2004 Concannon Petite Sirah

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 Again, in 1904 there is a historical document from Concannon, written in French, presumably to obtain Petite Sirah/Durif cuttings from France for planting in California's Livermore Valley.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!

2004 Butterfield Station Merlot

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

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!

Zinfandel vs. Primitivo

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.