drinking two and a half (12 oz) bottles of beer, or roughly one and a half pints (one pint = 586 mL = 19.2 oz). Got that? And now for a general public service announcement: your body can only metabolize about one drink per hour, so splitting a bottle of wine at home is fine, but doing so at a restaurant isn't such a good idea if you're planning on driving any time soon (especially not if you live in DC!).

Recommended Alcohol Consumption
New stories seem to crop up in the media every couple of months about this, but the general trend of most of the research I've seen seems to point to the fact that moderate alcohol consumption (of any type) is beneficial to heart health, and that red wine in particular may have additional antioxidants which aid in preventing certain types of cancers. So just what is "moderate alcohol consumption"? The U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary Guidelines defines this as 1-2 drinks (servings) per day for men, and one drink per day for women (sorry ladies - life is unfair). Being a bit less teetoling than the U.S., the UK recommends 3-4 drinks per day for men, and 2-3 drinks per day for women as part of a healthy diet. Keep in mind that when they say "per day" in the US, they really mean "with dinner"; in the UK, those per day drinks include those consumed at lunch as well, since a glass of wine at noon isn't likely to get you fired as it would in the US.

The Joys of Bicycle Commuting
So I'm one of those people who are lucky enough to actually live within a 10-mile radius of where I work. Because of this, I bike to work nearly every day. Thanks to my trusty heart rate monitor, I know that I burn approximately 300 calories during my 7.5 mile ride in to work. Since the neat thing about bicycle commuting is that you are automatically committing yourself to riding home as well, another 7.5 miles earns me another 300 calories, for a total of approximately 600 extra calories burned each day. (In case you're thinking 300 calories sounds like a lot to burn in only 7.5 miles, understand that Maryland is very hilly - we're not talking 7.5 flat, easy miles here). Comparing that 600 calories burned to the measly 250 calories consumed by splitting a bottle of wine with dinner, I have decided not to feel guilty about it and will thus now enjoy my evening bottles that much more!

And Now We Return to Our Regular Programming...
Sorry for the tangent - I had just always been curious about that, and thought I'd share what I found out in case there were any other calorie-counting wine lovers out there! I will now return to my regular business of reviewing tasty, affordable bottles of wine...

2004 Cousiño-Macul Doña Isidora Riesling

2007-05-07T23:48:00.000-04:00

I decided a couple months ago or so that I wanted to learn more about Rieslings. It was actually some of the sweeter, German -style Rieslings that really got me started on wine in the first place several years ago. I think as I learned more about different wines and transformed into a red wine drinker, I just unconsciously presumed the stuff I started on had to have been inferior, and I have sort of ignored it ever since.

Well, a couple weeks ago I started reading Andrea Immer Robinson's Great Wine Made Simple. As described by the subtitle of her book, Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier, Andrea Immer Robinson really knows her stuff and is completely unpretentious as she walks you through a series of several recommended tastings meant to help you develop your palate.

The first of these tastings is the "Big Six" - six grapes that represent the "guts" of about 80% of the quality wine sold in the U.S. There are three white grapes and three red grapes, each grape also representing the range of body (light, medium and full) of each type. In order of increasing body, the white grapes are Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay; the red grapes are Pinot Noir, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

When I read that, I thought"Hmmm... I've had several wines made from all but one of those grapes within the last couple of years - Riesling. Am I missing out here?" As Robinson says, "First, ditch your snobbery about Riesling. A lot of people hear Riesling and think 'sweet' and 'no thanks.' My theory is that as soon as people spot the traditional long, thin bottle, they have flashbacks to Liebfraumilch. But about the only thing great Rieslings have in common with Liebfraumilch is its traditional home base - Germany."

See, I told you she was unpretentious.

Anyway, that right there was enough to convince me that I needed to widen the (admittedly limited) horizons of my white wine world, and start tasting some Rieslings. With the hot and humid DC summers just right around the corner, when drinking my favorite red wines becomes all but unbearable, now seemed like the perfect time to start my exploration. So I did something I don't normally do - I bought this bottle of wine from the cornerstore "beermart" while picking up some Cinco de Mayo cervezas.

Why You Shouldn't Buy Wine at a "BeerMart"
This was probably a mistake for several reasons, but the biggest one was how the wine had been stored. Being mainly a beer store, they have tons of beer-filled refrigerators which noisily and continuously remove heat from within the coolers and pump it out into the store. I'm just taking a guess here, but this heating effect probably keeps the temperature in this small shop in the upper 70s - not exactly ideal storage conditions for wine. Also, being mainly a beer store, they a) had a very poor wine selection, and b) almost never sold any wine - thus the bottles they did have had probably stewed there on those shelves for some time without being replaced by new stock.

All of this is to say that I probably didn't exactly "set myself up for success" for my re-entry into the world of Riesling. And when I first cracked open this 2004 Cousiño-Macul "Doña Isidora" Chilean Riesling, I must say I was not impressed. Since Kris and I had folks coming over to our place for a Cinco de Mayo BBQ, I didn't have adequate time to chill the wine and attempted the "bottle in the freezer" trick which never seems to work out well. It was still far too warm when I first opened it, and therefore quite harsh. It was creamier than I was expecting, and had a bitterness to the finish which was not particularly pleasant. Oh well - time for a Negra Modelo, and the Riesling was pumped and put into the fridge.

The next night, my wife and I were having a grilled lemon pepper (wild-caught) salmon, so I figured I'd break it out and try it again. Having been in the fridge all day, it would now be at a much more agreeable temperature which I hoped would rectify the many faults from my previous failed tasting attempt.

Wine in Chile
But first, let me tell you a bit about Cousiño-Macul. C-M grows the grapes used for their Riesling in the Maipo Valley of Chile. Chile is in some ways the world's most ideal location for making consistent wines. Sandwiched by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, it is protected from many of the pests that plague other vineyards of the world, most notably Phylloxera. Phylloxera attacks the roots of the Vitis vinifera vine, and completely decimated the world's wine grape vines in the late 1800s. It was only by grafting Vitis vinifera to native American Vitis labrusca rootstock, which was resistant to Phylloxera, that the wine industry was finally able to recover. But Phylloxera never made it down to Chile, and thus grapes in this region are mostly pure, ungrafted Vitis vinifera.

Another advantage that Chile's winemaking regions have in terms of making consistent wines is that they are very arid (receiving less than 12 inches of rain per year), relying upon irrigation. Thus heavy rainfalls late in the season can't "dilute" the ripening grapes which typically makes for thinner wine. Simultaneously, these arid regions are virtually immune from drought as snow melt from the Andes provides a plentiful source for their irrigation.

Now, on to the wine
We selected this wine-on-a-whim because we have thoroughly enjoyed Cousiño-Macul's Antiguas Reservas Cabernet Sauvignon (although my favorite Chilean wine has been the Carmenère - more on Chilean Carmenères in a later post!) This 2004 Cousiño-Macul "Doña Isidora" Riesling had a syrupy golden-straw color to it. What surprised me about the taste of this Riesling is that although tart, there was also what I think of as creaminess to it. I was definitely not expecting to find that in a Riesling. This leads me to believe that perhaps I confuse body with creaminess, because the tasting notes on Cousiño-Macul's website indicate that there was no malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that changes the tarter malic acids into softer, creamier lactic acids), no aging in oak, nothing that would impart that cream.

So I wasn't that happy with this Riesling as a sipping wine. However, it paired quite nicely with our salmon. It's citrusy, almost pineapple flavor with minerally finish cut through the oily fish very nicely, cleansing the palate. Purchased for just $9 at the beermart, I probably can't expect much more from it than that.

Final recommendation
The last Riesling I tasted was an Alsatian Riesling at the FineWine.com tasting in April. That one was really good, and probably set my expectations a little high for this significantly cheaper Chilean Riesling. Before that, I can't even remember the last time I had Riesling. Thus I have a very limited mental Riesling library with which to compare the Doña Isidora. All I can say is that the Chilean Riesling worked out OK with dinner, but was nothing spectacular. I'm still going to move ahead with my plan to try more Rieslings this summer, but would love to get some suggestions so that my next experience is a better one!

Footnote
Kris and I are going to be starting in on the "Great Wine Made Simple" suggested palate-developing tastings, beginning with the Big Six tasting in two weeks! I have a Domaine Trimbach Riesling from Alsace slated for that event - I'm hoping to go 2 for 2 on good Alsatian Rieslings! I'm excited to take a more directed approach to improving my palate, so I'll let you know how it goes!

1998 Rideau Syrah

2007-05-05T23:57:00.000-04:00

Rideau Vineyards is one of my all-time favorite California wineries. Located in the heart of "Sideways" country (aka the Santa Ynez Valley) up the road from Kalyra, Rideau makes some absolutely spectacular Rhone-style wines. It was to the Rideau Vineyards cellar club that I bid the most tearful farewell when we moved from Santa Barbara to Maryland and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the Orwellian, asinine Montgomery County still profiting hand-over-fist from Prohibition-era liquor control laws.

But I digress.

Suffice it to say, their wine simply rocks. Most bottles are well outside my "everyday wines" price range, typically costing between $30-$50 a bottle. But if you're going to splurge, Rideau is the place to do it. Every single bottle of red I've ever tasted from them has been nothing short of stunning (a lot more stunning than my bottle photography skills - I clearly still have issues taking a decent pic at night!).

Since Rideau only sells their wines from the winery or via their website, my once hefty supply has been slowly dwindling since our California Exodus. With the consumption of this Syrah, I am down to but a single bottle - a 2000 Syrah/Mourvedre blend available only to Cellar Club members that the tasting room staff simply referred to as "liquid gold". It is *so* good in fact, they had a hard time holding my bottles for me at the winery for an extra month as I was unable to make it up there upon their release for pickup. Since the wine was completely sold out, they told me they were sorely tempted by my two bottles staring at them for a month, but they stoically resisted.

You're probably expecting tasting notes for this wine, but I didn't take any. I clearly love learning more about wine, trying new styles, finding new favorites, and telling people what I've discovered. But with wine this good, I just want to savor it. I want to turn off the analytical portion of my brain and just let the flavor sensations wash over me without applying any sensory filters. I don't want to think about it, I just want to experience it.

I think it is important to allow ourselves that luxury upon occasion, just like it is important to allow ourselves to enjoy beauty wherever we may find it during our regular routines. I just read an interesting article in the Washington Post about a musician playing his violin at a DC Metro station during rush hour. Metro stations have not traditionally allowed musicians to play in them, and hidden cameras were installed to record the reactions of commuters to the new addition. The thing is, this was no ordinary musician - this was Joshua Bell, a virtuoso violinist playing a 300-year old Stradivarius violin valued at over $3.5 million. The experiment was set up by the Washington Post to test public perception and priorities - "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

The reaction? Of the 1,097 people who passed by during his 43-minute "performance", only 7 of them stopped for any length of time. Bell, used to playing sold-out concert halls where the "cheap seats" start off around $100, was almost completely ignored. I think this is a telling statement of American values. Obviously, context matters here - people were not expecting to hear beautiful music in a Metro station, so they weren't actively listening for it. But the fact that only 7 people even bothered to try really makes you question our cultural trajectory.

Most wine drinkers, I think, are hedonists to some degree. We find pleasure in the boundless variety of scents and tastes wrapped up in each bottle, obviously, but we also find as much or more pleasure in sharing that bottle amongst good company. We realize that our quest for good wine is actually only a part of a much larger quest for "the good life". Wine seems to grant us permission to slow down, relax, and let that right half of our brain run the show for a little while. This is something that is becoming increasingly more difficult to do, as evidenced by the Washington Post musician experiment.

So I say grab your significant other and/or friends, pull out one of those bottles you've been "saving for a special occasion", pop it open, and enjoy. I bet you'll find it was the perfect occasion, after all.

2004 Concannon Petite Sirah

2007-05-03T22:52:00.000-04:00

There were several reasons why Kris and I cracked open a bottle of an old favorite, Concannon's Petite Sirah, tonight.

One reason was that Wannabe Wino's description of her recent "wine find", Mounts Family Winery (in particular their Petite Sirah), had me hankering for one myself. Another reason is that Concannon bottles have a nifty raised relief image on them (barely visible in the photo), and I was just commenting yesterday on how I was a sucker for such "bottle dressing". But the *real* reason I wanted this PS tonight is that yesterday's tasting of the Cèdre Cahors Malbec/Merlot blend oddly reminded me very much of the taste of Petite Sirah.

Thanks to my trusty Vacu Vin, I knew that the remainder of last night's Cahors would still be in prime condition to taste side-by-side with this "fresh" bottle from our collection. Would my "wine memory" of Concannon's Petite Sirah be correct - would there be similarities between tonight's bottle and last night's Cahors Malbec/Merlot blend?

Petite Sirah
Before we get to the tasting notes and answer that question, I want to take a look at the Petite Sirah grape, and at Concannon's role in popularizing this interesting varietal. As I mentioned in my previous tasting notes of a Bogle Petite Sirah last month, Petite Sirah is a completely different grape from Syrah/Shiraz (those two are the same grape, by the way). So while Petite Sirah sounds like Syrah, they are in fact completely different grapes. Petite Sirah is believed to be a cross between Syrah and Peloursin, also known as Durif after its creator, Dr. Francois Durif, who performed the cross in the late 1800s. So like Syrah/Shiraz, Petite Sirah/Durif are also synonyms for the same grape.

Petite Sirah (or "PS" as fans like to call it) even has its own "support group" aimed at marketing this misunderstood grape. The name? PS - I Love You. "Not just for love letters anymore!" They have done a great job at coming up with this extensive history of the Petite Sirah grape. One thing that jumped out to me from this list was a news article from 1890 written to describe the "Million Grape Cuttings" sent from Concannon to the Mexican Government for experimental planting throughout Mexico. One of the grapes mentioned by name in this 1890 article is Petite Sirah. Again, in 1904 there is a historical document from Concannon, written in French, presumably to obtain Petite Sirah/Durif cuttings from France for planting in California's Livermore Valley.

The Livermore Valley
"The Livermore Valley? Where's that?" you may be asking yourself. Located just past the verdant green (in the rainy winter season) rolling hills of San Francisco's East Bay, the Livermore Valley may not immediately spring to your mind as a premier California wine-growing region. But that was not always the case. As detailed in a recent Vinography post,
the Livermore Valley was once one of the most well-known wine growing areas in the United States, having as many acres under vine as the mighty Napa. Early pioneers of California's viticultural heritage compared the Livermore Valley, with its ancient stream beds and gravely soils, to Bordeaux's famous Graves region (whose very name means simply "gravel"). These well-drained soils were thought to be the ideal location for reproducing Bordeaux's success in California.

But while Napa's renown grew, Livermore's gradually faded with few of the original vineyards recovering from the effects of Prohibition. One of the few wineries that *did* manage to pull through was Concannon. Founded by James Concannon in 1883, they proudly proclaim "America's First Petite Sirah" right on the wine label.

Tasting Notes
The Concannon Petite Sirah displays the characteristic inky ruby purple color of a PS (Dark & Delicious, says PS I Love You). It has a very fruity nose of jammy blackberries. Big and juicy, the berries follow through to the palate with hints of chocolate and the chalky tannins which I also associate with Petite Sirahs. It was this chalky tannin structure that made me think of Petite Sirahs will tasting last night's Cahors blend.

So how does this Petite Sirah compare to the Cahors Malbec/Merlot blend? They *did* have several similarities - I had my wife taste them blind, and she initially picked the Cahors as the Petite Sirah. As the Concannon opened up, that fruit really started jumping out at which point distinguishing the two was far simpler. However, the serious dose of tannins serves to keep all that fruit in check, making for an overall balanced and enjoyable wine.

If you like big, fruit-forward reds and enjoy playing with the tannins on your tongue, then the Concannon Petite Sirah is for you. If you like a little less fruit, a little more spice and slightly smoother yet still big and chalky tannins, then I'd go for the Chateau du Cèdre Héritage Cahors. Both are excellent wines, and for around $12, you can't go wrong!

2005 Chateau du Cèdre Héritage Cahors

2007-05-02T12:49:00.000-04:00

The temperature dropped a bit tonight, making my thoughts turn from rosés back to more familiar territory - big, bold reds. Tonight's bottle is the first we've opened from our "Meet the French Winemakers" winetasting event at FineWine.com in Gaithersburg, MD that I wrote up last month - yay! The bottle was purchased for $12 (although it usually goes for $15).

First off - a warning: this post is really long. If you're interested in my tidbits of wine trivia, read on! I am always fascinated to learn more about the grapes, regions, etc of the wines I drink, so I often feel like writing about them. However, if the wine geek thing isn't for you and you're mainly looking for my tasting notes from this bottle, just skim all the way down to the bottom.

Cahors
This wine comes from the Cahors region of Southwestern France. Being a French wine ignoramus, I had never heard of Cahors before. It made me feel a little better to flip through some wine books and note that Cahors doesn't even show up in the index of most of them, and when it does show up in the text it's mainly as a footnote or minor reference. So Cahors appears to be an under-appreciated (or at least under-publicized) winemaking region.

Despite this, apparently Cahors has a long winemaking history, and centuries ago wines from Cahors surpassed the popularity of its more famous neighbor to the East, Bordeaux. Even the Romans partook of the "black wines" of Cahors, so named because wine from this region has historically been very deep and dark in color, characteristics of its major grape varietals Malbec (also known here as Auxerrois or Côt) and the more obscure Tannat. In fact, the parade of little-known grape varietals doesn't stop there - Negrette, Mauzac, and Fer Servadou have also been planted in Cahors for centuries. But Malbec is the true star of Cahors - in fact, all wines from Cahors must legally contain at least 70% Malbec. The balance is usually made up with Merlot, or sometimes Tannat, although some of the more unusual varieties may also make their way into the mix.

First tangent of this post - Hillsborough
What I find most interesting about this list of little-known varietals is that two of them, Tannat and Fer Servadou, are planted and used in blends from one of my favorite Virginia wineries, Hillsborough. I attended a barrel-blending seminar at Hillsborough once, and we were able to sample each of these varietals (as well as the more familiar Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Petit Verdot) straight from the barrel, before they had been blended together into the "gemstone" wines that Hillsborough produces. It was very interesting to see what specific qualities each of these grapes might bring to the final blend; we then measured out the various varietals in the approximate proportions they would be present in the final blends, and got a pre-taste of what the final product would be. Fun!

Second quasi-tangent of the post - Malbec
I have somewhat recently become very interested in the Malbec grape. This has coincided precisely with my somewhat recent interest in South American wines, as Malbec has found a near-perfect climatological fit with the Mendoza region of Argentina. In fact, I thought that Malbec was all but extinct in its native France - it is apparently something of a Bordeaux reject, having once been more popular but now grown only sparsely. However, to paraphrase Mark Twain: "the reports of Malbec's demise in France have been greatly exaggerated"; Malbec is still very much alive and doing quite well in the next region over, Cahors.

Wine temperature and decanting tangent
Since I have recently been experimenting with wine temperature for the recent rosé tastings, I decided to give it a go for a red. Traditional wisdom says that reds are supposed to be consumed at "room temperature". But whose room? Located where? Turns out that this idea of room temperature probably originated in drafty old chateaus, where "room temperature" was most likely 65°F, rather than the 70°F or so that most folks keep their homes at today. The end result is that most of us probably drink red wine slightly too warm (and whites and rosés slightly too cold due to refrigeration) . This isn't usually a big deal, but can come into play if the wine is particularly big and "hot" (high alcohol).

When I first popped open this bottle and took a whiff, I could feel the prickly sensation of alcohol interfering with my appreciation of the wine's aromas. Upon tasting, I thought the wine had a little extra burn as well. After probing the bottle with my wine thermometer, turns out the wine was at about 69°F. Although only 13% alcohol, I figured chilling it a couple of degrees in the fridge couldn't hurt - the lower temp should reduce some of the volatilization of alcohol, masking that "prickly effect" a bit. I took it out after about 5 minutes or so, and the wine had dropped down to 64°F. The "pricklies" had now disappeared from both the nose and taste - placebo effect? Maybe - we left my wife's glass of wine out for the five minutes we were chilling the bottle, and her glass seemed to have mellowed quite a bit as well. So did the temperature matter? Maybe not.

This lead us to thinking that perhaps we should decant it. First off, a confession - my wife and I are decanting junkies. Initially I thought decanting was only for presentation, or for removing sediment from really old, expensive wine - the kind Kris and I would rarely if ever be opening at our dinner table. So what was the point? I have since discovered that decanting is so much more than that, and I'd say we decant the majority of red wines we drink. Decanting can make a young wine better, and a good older wine great.

The main purpose of decanting is to allow oxygen to contact the wine, opening it up and softening it a bit. This is especially the case for wines with a lot of tannins (such as this Cahors). Sure, you could also simply open the bottle and let it "breathe" for a while, or swirl it around in your glass and wait a while - a decanter just makes this happen a whole lot faster as it increases the surface area dramatically.

So I strongly recommend you experiment with decanting. My wife and I would pour one glass straight from the bottle, and pour a second glass from the decanter and serve them "blind" to each other to see if we could tell the difference. In some cases, decanting did virtually nothing for the wine. In most cases, there was a slight noticeable improvement in the flavor and texture of the wine, but in a few cases the change was so dramatic it was like having two completely separate wines. After a while, we learned to identify which wines tasted like they could benefit from decanting, and have found that our gut feeling on this is now usually correct. (Just FYI - the decanter in the picture is our "mini-decanter" (375 mL) - gets the job done but doesn't take up as much space on the table as our regular-sized decanter (750mL))

Finally, the tasting!
Having exhausted my supply of tangents for the evening, I'm ready to get down to business. The 2005 Chateau du Cèdre Héritage Cahors had a nose of dark cherries and plums. Had I been blind tasting this wine, my first thoughts would have immediately been "Wow - Argentinian!" I now know that I thought this because this Cahors is made from a blend 90% Malbec and 10% Merlot, and Malbec is something of an Argentinian specialty.

The defining characteristic of this wine is its big, smooth tannins. I'm a big fan of tannins, and they were well balanced in this wine, so I very much enjoyed it. The tannins here were also somewhat chalky, and the overall effect of the dark fruit and tannins reminded me of bitter chocolate. Have you ever tasted dark chocolate with a large percentage of cacao, say 75% or more? That almost dusty feeling it leaves in your mouth is what I'm talking about here. This may not sound pleasant, but in this case it's a good thing!

Overall Recommendation
I would definitely recommend you check this wine out. I really enjoy this style of wine, and it's kind of fun to taste wine from a lesser-known region of France. Plus, because of its relative obscurity, it seems that there are some good Cahors wine deals to be found. At $12, I thought this wine had an excellent quality-to-price ratio (at the regular $15 price, it would still have a pretty good QPR). I'm also happy to have discovered another region outside of Mendoza, Argentina producing quality Malbecs. Actually, that would be an interesting Wine Blogging Wednesday - the Malbecs of Cahors vs. the Malbecs of Mendoza!

Final Tangent - Valentré Bridge
I have to sneak in one more tangent. Another thing I liked about this wine was the bottle. The green glass contains the raised relief image of a very cool looking bridge all around the bottom of the bottle. I discovered that this bridge is the Valentré Bridge, symbol of the town of Cahors, that was begun in 1308 and finished in 1378.

I must admit, I'm a total sucker for this sort of thing, having always loved the raised Papal emblem on the necks of bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine. I wish this practice would become more popular!

Catavino Virtual Rosé Tasting!

2007-05-01T00:57:00.000-04:00

I have been looking forward to this tasting ever since I heard about Catavino's Virtual Rosé Tasting a week or so ago. Ryan and Gabriella at Catavino want to encourage folks to explore wines of the "Iberian Peninsula" - for the geographically-challenged, this means Spain and Portugal. The rules that Catavino set for this virtual tasting are pretty simple - pick out a Spanish or Portuguese rosé, and compare it to a rosé from virtually anywhere else. You don't even need a blog to join in on the fun - you can post your comments directly to Catavino's forum!

I chose to compare a Spanish Navarra rosado with a French Côte-du-Rhône rosé, mainly because I conveniently had both wines in my collection - no need to drive to Virginia! I also thought: Northern Spain, Southern France - the wines should be similar, yes?

The Spanish wine was a 2006 Viña Rubican Rosado from the Navarra region of Northern Spain. According to Catavino, Spain classifies rosé wines into two categories: rosados and claretes. Rosados are apparently what we typically think of as rosés - light to dark pink in color. Claretes aren't so much a rosé as a very light red wine. How does light red differ from dark pink? I have no idea - but now you know what I know.

The French wine was a 2006 Domaine Guy Mousset Cuvée Réservée Rosé from Côtes-du-Rhône. I would love to give you more information about it (love to find out more myself!) but I have the hardest time finding out anything about specific French wines on the 'Net. With any American wine, Google to the rescue - I can learn what varietals are in it, probably even find tasting notes and technical data from the winery. But with the French wines - nothing. The only link I could find to this wine is on Cellar Tracker. So, I'm not even sure which grapes this wine was made from. I see this as yet another hurdle French wine has in gaining widespread acceptance with American wine drinkers, particularly younger wine drinkers. We demand more information about our products, and the French wine labels and limited online data are unable to satisfy our demands.

Anyway, on to the good part - the tasting!

I didn't even need to open the bottles to immediately notice a distinct difference between the two: the color. Here are two different shots that highlight this - the French rosé has a light salmon color, while the Spanish rosado has a deeper, redish-purple color.

OK, so I probably should have rotated that top picture so that the rosé was always on the left, rosado on the right, but you get the idea. I found myself liking the color of the rosé more - it just looked more elegant in the glass. You'll also notice from the first picture in this post that the two rosés came in differently shaped bottles: the Spanish rosado came in a high-shouldered Bordeaux style bottle, while the French rosé came in a more gently-sloped Rhône style bottle.

As for the nose: the rosado smelled, well, kind of grapey. Actually, if you've ever taken a tour of a winery, it reminded me of the room where they store all of the aging oak barrels - damp, slightly sweet, and a thick grapey aroma. It also reminded me a bit of the smell of port. The rosé had a much lighter, sweeter nose, with hints of strawberries and citrus.

For the actual tasting, I admit - I went full-bore wine geek on this one. I used a wine thermometer. The absolute height of wine snobbery, I know, but I was inspired by Winedeb at Deb's Key West Wine & Garden blog. I always like how inviting her pictures of whites and rosés look - seeing as how she's in Key West, the bottles get a nice layer of condensation on them probably immediately after taking them outside. They also heat up pretty fast, so after she's done photographing them for her blog she sticks them back in the fridge to cool down again before tasting, and uses a wine thermometer every now and then to check and see if they've chilled enough to be enjoyable.

So, I was digging through my kitchen drawer of wine toys, and lo-and-behold: I actually own a wine thermometer! After reading Winedeb's posts, I had to try it out and see how/if the temperature affected the taste of the rosés. After my two bottles were done with their photo shoot, both were at 54° F. Judging from my wine books, this should be the perfect temperature to drink them at: most books seem to say that 50°-55° is right around where you want to serve rosés.

In the mouth, all of the light, sweet strawberry and citrus on the nose of the French rosé completely vanished. I was really just getting textures at this point rather than flavors - medium to full-bodied with some bitterness across the back of my tongue, and a slight creaminess to it. There was something annoying me about this wine though, and after letting it sit in my mouth awhile I decided it was the strong oakiness to it. I've never really been a fan of big oak, preferring "No Oak Chardonnays" fermented in stainless steel tanks to their often over-oaked brethren. So I wasn't too happy when some oak showed up in this rosé, but if you like oaky Chards then this wouldn't be a turn-off for you. The French rosé was otherwise pretty tasty. The Spanish rosado had a very different flavor. There was a tanginess to it, somewhat lemony. It has less body than the French, but more acidity.

By this point the wine had warmed up a bit - 57° F said my trusty thermometer. Both wines now seemed to have a bigger, sweeter nose. I thought I started smelling some vanilla in the rosé, while the rosado had an aroma like a dark red rose. A little bit of fruit flavor also crept in to the taste of the rosado, almost a sour cherry - still quite tangy.

Overall, both Kris and I liked both wines better when they were a bit warmer - warmer than you are apparently "supposed" to serve rosés. I liked to color of the French wine better, but enjoyed the uniqueness of the rosado, and definitely preferred the flavor of the Spanish wine over the French. We had some Parado cheese and crackers as an appetizer, and the rosado went perfectly with this tangy cheese. However, with our dinner of grilled salmon, the French wine paired much better.

Final recommendation - I enjoyed trying these wines side-by-side, but neither offered me what I'm looking for in a rosé. When I think rosé, I think picnic wine - something to sip on a warm summer day while out in the yard or playing croquet or something. Neither of these wines were "refreshing" enough to do that for me. I know, rosés are supposedly the "new thing" in wine, and I'm probably still a little gun-shy from White Zinfandel to have a completely open mind on rosés. I also just don't know enough about rosés to have some idea of what to expect when I pop the bottle. Because of this, I think I feel safer with whites for warm weather enjoyment and meals as I have a better understanding of what the wine is going to taste like.

However, both of these wines were still quite tasty in their own very different ways, and I think I'll keep trying out different rosés this summer. From my experience thus far, I think there are probably better rosé values out there than the wines in this tasting. Both of these wines were purchased for $9 at Total Wine in McLean. For one dollar less per bottle, a couple weeks ago I tasted a 2006 Anakena Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé from Rapel Valley, Chile that fit my "summer rosé" criteria perfectly. I recommend going out and giving that one a shot. Perhaps I'll pick up another next time I'm out, and pair the Anakena off against another Euro rosé, and see who comes out on top!

One Day Blog Silence

2007-04-30T10:16:00.000-04:00

2005 Cruz Alta Malbec

2007-04-28T13:20:00.000-04:00

So I just got done telling you in a previous post what a great value Argentinian Malbecs are, and that you should check them out. While that is still a true statement, I must admit I was a little disappointed with the 2005 Cruz Alta Malbec. However, I think my disappointment was mainly due to the very high expectations I had for this bottle before ever cracking it open.

We had opened up a 2005 Cruz Alta Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon ($12 at Total Wine) a couple weeks ago, and were very impressed. The reserve cab was full-bodied, big and beautiful! It had pretty hefty tannins, but was well-balanced with some lighter berry fruit and some intriguing spice to it. Kris and I both loved this wine, and I strongly recommend it. This is why I was so excited to try one of Cruz Alta's Malbecs, since if they could do Cabs so well I wanted to see what they could do with Argentina's specialty - Malbec.

The 2005 Cruz Alta Malbec was purchased for $10 at Total Wine in McLean, VA. It had a nose of dark raspberries and plum. On the tongue, the dark fruit held up, and there was a nice earthiness to it, but there was also some unpleasant bitterness. We had brought this wine over to the home of our friends, so were without our decanter. The decanter may have helped with the bitterness, as the wine simply tasted too "tight" and we've found that a decanter can often alleviate this.

I feel that I've been a little harsh with this wine - we drank the bottle and enjoyed it, but I was just expecting more and was thus overly critical. However, my overall recommendation is still to skip this particular Argentine Malbec. There are definitely better wines out there for $10, and I'd rather see you spend your wine time and money seeking out a more satisfying Malbec. Definitely check out the Cruz Alta Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon though - it's excellent!

2005 Chateau Montet Bordeaux Sauvignon

2007-04-28T13:12:00.000-04:00

"Bordeaux" had always been synonymous with "red wine" in my mind. As I have admitted before, I am definitely a French wine neophyte. Living in California, I was always able to find a Californian (or Oregonian or Washington State) wine to suit the occasion or my mood. Out here on the East Coast, the selection of West Coast wines is a bit stunted, and I've had to begin to expand my wine repertoire.

I was thus surprised to stumble upon this tasty "white Bordeaux". I guess it seems pretty obvious that white grapes are grown alongside their more familiar red Bordeaux cousins of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petite Verdot and Malbec. But I had never thought of white wine coming out of Bordeaux.

And since I'd never thought about it, I had to learn a bit more about it. I'm a big fan of "full grape disclosure" on wine labels - I want to know which grapes were used in the bottle of wine I'm drinking. Apparently aside from the red grapes I listed above, Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon and Muscadelle are also grown in the Bordeaux region and used for white wine. Just like red Bordeaux wine, whites are usually (always?) a blend of two or all three of the white grapes listed.

Based on its name (and taste), I'm thinking that the 2005 Chateau Montet Bordeaux Sauvignon is mainly or completely Sauvignon Blanc. This wine was purchased for $8 at Total Wine in McLean, VA. This wine has a very nice, crisp taste. A little minerally, in a sort of Perrier sort of way (without the bubbles obviously), it also had some subtle fruit flavors, probably grapefruit.

We first had this wine with a Steampot dinner (take-out steamed crab, shrimp, other yummy seafood). This wine paired *perfectly*, with that slight citrusy grapefruit adding nicely to the seafood. We liked it so much that this became our 2nd white "house wine", displacing the Banrock Station Sémillon Chardonnay blend that had previously held the honor. The Banrock Station wine is a bit sweeter, which tends to pair better with spicier foods like Thai or Indian, but I really enjoy the "clean", crisp taste of the Chateau Montet Bordeaux Sauvignon.

Overall recommendation - the 2005 Chateau Montet Boreaux Sauvignon makes for a pleasant drinking, clean and crisp summer white. For $8, it has a high quality-to-price ratio, and I'd recommend giving it a shot!

2004 Butterfield Station Merlot

2007-04-27T18:57:00.000-04:00

One of the things I like most about wine is that it's meant to be shared. Unlike beer which comes in "single serving" sized bottles and cans, wine comes in a big bottle that's the ideal accompaniment to any sit-down dinner amongst friends.

Kris and I brought this bottle of 2004 Butterfield Station Merlot over to our friend Alex's place for dinner the other night. This wine costs $8 at Total Wine in McLean, VA. (I know what you're thinking - wow, such generous guests... But we were also bringing dinner, and this was just a simple wine to drink while watching Survivor!)

This wine was very briefly our "house red". A year ago or so, Kris and I decided we should find both an inexpensive red and white wine with "middle of the road" taste that would make them easily pair with a wide variety of dishes, or at the very least just not "get in the way" of the flavors of the food. We would buy these by the case, and just always have them around the house to pop open when we wanted a simple wine with dinner but didn't want to spend too much money on it, or if we needed a second, or third bottle when we had company over and a higher quality wine was unnecessary at that point.

The Butterfield Station Merlot is a medium-bodied wine which contains 9% Shiraz, 5% Petite Verdot, and 3% Malbec. It is light ruby in color, lighter than I would expect given some of the "darker" grapes it has blended in. When we first opened it, I thought it had a grapey and somewhat astringent aroma - you could feel the alcohol tingling the inside of your nose. Upon tasting, Kris described it as "smooth and round", with hints of chocolate. She thought it was also tart, something like a sour cherry. Alex thought it was very fruity, especially at the back of his mouth. He said it didn't have a strong aftertaste, which Alex said was a good thing for him. He agreed with the chocolate. I tasted the chocolate and cherries, some dark fruit, maybe over-ripe raspberries. It had very soft tannins, and tasted a bit juicy. That astringency on the nose was kind of bothering me though. I let it sit for a while in the glass, and that seemed to help.

Overall, I don't think this wine is quite worth it for the money. I think Kris and Alex were more forgiving than I was, and would rank this wine as a bit of a better buy. I think this wine makes a really good first impression, which is how it ended up as our house wine for about 6 bottles. However, once you get to know it a bit you start picking up on its idiosyncrasies and annoying habits, and it loses a lot of its charm. So, this is a recommendation against it from me.

Instead, I'd recommend our *new* house red, the 2004 Carmen Merlot from the Rapel Valley of Chile. At only $6, this wine has an excellent quality-to-price ratio - especially when you buy it by the case and get the case discount! This could just represent the general trend of our palates moving away from super fruity wines towards a more fruit/earthy balance, but Kris and I really like to depth and added complexity that the Carmen Merlot brings. I'll write this one up separately the next time we pop open a bottle!

On a related note, I've somewhat recently become fascinated with the wines of Chile and Argentina, and I strongly recommend taking a chance and grabbing a bottle the next time you're at your local (or not-so-local if you're a Marylander) wine shop. I've found that the majority of these wines are of very high quality for the price, and typically have much more complexity to them than you'd expect in an inexpensive wine (not to say that they don't produce any top-knotch wines - they do). I'll write up some Chilean and Argentinian wine tips in a later post, but for now I'd look for Argentinian Malbecs and Chilean Carmenères (Carmenère is an old Bordeaux varietal, virtually extinct in its native France which has found its ideal home in Chile; although still widely grown elsewhere and typically used as a blending grape, Malbec has similarly found its ideal conditions in Argentina, where exciting Malbec varietal wines (i.e., 100% Malbec) are being produced).

Sonoma County Partie Deux

2007-04-26T08:24:00.000-04:00

This post is continuing my post from April 15th about my Sonoma County wine tasting experiences while living in the Bay Area. This was 6 or 7 years ago, when I knew very little about wine and only recall the "stand out" events, but I wanted to write this mainly as a way of looking back and using my current perspective on wine to better understand the great opportunities I had while living driving distance from California wine country. Yeah, these "background" posts can get sorta long, and don't have any pictures or anything visually stimulating so you may want to just skim and look for the good stuff. I tend to get off onto tangetns quite a bit, so perhaps those will be more interesting. Anyway, today I want to touch on my recollections from tastings in the Russian River Valley, Green Valley and Alexander Valley regions of Sonoma wine country as I covered Carneros, Sonoma Valley and Dry Creek in my previous post.

Russian River Valley
In Northern Sonoma County, the Russian River Valley was first known for its Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays, although also produces some excellent Zinfandels and increasingly, Syrahs. This seems a little strange to me, because from my limited grape knowledge it seems that Pinot Noir and Chardonnay always "pair" well in a similar climate, one that has cooler nights (often accomplished by the coastal fog settling in and cooling things down) and a slightly longer growing season, but Zinfandel and Syrah are happy baking in the sun a bit, so I wouldn't expect to find them within the same AVA. Since it has been so long since I was there, I'd guess that the Pinots and Chards came from vineyards in the hills while the Zins and Syrahs must be grown on the valley floor.

The only winery that I visited in the Russian River Valley that left enough of an impression on me that I still remember it today was Korbel. Up until visiting Korbel, I had never particularly cared for sparkling wine; it's not that I disliked it, but I'd just never found it to be that interesting. Slightly tart, not very flavorful wine with bubbles - big deal. I recognize now that this was likely due to two reasons: 1) The limited sparkling wine I had consumed to this point in my life was all quite cheap (as in, $3 a bottle cheap); and 2) I had typically only drank "one toast's worth" of the stuff before returning to whatever other beverage was at hand, and I had certainly never tasted two (or more) sparkling wines within months of one another, much less minutes. So it came as a bit of a shock to me to learn that there was actually a great deal of variety to sparkling wines, and that they could taste a) quite different from one another, and b) really good!

One of the things I most remember about tasting at Korbel is that they had several little tasting "carts" set up outside along a path leading throughout the grounds. I liked this approach, because it allowed for a little separation between the different groups of people tasting that day, and you didn't get that "cattle at the trough" sensation that so often occurs when too many people are crowded around a small indoor wine tasting bar. The other thing I recall is how we were instructed to taste - instead of sipping at it like still wine, we were encouraged to bottoms up and take it all as one big swig. Probably not the best advice, but it was fun at the time! I remember my favorite being the Korbel Natural. It's very easy to find and probably costs around $13, although I think I'd probably spend a couple extra dollars and pick up a Gloria Ferrer sparkling wine instead (almost as easy to find nowadays as the Korbel).

And now, an educational moment
I used to call U.S. sparkling wines (all sparkling wines, really) "champagne"; in fact, many U.S. winemakers (Korbel included) still market their product as "champagne", or even "Champagne", and at the very least mention "méthode champenoise" (i.e., made using the Champagne method), so it's not suprising that a large number of Americans refer to it in this way. However, "Champagne" has actually been a legally-protected name for the sparkling wines from the Champagne region of France for some time now. The French reaffirmed this legal protection in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 (the larger purpose of which was to officially end WWI). The catch here is the although signed by President Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty of Versailles was never ratified by the U.S. Senate (think Kyoto Protocol); instead, the U.S. ended up making a separate peace agreement with Germany. Thus the legal protections for all things "Champagne" do not apply to U.S. winemakers, many of whom happily exploit this loophole and name their wines after renown French wine-making regions (Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy being the most obvious examples).

And while we're on the subject, lots of countries make sparkling wines: the Spanish have their Cava, the Italians have Spumante, the Germans, Sekt. Just because a sparkling wine isn't truly "Champagne" does not make it inherently inferior - I recommend trying out some of these other sparklers and see for yourself!

Green Valley (technically a sub-region of the Russian River Valley)
My then girlfriend, now wife and I visited Iron Horse Vineyards back in 2000 or so. I believe this is the only winery we visited within the Green Valley AVA. While Iron Horse does produce quite a few still wines, it was their sparkling wines that brought us there for the tasting as our visit to Korbel had made us interested in exploring the world of sparkling wines a bit.

As luck would have it, we arrived on a day where they were pressing Chardonnay. Before our tasting, we were asked if we would like to try the juice straight off the press - but of course! They dipped our tasting glasses beneath the stream of juice flowing out of the press, and handed them to us. Yum! That is definitely the best grape juice either of us have ever had - so good in fact, that I still recall it quite clearly almost 7 years later! At this point, we joked that we were sure there wine was good, but we'd just take a couple gallons of the juice to go, please. Alas, that was not to be, but at least we had the tasting to look forward to.

I only recall Chardonnay and Pinot Noir based sparkling and still wines in the tasting, but there may have been others - I see their website mentions Sangiovese, as well as Viognier, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petite Verdot (the final four being sourced from the T-bar Vineyard in Alexander Valley). Our favorite wine by far was their "Wedding Cuvée", a Blanc de Noirs made from predominantly Pinot Noir. We splurged and bought a bottle, and ended up saving that bottle for almost 5 years - breaking it open to celebrate when I proposed to Kris on a beach in Ventura! Needless to say, it was the perfect wine for the occasion!

Alexander Valley
I recall tasting at several wineries within Alexander Valley such as Chateau Souverain and Murphy-Goode, but it was Clos du Bois that made the biggest impression on me - and it wasn't even because of the wine! Oddly enough, what ended up being a life-altering (albeit in a very small way) experience for me was the way in which they opened their wines: it was at Clos du Bois that I first discovered the world's perfect wine opener.

The perfect wine opener
I don't think I'm alone in that I started off my bottle-opening days using a "winged" corkscrew, often referred to simply as "wings". Why this device has so thoroughly infiltrated most stores, supermarkets and kitchen drawers I'm not sure: it typically has a rather large diameter corkscrew, which really destroys the corks as you try to remove them, and downright pulverizes older, more brittle corks; the corkscrew also never seems quite long enough to fully extract the cork, so you are left tugging at the device once the wings have "closed", trying to pry those last fractions of an inch of cork out of the bottle.

Not really thinking that there may exist an alternative, I went along twisting and yanking and cursing my way through the uncorking process for many years, always rather annoyed that such a small hunk of bark could so effectively bar my entry into the treasures waiting within the bottle. I have since come to think of using wings to open wine bottles as like trying to cook using cheap, dull knives - sure, they'll do the job they were designed to do (cut things), but they'll likely badly mangle the final product in the process (ever try cutting a soft, sweet heirloom tomato with a cheap knife? It isn't pretty).

Enter the the Pulltap Wine Opener. When I saw the Clos du Bois tasting room associate whip one of these out and effortlessly open a new bottle for the tasting room, I realized that wine openers had evolved far beyond the wings with which I was accustomed. There are several aspects which make the Pulltap the perfect wine opener: 1) The serrated foil cutter - easily remove the foil blocking your access to the cork; 2) a relatively thin, Teflon-coated corkscrew - goes in easily without destroying the cork, and since it's Teflon-coated doesn't get stuck on the way out, either; 3) the dual-stage arm - you crank the corkscrew down all the wine into the cork, and use the first stage to life the cork most of the way out and the second stage to finish the job - simple!; and 4) they're cheap! You can buy them at Trader Joe's or on the 'Net for $5 or $6 dollars - forget those expensive wine openers that allow you to re-cork the bottle (that's what Vacu Vin is for). So I strongly recommend picking up a couple of these babies - your bottle-opening will be much more pleasant from now on!

Sayonara, Napa and Sonoma...
After making trips up to Napa and Sonoma for a couple years, we were ready for something different - different wines, different attitudes, and definitely a difference in the number of people crowding into the tasting rooms. That's when we stumbled across the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association's Passport Program. This great program opened up a new world of wine tasting in the Santa Cruz Mountains for us - I'll talk about this in another post!

Shenandoah Blanc

2007-04-24T23:56:00.000-04:00

Although there were rumors of thunderstorms, today ended up a nice, warm and sunny day - the perfect kind of day for an after-work "summer wine". This "Shenandoah Blanc" from Shenandoah Vineyards fits the category perfectly. To me, a summer wine needs to be light (light- or medium-bodied), crisp, and slightly sweet, preferably with floral or tropical fruit notes. Somehow, I think Virginia wines know that, since several Virginia whites seem to fit this description. This has lead me to the theory that it is often best to try to "drink locally", if at all possible. Local wines just seem to "fit" that region's climate, or the mood that climate puts you in, or probably both.

I certainly wouldn't want to *exclude* wines from other regions - after all, finding a great wine from a new-to-you region is part of the fascination. But there's definitely a connection between where you live and what you eat and drink, and doing both locally when possible makes you feel a little more rooted in the now. I never used to be a white wine person - while living outside of Santa Barbara, CA, I fell in love with the Rhone-style blends that absolutely thrive in that area. After experiencing my first DC summer, I'm gaining an appreciation for the valuable role the whites (and rosés) can play...

Anyway, back to the wine - the Shenandoah Blanc has a slightly greenish straw color (as you may or may not be able to tell from the picture - I'm beginning to learn how much of an art photographing something so simple as a bottle of wine can be!). It has a pleasant nose, slightly sweet and perfumy. This gives way to a much crisper taste than you might expect yet with the hint of sweetness, like biting into a green apple. The flavor is rounded out with tones of citrus and honey. I appear to have misplaced our tasting notes from the winery visit (we stopped by over Easter Weekend), but I'd guess this wine has a fair amount of Sauvignon Blanc, and probably that perennial Virginia hybrid, Vidal Blanc. And at just $10/bottle, this makes for the perfect summer sipper.

Some of you may wonder about the wine glass shown in the picture - not exactly elegant stemware, eh? Well, remember those cute wannabe-winery dogs (Owen & Iris) from by previous post? Their tails are the natural predators of the elusive wine glass. One misplaced wag can send several of these often coffee-table dwelling glasses flying across the room to their doom. Not so with these beefy wine glasses though - there's just enough weight in the oversized stem and base to give the glass a fighting chance to shrug of an indirect hit from an excited border collie tail. And even if they do take a fall, they're likely to remain on the table rather than becoming a carpet-destroying projectile of red wine and glass. So, they may look a little funny, but these Crate & Barrel Viva wine glasses are really a wine-and-dog lover's dream (oh yeah - they're also completely dishwasher friendly!).

Three Fox Vineyards

2007-04-24T22:51:00.000-04:00

On Sunday Kris and I took a special trip out to Virginia wine country specifically to visit Three Fox Vineyards. As always when visiting wine country, we were accompanied by our wannabe-winery dogs, Owen and Iris. As border collies, you might think their goal in life would be to herd sheep, but ours seem much more content herding vines (and greeting everyone at the winery, and chasing bees, that sort of thing). It's always interesting for us to see how different wineries react to the dogs; we've seen the entire spectrum, from having to tie them up outside, to allowing them to wander in and out of the tasting room (and wine cellar, in the case of North Mountain Vineyard & Winery in the Shenandoah Valley - apparently Owen kept visiting their winemaker while we were up in the tasting room!).

This picture is pretty clearly NOT from the winery (it's actually from Assateague) - no, our camera batteries died, so I have no photographic documentation of our visit to Three Fox. Dezel at Virginia Vine Spot has posted some good pics of Three Fox which can make up for our technical malfunction. I just wanted to post a pic of Owen and Iris since they're so cute.

Anyway, Three Fox Winery passed the "dog test" with flying colors! Not only are they "dog-friendly", but owner Holli Todhunter absolutely loved the dogs, and invited them to come back (presumably with their owners!). She said she would like to get a "winery dog" or two, as the scent helps to keep deer and other critters out of the vineyards.

This laid-back approach is definitely the norm at Three Fox, where they have a croquet set, bocce ball and horseshoes set up for their guests' enjoyment, and tasting room staff wear shirts saying "Will Work for Wine". In fact, the "will work for wine" thing is part of the reason Kris and I wanted to visit Three Fox - they take in volunteers to help out in the tasting room and possibly other duties, and we're considering giving it a shot. True, it's about an hour and 15 minute drive from our house, but I think it would be a pretty fun weekend activity once or twice a month or so.

But first we wanted to taste their wines! They were pouring nine wines the day we visited (it would have been an even 10, but they ran out of "the favorite"). For whites, they had a 2005 Leggero Chardonnay, a 2006 Giacosa Chardonnay, a 2006 Calabrese Pinot Grigio, a 2006 La Boheme Viognier, and a 2006 Appassionata Vidal. My clear favorite of the whites was the Leggero Chardonnay. This no-oak Chard had a great pineapple & citrus nose which leapt from the glass, with both flavors continuing on to the tongue. There was a hint of creaminess to it, but overall it was very crisp and refreshing (the whole "no-oak" thing). This sells for $20/bottle.

For reds, they had a 2005 Il Volpe Sangiovese, a 2004 Il Cigno Merlot, a 2004 Classico Cabernet Franc, and their "port alternative, a 2006 Rosso Dolce Chambourcin (they would have also been tasting a 2005 Alouette Cabernet Franc, but they were sold out). I had another clear favorite on the reds, their Il Volpe Sangiovese. This 89% Sangiovese, 11% Cabernet Franc Super-Tuscan had a nose of fresh berries, cherries and red fruit. This easy-sipping wine had some spice to it, with a brightness and balance that was very enjoyable. This is a good "summer red" - light enough to enjoy when the temperature starts to peak but definitely a red wine at heart. This sells for $22/bottle.

I liked all of their reds actually, which is a unique experience for me at a Virginia winery - oftentimes Virginia reds seem too watered-down, lacking the punch of California or South American reds. It appears as though Three Fox has found a way to create a little bit of Tuscany in Virginia, with the effects carrying over from their Italy-themed tasting room and wine names to the vineyards and wines themselves. Although John Todhunter has only been running his own winery for a few years now, his more than 25 years of winemaking experience really shows through in the final product. I look forward to tasting their Nebbiolo and Sangiovese Reserve once they are released!

Poggio le Volpi 2004 Frascati Superiore

2007-04-21T22:20:00.000-04:00

To celebrate the return of Spring to the Mid-Atlantic, Kris and I popped open a bottle of Frascati Superiore. We bought this bottle for $12 at FineWine.com during their French wine tasting blitz (I'll describe this in a separate post). We've also purchased this wine for $12 at Best Cellars in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC (also for $12).

This wine has a great floral nose that just jumps out of the glass at you. You also get hints of honeysuckle and peaches, and that floraly fruit continues on to the taste. It dances across your tongue, with an almost effervescent acidity, and a slightly sweet, almost mineraly finish. This is a great "hot weather wine" - I highly recommend it! We drank it with leftover sandwiches from our lunch at a French bakery - perfect!

A little research reveals that this is an Italian blend of 35% Malvasia di Candia, 35% Malvasia del Lazio, and 30% Bombino. All of these grapes seem mainly confined to Italy, particularly the Puglia region, although they can definitely be found elsewhere. I'd like to provide more interesting tidbits, but I know even less about Italian wines than I do French, so that's all I can add for now. Check back with me in a couple months - hopefully I'll be able to do better!

Overwhelmed at today's tasting

2007-04-21T20:05:00.000-04:00

Wow - there were a lot of people at FineWine.com Gaithersburg's French Wine Tasting event today! I think even FineWine.com were pretty blown away by the turn-out As it turned out, there were 11 French winemakers present, pouring a total of 24 wines! I'm not sure how long this link will be remain live, but here's a list of *most* of the wines poured (two winemakers signed up too late to be included on the list).

As a transplanted Californian, I am a French wine neophyte, so I was looking forward to this opportunity to directly compare between wines from different regions of France. Represented were Burgundy, Loire Valley, Northern and Southern Rhône, Cahors & Madiran, Bordeaux, Alsace, and Langeudoc.

First off, I want to mention that Kris and I escaped with only a $265 dent into our bank account - I was very impressed with our restraint, given that we tasted some absolutely fabulous wines! Since I doubt anyone is interested in reading tasting notes from 24 wines in a row, I think I'll mention my general impressions of the event, and will post about the wines as we drink them :)

This was the first tasting I've ever done where I've consciously spit. I admit, I did swallow on some of the truly spectacular offerrings, but I probably only drank the equivalent of one full glass even though I tasted 24 different wines. It wasn't easy - with so many people crammed into a realtively small store, the spit buckets were few and far between. We ended up carrying an extra glass with us as a "spit glass", which we periodically dumped into a bucket as we came across one.

With so many great-sounding wines, I really wanted to be able to fully appreciate them, so spitting was key. The wines were arranged by winemaker, obviously, since the winemakers themselves were present. Although predominantly a "red guy", I'm struggling to appreciate whites and really wanted to give them their fair share of attention. Thus we ended up making two loops - first to taste the whites, then to taste the reds (with one final stop for a yummy late harvest + botrytis dessert wine). This made for a rather long tasting, as we had to wait in line not once but twice for each winemaker, but overall I'm glad we did it because it allowed for a more direct comparison of more similar wines.

My overall impression of the event was that it was a bit overwhelming - between the hordes of people and the often thick accents of the winemakers, it was very difficult to glean much information about the wines I was tasting beyond the descriptions I had printed out from FineWine.com's website. I think the fact that it was a free wine tasting, combined with decent advertising and the most beautiful weather we've had since last fall all came together and created a "perfect storm" of wine consumers descending upon the store. I'm very glad I attended - I left with some great wines! - I just wish I would have had more time to talk with the winemakers and expand my (incredibly limited) knowledge of French wines.

Here's a quick list of the wines we ended up purchasing - as I mentioned, I'll put up tasting notes from when we actually crack open the bottle, not the ones I took during this tasting event:

Whites (see, I'm giving whites a fair chance!)

2005 Dom Jean-Luc Mader Gewurztraminer (Alsace) - $17
2005 Dom Jean-Luc Mader Pinot Gris (Alsace) - $17
2005 Dom Berthet-Rayne Côtes du Rhône Blanc (Côtes du Rhône) - $13
2006 Ch Les Arromans Entre-deux-Mers (Bordeaux) - $10

Reds

2005 Dom Berthet-Rayne Chateauneuf du Pape Rouge (CdP) - $27
**My favorite wine of the day! I just love strong, smooth CdPs...
2001 Ch Mondesir-Gazin Blaye (Bordeaux) - $23
**Very tasty - a "close second" in the running, but hard to beat a CdP for me.
2005 Dom Renée Bouvier Le Chapitre Bourgogne Rouge (Burgundy) - $20
2004 Dom Le Pas de l'Escalette Les Clapas Rouge (Languedoc) - $20
**Perfect timing! A Coteaux du Languedoc just in time for this month's WBW!
2005 Dom Le Pas de l'Escalette le 1er Pas Rouge (Languedoc) - $15
2004 Ch Les Arromans Rouge Cuvée Prestige (Bordeaux) - $14
**We bought two - seems like it could have excellent aging potential.
2005 Dom Berthet-Rayne Côtes du Rhône Rouge (Côtes du Rhône) - $13
**We also bought two of these - excellent Quality-Price Ratio.
2005 Ch Les Cedres Heritage Cahors (Cahors) - $12
**Again, we bought two - excellent QPR!

In case anyone's adding up our purchases, we also bought the Frascati Superiore that I just reviewed for $12, as well as a Cateller Cava Brut (sparkling Spanish wine) for $14. All in all, not a bad haul! Looking forward to breaking in to them and writing them up in the weeks / months to come.

Virtual Rosé Wine Tasting!

2007-04-20T00:49:00.000-04:00

It just keeps on coming tonight - amazing what a wine-obsessed insomniac can stumble upon in one evening! My next big find of the night is a "Wine Blogging Wednesday" type event called a Virtual Wine Tasting hosted by Catavino. (I grabbed this cool 1984-esque graphic from Catavino's site: since I don't know what I'm doing yet in terms of blogging etiquette, please tell me if this is a no-no, rude, or in any way bad!)

Back to the tasting - the theme for this virtual tasting was chosen as a way of encouraging folks to delve a little deeper into an oft-neglected portion of the wine world, rosés. It seems that many American wine drinkers (myself included until quite recently) live in a binary wine world: wine is either red or white. Contemplating a glass of pink wine only conjures up memories of the sickly sweet "White Zinfandel"; a difficult mental roadblock to overcome.

Thus I am excited to participate in Catavino's proposed virtual rosé tasting, which will give me a chance to compare a Spanish or Portuguese rosé with a French or Californian one (of which I am just *slightly* more familiar). Or I could go crazy and try a South American rosé - Kris and I tried a 2006 Anakena Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé a couple weeks ago to welcome in what we thought was the beginning of Spring (and then it got cold and dreary ever since - tomorrow looks better though!). It was only an $8 wine, and we were pleasantly surprised by the "happy fruit flavor" (official wine tasting terminology all the way on this blog), and crisp, balanced taste. I've heard of people liking South American Malbec Rosés, so I may have to check one of those out - I'll let you know how it goes!

Breaking Tasting News: 10 French winemakers at Finewine.com in Gaithersburg!

2007-04-19T23:53:00.000-04:00

Seems like a bit of last-minute notice, but I just received an email from FineWine.com (both the name of the stores and the website) mentioning their exciting double tasting they're having this weekend! FineWine.com has two stores, one in Gaithersburg, MD and one in McLean, VA. One Saturday, the Gaithersburg store will be hosting a free French wine tasting event, with 10 French winemakers at the store pouring 20 wines from Bordeaux, Loire, Burgundy, Rhone Valley, Cahors, Madiran and Alsace! Cool! Then on Sunday in their McLean store they will be featuring 5 Spanish winemakers with an assortment of Spanish wines.

FineWine.com is one of but a few exceptions to the general rule that it is impossible to find good wine (at non-inflated prices) within Montgomery County. That said, I have only visited their store twice in the past (to pick up Beaujolais Nouveau on the third Thursday in November! More on this fun wine world tradition next fall...). Thus I don't want to be too enthusiastic in my recommendation of this event, but needless to say I have high hopes. I plan to attend the French wine tasting at the Gaithersburg store, so I'll report back on how it goes!

Wine Blogging Wednesday #33

2007-04-19T21:21:00.000-04:00

So after stumbling about the wine blogosphere for the past few weeks, I have found out about this great little tradition know as Wine Blogging Wednesday (WBW). The idea behind WBW is that someone "hosts" by proposing a theme (e.g., Oregon Pinot Noir vs. French Burgundy, or something like that). Folks then go out and find wine to fit the theme, drink them (the fun part!), then either blog about them if they have their own blogs, or post their comments back to the host's blog! Sounds like a great way to discover new wines that you may not have thought to try, as well as hear many different people's impressions on the same or similar wine. I'm all for making wine as fun, open and un-snobby as possible, and WBWs seem designed to do just that!

So, this month's WBW (#33 apparently - is that almost three years of WBWs then??) is being hosted by Marcus of Doktor Weingolb. The theme is Languedoc-Roussillon value wines: all bottles must be in the $15-$30 price range and from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of Southern France. To help everyone out a bit, Marcus posted this list of Languedoc-Roussillon producers - looks like there's quite a bit to choose from! This is going to mean another trip into Virginia to swing by Total Wine in McLean, since Montgomery County Maryland is downright draconian when it comes to the wine selection allowed within the County. I just picked up a couple mixed cases from them only last week, but hey: too much wine is never a bad thing!

The wine geek in me had to look up some quick facts about the Languedoc-Roussillon wine region, and it's impressive: the region has well over 700,000 acres of land devoted to the vine, and is the single biggest wine producing region in the world! In fact, L-R is responsible for over a third of France's total wine production - and that's a lot. This abundance of production has apparently been a blessing and a curse - originally, this region was known mainly for bulk wine production, creating copious amounts of very low quality wine. This began changing in the late 1980s when new first-generation, often young, winemakers moved into the region, schooled in modern winemaking techniques and passionate about making wines that expressed the potential of their appellation that they knew was there. They began to limit the quantity and improve the quality of their grapes, and their efforts have lead to a steady increase the quality of wines from the region.

So it sounds like this is an excellent opportunity to get good "QPR" wine, as the wine blogs like to say (Quality-Price Ratio : aka "bang for your buck"). Grape varietals which thrive in the Languedoc-Roussillon region are Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignan, Cinsault, Grenache, Merlot, Mourvèdre and Syrah. WIth this kind of a selection, what's not to love?? I look forward to spending what will likely amount to an inordinate amount of time scouring the bottles at Total Wine for the perfect selection for my inaugural WBW!

2005 Milton Park Shiraz

2007-04-19T20:44:00.000-04:00

Since Kris and I had both had a long week, we wanted to veg out in front of the TV and not feel guilty about only half-heartedly paying attention to what was in our glass. For better or for worse, the 2005 Milton Park Shiraz fulfilled this role admirably.

I guess I was expecting more - I remember being very impressed with the quality of this wine given its price ($9 at Total Wine) back several years ago when I first came across this wine in California. In fact, a quick Google brings up several reviews, each and every one mentioning its quality far exceeding its price. Here's what the Wine Advocate had to say about it: "A superb value, the 2005 Shiraz Milton Park is unbelievable for this price point. It reveals copious amounts of blackberries, black cherries, tar, licorice, and a hint of oak. Beautifully textured, rich, full-bodied, and lush, it should be consumed over the next 3-4 years." - Wine Advocate (#167, Oct 2006), 90 pts

Perhaps its just because my tastes have shifted a bit since leaving California for the East Coast - I find myself appreciating the earthier, more balanced European (and South American) wines recently over some of the Californian and Australian fruit bombs (I certainly don't mean to imply that *all* or even *most* California wines are like this - but there are plenty out there). I think part of this preference shift is due to simple availability - good California wines are difficult to get over here on the more Euro-centric East Coast. It seems that some wine retailers in the area almost enjoy excluding California wines - some weird way of thumbing their nose at the "Left Coast". And Maryland doesn't allow direct wine shipping to consumers (or even retailers in Montgomery County), so no more California wine clubs. Thus I think you just start exploring what's available, and start developing a taste for it. It's like the Crosby, Stills & Nash song: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

Anyway, the Milton Park Shiraz is definitely very drinkable, and although frighteningly dark purple could be a good choice to break out for friends who are just getting in to wine as its simple fruit and tannins remain soft and approachable. I feel that its a solid wine - I was just hoping for more. But I'm still struggling to recognize the difference between a poor wine and a well-made wine which I simply dislike. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions on this - I think that's a difficult milestone to reach in wine tasting, and I will take all the pointers I can get!

Zinfandel vs. Primitivo

2007-04-17T23:26:00.000-04:00

Tonight's bottle of wine magically turned into two, when, after tasting the 2005 Caleo Primitivo Salento, my wife Kris and I decided we just had to do a side-by-side comparison with a California Zinfandel. Since we purchased the Caleo Primitivo for $8, we found an $8 Zinfandel in our collection - the 2005 Ravenswood Vintner's Blend Zin. Both wines were purchased at Total Wine in McLean, VA.

"Why would you want to compare an Italian Primitivo with a Californian Zinfandel?", you might ask. Well, if you're asking, it's because you sagely decided to skip the long introductory posts on this blog, and thus missed my rant on Zinfandel / Primitivo / Crljenak Kasteljanski. The point of the rant was that Zinfandel and Primitivo have now been proven to be the same grape. So it only made sense to try them side-by-side and note any differences or similarities.

As it turned out, there are a LOT more similarities than differences. Both had a very similar nose of raspberries and spice: the Zinfandel displayed more pepper while the Italian was more an unidentifiable melange of spices (I'm new at this whole describing-what-you're-smelling thing, so it's probably just me not having a sufficient "mental scent library" to nail down the spices in the Primitivo). Both the nose and taste of the Ravenswood were more fruit forward and brighter. The Primitivo was a smoother, more balanced, more complex, and a bit more "brooding" than the happy Californian. As the glass opened up, the Primitivo took on more complexity, while the Zin stayed relatively the same.

Bottom line: If you're a Zinfandel fan, it's well worth your time to explore some Italian Primitivos. Given that both the Zin and Primitivo were the same price ($8), I'd buy this Primitivo again hands-down over this Zin - although these wines are so similar that we had a somewhat hard time telling them apart when tasting "blind", there's just a lot more to like in the Primitivo.

Crush

2007-04-17T18:32:00.000-04:00

Crush, a new 13-minute-long wine documentary, just debuted at the 10th Annual Sonoma Valley Film Festival. Filmmaker Bret Lyman follows winemaker Richard Bruno of Don Sebastiani & Sons through the end-of-season harvest and crush, letting the story be told through gorgeous visuals and simple narration. The movie is very much cinematic, with the portrayal of the human element of the story far outweighing any academic explanation of the processes being filmed. Definitely worth 13 minutes of any wine lover's time!

So what's up with the name?

2007-04-17T00:37:00.000-04:00

Dead languages are cool. True, they aren't too helpful when you're traveling, but they just sound cool - Carpe diem! Veni, Vidi, Vici! - see what I mean? And blog names should sound cool too, don't you think? Seeing as how I took a whopping one semester of Latin in undergrad, I figured that made me perfectly qualified to butcher Latin in the attempts to come up with the name for my wine blog. Which is exactly what I did with the help of a Latin - English dictionary.

So the idea here is that word Vinvenio has two parts: I initially intended for the "in" part to overlap, forming both "vin" and "invenio". I think the meaning behind the "vin" part of the name is fairly obvious; "invenio" means "to come upon, find or discover". Perfect, methinks, since this blog is all about finding/discovering new things about wine!

I then got a little concerned over what would happen if someone broke the word down the middle to form vin+venio. See, "venio" reminded me a bit of "venial", so I was thinking "uh oh, I don't want folks to think this blog is about forgivable or excusable wines". Again, Latin-English dictionary to the rescue, informing me that "venio" meant "to get into a certain state, to fall into". Phew - I'm fine with getting into that wine state of mind! Thus Vinvenio was born...

(And in case you're wondering, the bumper sticker says "If you can read this you are over-educated".)

2004 Bogle Petite Sirah

2007-04-16T22:01:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you, but I was getting pretty bored with that background stuff! I still want to finish it though, but I think I'll just intersperse it in amongst the fun stuff :-)

So tonight's bottle was a 2004 Petite Sirah from Bogle Vineyards in Clarksburg, CA. If you've ever had a wine made from Syrah before (or Shiraz as the Aussies call it - it's the same grape), you may be thinking "OK, this must be some strange "small" form of Syrah". Actually, Petite Sirah (note the "i" in Sirah, and not the "y") is a different grape altogether. It seems likely that "Petite Sirah" is actually the grape "Durif", which was itself a cross between Syrah and another grape. So although Syrah and Petite Sirah may sound similar, they taste completely different!

The first thing you'll notice about Petite Sirah when you pour it is that it's dark - really, really dark. It's almost impossible to write about a Petite Sirah without using the term "inky" - for something this slippery and opaque, no other adjective quite works. That's actually why we chose a Petite Sirah for tonight - the skies were dripping, dark and dreary, the wind was screaming past the house, and you just wanted a wine you could wrap yourself up in like a nice warm blanket. Petite Sirah can do that.

The 2004 Bogle Petite Sirah had a nose of cherries and dark berries - blackberries maybe. Upon tasting there was a distinct "jamminess" that I find pretty indicative of California Petite Sirahs. The wine was big yet smooth, with plenty of fruit and oak. It had a fair amount of tannins (also a Petite Sirah trait) that in this case unfortunately weren't in balance with the rest of the wine. This may mean that the wine could benefit from cellaring for a while, mellow those tannins out and soften it up.

We bought this wine for $11 at World Market, which can be a surprisingly good place to pick up wine at a decent price. The selection is really the biggest drawback, but it's definitely large enough to keep you occupied for a while!

Other people may do this too, but we think we came up with a particularly clever way to keep track of how much a wine costs and where we bought it - we simply write it onto the back label, usually near the bar code, with a fine point sharpie (the WM in this case is for "World Market"). It's small enough that guests probably won't notice it if it's sitting on the table, but quite helpful if you're pulling out a "second bottle" and know that your guests won't appreciate a $20 bottle at this point.

The final word on the 2004 Bogle Petite Sirah is that it served its purpose well - we were in a lazy mood and just had a Boboli pizza for dinner so no need for a fancy wine pairing, and this thick, juicy wine was great for after-work pre-meal sipping. That said, there are definitely better values to be had at $11 a bottle, but probably not in Petite Sirahs (I have the comparably-priced Concannon Petite Sirah in the cellar which I'll break out for comparison purposes next time the mood strikes which, given our weather forecast, could be quite soon).

The "Sonoma Story"

2007-04-15T21:42:00.000-04:00

This post continues with my long-winded wine tasting resume that I feel compelled to lay out before I can get into the guts of what I want this blog to be, namely my journey towards a deeper understanding and appreciation of wine, and my continual quest for enjoyable "everyday wines" (i.e., those that can be consumed on a nightly basis without going broke in the process!).

So as I described yesterday, Napa was great when I was a grad student and could visit during the week. Once the real world crept in via a 9-5 job (more like 8-6, being a consultant), wine tasting trips were relegated to the weekends, and Napa become a distinctly less-fun place to be. Enter Sonoma County - take a different bridge , add on 30 minutes or so to your drive time from the East Bay, and voila: you're in a totally different wine world! Just compare the map of Sonoma County wineries to the map of Napa wineries: I think you'll notice a distinct "linearity" to Napa with the majority of wineries sprouting directly off of Hwy 29 or Silverado Trail, while Sonoma appears more like a braided river channel (to me anyway, but I'm an enviro-geek... perhaps "spiderweb" might be a better general descriptor) with a couple major roads (notably the 101) weaving through it. This makes Sonoma a little more challenging to successfully navigate between the wineries and string together a pleasant day's tasting. It's this challenge that keeps some of the masses away, and makes for a much more pleasing experience.

Anyway, my Sonoma tasting experiences are at least six years old at this point, so the memory is a bit dim. And keep in mind that while I was definitely enjoying the wine tastings at this point, it was on a purely "gut-reaction" level - I'd either like something or I wouldn't, I couldn't really describe what it was about a wine that made me like or dislike it, and I had very little intellectual background as a reference to understand how one type of wine differed from another.

With that as the caveat, here's what I can recall from my Sonoma experience. First off, Sonoma County is divided into several American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) although I wasn't aware of this at time. The wineries that I visited during my several tasting trips were located in the Carneros, Sonoma Valley, Dry Creek, Green Valley, Russian River Valley and Alexander Valley. I think I'll cover the first half of these in one post, and continue with the Green Valley, Russian River Valley and Alexander Valley tomorrow. So, here's the scoop on the first half:

Carneros
Carneros is the southern-most region of Sonoma, and the first one you hit coming up from the Bay Area. It's a pretty small AVA, with only a handful of wineries.

Gloria Ferrer: Gloria Ferrer "Champagne Caves" (thus labeled, much to the vexation of the French I'm sure) specialize in sparkling wines, but also offer a variety of still wines. (If you're new to wine-speak, "still wine" just means "normal" wine - wine without any bubbles like sparkling Champagne-like wines). Anyway, Gloria Ferrer offers a tour of their "Champagne Caves" (which in reality is a glorified basement used to keep the wine cool while aging in the barrels - that said, it *is* pretty interesting to tour, but I think "cave" is a bit of a stretch), and describes how the process of creating sparkling wine differs from other wines. My wife and I brought her parents here on one of their visits to the Bay Area, and ended up being their favorite stop of the trip! Gloria Ferrer produces some great sparklers, which can be found just about anywhere across the U.S. I recall our favorite being the Royal Cuvée.
Other Carneros wineries visited included Cline, Schug and Roche. Although I can comment on some of their wines I've had more recently, looking back on it none of these wineries left much of an impression on me.

Sonoma Valley
The Sonoma Valley region is the next stop up from Carneros. This region is home to several big-name producers, many of which I visited upon multiple occasions. The stops I remember:

Gundlach Bundschu: Lovingly known as "GunBun" (likely to prevent the non-Germanic inclined from slaughtering their name), this unpretentious winery even sells (sold) Hawaiian shirts with their logo on the back. In keeping with the theme of taking the "stuffiness" out of wine, the GunBun folks pulled a "train heist" of the Napa wine train, holding up the train on horseback and serving Sonoma wine on the *Napa* wine train! Quel horreur! I love any winery that challenges the notion that wine has to be serious to be appreciated - wine can be enjoyed on many levels, but at least one of those levels should be "fun"!
Ravenswood: As I mentioned in my previous post, Ravenswood probably ended up becoming my favorite Sonoma winery. Absolutely obsessed with Zinfandel, they make break-out-of-the-bottle big, juicy wines. Although they make a couple non-Zins, they joke that they just love that grape so much that everything sort of ends up tasting like Zin anyway. Nullum Vinum Flaccidum - No Wimpy Wines here! They definitely live up to their mantra. And what's great about touring the winery is they take this "No Wimpy" concept to a hilarious extreme: almost *everything* in the winery is labeled as no wimpy this, no wimpy that. Examples: No Wimpy Restrooms, No Wimpy Water Fountain, No Wimpy Pen... you get the picture. Basically, the only thing serious about Ravenswood is their wines. They have crafted three categories of wines, from the everyday Vintners Blend to the moderate-production County Series and the select Vineyard Designates wine. One thing I find interesting about Ravenswood is that they use native vineyard yeasts for fermenting their wine - slightly unusual for such a large producer, whom you may think would be more concerned about consistency over the possibility of added complexity (as well as possibility of a ruined batch).
Kenwood: Kenwood made its biggest impression on me with their Jack London Series of wines. Even if you haven't heard of them before, you'd probably recognize them - the "labels" are rather stunning, with a a large wolf's head and all text etched directly onto the bottle. I recall the Jack London Cabernet Sauvignon to be particularly delicious.
Other Sonoma Valley wineries that I know I visited but don't have anything memorable to report include Arrowood, Benziger**, Chateau St. Jean, Kunde** and Wellington.

** Quick note: While going to these websites to snatch their URL for the blog, I noticed that both Benziger and Kunde have really well developed sustainable vineyard / organic and/or biodynamic farming practices in place (so does Grgich Hills, from my Napa post). Getting "sustainability" into all aspects of grape growing and wine production is a major interest of mine - this is the perfect intersection between my "real job" as an environmental professional and my passion for wine. I plan to do a full-blown posting on this in the future, but for now here are links to Benziger's, Grgich Hills, and Kunde's sustainable winery initiatives.

Dry Creek
Dry Creek Vineyards was the only winery I believed I visited within the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County. To be totally honest, I think I visited them mainly because I love their labels - all sailing-inspired paintings. That was more than enough of a reason for a sailing wino like me to drive up and check them up! Sadly, all I can recall from that single trip was that their gorgeous grounds made for an excellent picnic.

I'm getting paranoid about how long these initial posts keep getting - long, and totally visually un-interesting since these trips were well before digital cameras were the norm, and I'm not even sure I could find old pics to scan even if I wanted to. So I apologize for that - it'll get more interesting soon! I'll finish up with Sonoma County tomorrow, then head down to Santa Cruz and Monterey later this week. Santa Ynez and Paso Robles will come next, hopefully moving in to my current location of Maryland and my experiences thus far with Virginia wine country. After that, we can put the past behind us and move gloriously on with the present - I've got a lot I'd like to cover!

My humble beginnings in Napa...

2007-04-14T21:56:00.000-04:00

I feel like I should finish off my "wine resume" before I get in to a regular blogging routine - just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from oenologically speaking. It is my ultimate goal to post my musings on my "wine of the day", our new favorite "house wine", and whatever random vino trivia I've stumbled upon. But I feel it's important to give a complete picture of how I got to where I am, and thus why I (currently - for I've found that my taste is constantly shifting and evolving) enjoy the wines that I do. So to continue my big "first post"...

While in grad school at UC- Berkeley, I started off my wine tastings at countless Napa wineries right off the "main drag" of Hwy 29: Robert Mondavi , Heitz, Cakebread, V.Sattui, Sterling, Domaine Chandon, Beaulieu (BV), Grgich Hills, Prager Portworks, and probably several others that have since disappeared from my memory (in my defense, it *has* been almost 8 years since then... wow, tempus fugit). My recollections of these early wine tasting adventures:

Robert Mondavi wines are what initially hooked me onto wine back in my undergrad at Eckerd College. This was rather fortuitous, since Mondavi was the first winery I ever visited, and they have (had? It's been a while...) a truly spectacular and highly educational tour and tasting. I remember having a guided tour through the winery with the guide explaining every step of the process, even stopping at a large video screen to watch a video about how the oak barrels were created - great! At the time, they made you sign up for a tour before you got to taste any of their wines. I liked this "wine education requirement" - I hope they've kept it.
V. Sattui was memorable in that the winery has an excellent gourmet deli and cheese shop - we would always stop by V. Sattui and pick up picnic supplies, either for consumption on their beautiful grounds or elsewhere down the road. Also memorable to me was their Madeira, which used to be only sold out of their winery, but I see is now available online! Too bad I live in Maryland, specifically Montgomery County which is a wine lover's purgatory (more on this topic in a later post). Just as memorable as the fantastic Madeira was the poem they attached to each bottle of it sold - I was able to find it online here.
I visited Sterling Vineyards mainly because of a gimmick - the vineyard is perched atop a hilltop, and they have an aerial tram to transport visitors from the parking lot up to the winery proper. It's not a particularly long ride, so not really necessary, but fun! As for the winery itself - they had a "self-guided" tour with signs posted at various spots when I was there; that didn't really do it for me. I also don't remember any wines from them in particular, but I do remember the view - it was fantastic! Sitting out on their terrace and looking down into the valley, watching the fog creep over the coastal range in the distance... spectacular.
I'm not so sure I knew this at the time, but owner and winemaker Miljenko "Mike" Grgich of Grgich Hills is Croatian. This is much more relevant to me now as my wife and I are also budding sailors (have taken a couple cruises to the British Virgin Islands and are working our way up the American Sailing Assocation (ASA) ladder of sailing certifications towards getting our bareboat chartering certification - ASA104). What would possibly be my absolute dream job is running a sailing & wine tasting combo chartering company, possibly out of Croatia. I am vicariously in love with the country - miles and miles of Adriatic coast, a near-perfect climate, tons of great islands to explore, and coastal wineries to boot! I sincerely hope to sail Croatia in the not-too-distant future. But I digress - Grgich Hills. So Mike Grgich is Croatian, and noticed that Zinfandel, "California's grape", tasted an awful lot like wine made from a grape from his homeland, Plavic Mali. He convinced Dr. Carole Meredith of UC - Davis to investigate. Italy's Primitivo had long been suspected as a parent or clonal variety of Zinfandel - and it has now been confirmed by Dr. Meredith that Zinfandel and Primitivo are in fact the same grape. But that still doesn't answer the ultimate question of origin: Primitivo is a relatively recent addition to Italy's crop of Vitis vinifera - it has only been documented in the boot of Italy for a couple of hundred years. After several years of searching (must have been rough fieldwork - wandering around Croatian vineyards, sampling wines and testing grapes - tough life), an almost extinct native Croatian grape called Crljenak Kasteljanski was determined to be the parent of Zinfandel/Primitivo. The holy grail of Zinfandel! So true wine geeks now refer to this grape as "ZPC" - Zinfandel/Primitivo/Crljenak. I do not aspire to such heights of wine snobbery however, so it'll always be Zinfandel to me...
I visited Prager Portworks twice while in my Napa wine touring days; the first time was at the urging of Sarah, a college friend of mine (and hardcore knitting blogger) who at the time had a binary view of the world of wine, separating all wine into either "yummy!" or "not yummy...". At this point, anything relatively sweet earned the "yummy!" rating, while everything else was distinctly "not yummy". The first time I visited Prager was before I had gotten hooked on V. Sattui's Madeira, and thus was unprepared for a serious port tasting. I tasted the two or three unfortified wines Prager offered, and called it a day. Sarah, meanwhile, happily tasted their ports, declaring each and every one high on her yummy-scale. Fast-forward a year or so, and my discovery of the value of fortified wines. Visiting Prager a second time, I eagerly partook of their port and left very impressed by the vast differences between ports crafted from the different grapes grown on their estate. If you are even remotely interested in learning more about port wines, Prager is a must on any Napa visit.

Ah, the good old days. Well, those happy days of Napa Valley tastings started to get a bit strained after graduating from grad school, starting in on a "real job" and only being able to visit the wineries on the weekends. On the weekends in Napa, Hwy 29 is (maybe was - don't know if improvements have been made) utterly choked with cars, and more importantly, buses. These tourist-toting buses descend upon tasting room after tasting room like a swarm of locusts, monopolizing the time, space and attention of the tasting room staff up and down Napa. You're lucky to be able to elbow your way to the tasting table, much less quiz the staff on where the grapes for the wine were grown, how it was made, or why it tastes the way it does.

It was right around this point that my wine education took its next step, in the direction of Sonoma County. Sonoma is very similar to Napa in terms of quality of wine, only with much windier and indirect roads leading to more far-flung wineries and significantly fewer tourists, and a distinctly more laid-back approach to wine appreciation (as evidenced by what would become my favorite Sonoma winery - Ravenswood; in fact, I still have a button stuck into my office cork board from Ravenswood - Nullum Vinum Flaccidum - No Wimpy Wines). Since this post has gone on far too long already, the "Sonoma Story" will have to wait until my next posting.

And so it begins...

2007-04-13T15:34:00.000-04:00

So I've decided to start this wine blog. This first post is a "first" in several ways being not only the first to this blog, but also the first post I've ever made to any blog anywhere! Kind of odd that I'd never really gotten into the whole "blog thing" - I'm pretty techno-geekish in other aspects of my life, but for some reason blogs never caught my attention until now. Anyway, because of this I'm totally blog-illiterate. The only way I could figure out to get a picture for my profile was to post it here first, thus the attached picture (that's me helping out with harvest at Hillsborough Vineyards in Purcellville, VA).

The idea behind this blog is to chronicle my tasting and learning about "all things wine" from this point on. And I guess it will also chronicle my quest to figure out blogging, since this is a total experiment for me.

I've been a wine lover for some years now - I attended grad school at UC - Berkeley in 1999 and 2000, so was in the ideal location to start down the path to oenophilia: Napa and Sonoma to the north, Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay to the south. And start down the oenophilic path I did. I started off my winery visits in Napa, moved over to Sonoma, then down to the Santa Cruz mountains and Monterey Bay area. I think I'll cover my recollections from each of these areas in following posts.

After living in the Bay Area for several years, my wife enrolled at UC - Santa Barbara for grad school so we packed up and headed down to Ventura CA. For the non-California initiated, Ventura is located just south of Santa Barbara, and about an hour north of Los Angeles. This could possibly be considered "SoCal", but while living in "NorCal" I was taught to despise SoCal (they steal all of our water via the California aqueduct, they are devoid of culture, oh so many reasons), so I considered it Central Cal - until I lived there a while and determined that the NorCal hatred of SoCal was stupid and petty. NorCal loves to hate SoCal, but SoCal is so laid back, they just don't care what NorCal thinks. Being a pretty laid back person myself, I adopted this attitude as well and began considering myself as a SoCal-er.

Living in Ventura is where my love of wine truly blossomed, mainly due to Leah Cole from Paradise Wines. We were fortunate to live walking (stumbling?) distance from Leah's excellent establishment, that invited wine makers (or at least knowledgeable wine pourers) from many of the smaller wineries of Santa Ynez and Paso Robles down to her store in Ventura. Every Saturday she held $3 tastings with 5 or 6 different wines for the tasting accompanied by a bountiful supply of vino info. Between weekly Paradise Wine tastings, the occasional wine dinner, and trips to Santa Ynez and Paso Robles (I'll describe these in later posts), we really started to "get" wine. Then we moved to Maryland.

One of my friends has called the DC-area the "vortex" for sucking people in and keeping them here. This is largely due to the concentration of Fed jobs to be had here, and once you have a cush Fed job, it's hard to leave it. Well, my wife (Kris) has such a job, and thus here we are in Silver Spring, MD. Living in Silver Spring (part of Montgomery County, MD) is like being exiled to the Siberia for oenophiles - liquor control laws dating to the repeal of Prohibition make purchasing good, affordable wine almost impossible. We had to bid a tearful farewell to the several direct-shipment California wine clubs we belonged to upon moving to a "felony" state (Maryland not only disallows direct shipments of wine to your home, but is amongst the select few states that considers it a felony, with hefty fines and imprisonment involved for those found skirting the law). Virginia to the rescue! Luckily for us, the enlightened (with regards to wine anyway) Commonwealth of Virginia is but a short drive away, where we can stock up on a couple months' worth of wines for our cellar (this too, shall be *severely* dealt with in a later post).

So, that brings us to the present day. My wife and I both love wine, and enjoy 4, 5, 6 (or more on a bad/good week) bottles of wine per week. I'd like to share not only our "great finds" and tasting notes from our nightly bottle, but also tidbits of knowledge as I accumulate them on my quest to learn more about the "bottled poetry" that is wine. I hope we can all enjoy the ride.