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Type: Dry redMade With: Pinot Noir grapesPlays Well With: Salmon, pork or grilled beef.
This is a wine that is all about balance – no mean trick when it comes to the notoriously finicky pinot noir grape.
Winemaker and founder Joshua Klapper started with some amazing fruit – from farmer and winemaker Peter Cargasacchi’s vineyards in the ever-so-hot Santa Rita Hills. Cargasacchi has his own Point Concepcion label (which we have had the good fortune to taste), but does sell a fair amount of his crop to several local vintners – including La Fenetre. In fact, one of our
Continue reading La Fenetre 2006 Cargasacchi Pinot Noir
Courtesy Tablas Creek Vineyards
Type: Dry rosé Made with: Mourvedre, Grenache, Counoise Plays well with: duck, figs, cheese, nuts and picnic fare.
Let’s be clear. This is not a sweet wine. Alas, US rosés, in particular, have that bad rep from the cheap box wines that were so popular in the 1960s and ’70s. But this ain’t your daddy’s Lancers. The Tablas Creek 2009 Rosé was pink, as in the color a fresh rosé should have. The nose was fruity with watermelon and strawberry, and the fruitiness continued into the taste, even though it is
Continue reading Tablas Creek 2009 Rosé
Courtesy Tablas Creek Vineyards
Type: Dry RedMade: In Paso Robles, California with grenache, syrah, mourvedre, counoise grapesPlays well with: Slightly spicy beef dishes, anything laced with garlic.
With Tablas Creek Vineyard GM Jason Haas one of the honchos behind the Rhone Rangers and Hospice du Rhone, you think maybe he and his family are into Rhone-style wines? Like the winery’s portfolio is based on these food friendly wines of the Rhone valley of southern France. The Cotes de Tablas is a typical Rhone-style blend of syrah, mourvedre and counoise built on a foundation grenache. The nose is
Continue reading Tablas Creek 2006 Cotes de Tablas
Benjamin Spencer's great viognier
While waiting for the Rhone Rendezvous tasting at the recent Hospice du Rhone wine festival, we started chatting with winemaker and blogger Benjamin Spencer. You can catch one of his posts here at intowine.com. He also has a very small boutique winery Leojami – and you can check out their site here www.LeojamiWines.com.
Spencer and Anne were talking about writing about HdR, but then Spencer mentioned that he was about to do a guerilla pouring, as well.
A what?
“Well, basically, it’s just a behind the scenes pouring at public wine
Continue reading Guerilla Pouring with Benjamin Spencer
Type: Dry redMade with: Pinot NoirPlays well with: Strong cheeses, red meats
The Vergari 2006 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir is a premium example of a California pinot noir. Which is not to say that it is a copy of a Burgundian wine. The California style generally has riper fruit which can sometimes be a problem in France. Actually, it can be a problem with Californis wines, too. Riper fruit can translate into jammier characters and higher alcohol – qualities not becoming for a food friendly grape like pinot noir.
Not so with the Vergari. It’s a crafted wine that
Continue reading Vergari 2006 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir
Type: Dry red
Made with: Cabernet sauvignon
Plays well with: Meat, meat and more meat
Please don’t think we’ve sold out the OBG mission of highlighting lesser known varieties. We also promise to highlight smaller producers who we believe deserve attention. So, that means a Napa cabernet is bound to turn up in these posts once in a while, especially since with Vergari Wines, there is no winery to find or visit. And, thanks again to winemaker David Vergari for finding us.
The Vergari 2005 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon shows the same attention to detail that Mr.
Continue reading Vergari 2005 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
Bronco Wines – the marketing geniuses that brought us Two Buck Chuck (better known as Charles Shaw Wines) – have struck again with another Trader Joe’s exclusive, coming in at $3.99 in California. (We are aware that Two Buck Chuck is actually Three Buck Chuck in other states.)
The result is a blend of sultana, colombard and muscat grapes and possibly something else. Organically grown in the Central Valley of California where many table grapes and wine grapes of some lesser quality are located, the resulting blend was intriguing.
Sultana is not generally used as a wine grape –
Continue reading Green Fin White Wine
Type: Dry roséMade with: Syrah and GrenachePlays well with: Seafood, salmon, chicken, pork, it’s rose – anything goes!
This rosé is so spectacular that you can’t help feeling a little smug when folks who supposedly “know” sneer that they don’t drink rosé. Good. More for us.
Bone dry, it’s made up of sixty percent syrah and forty percent grenache with a scant .02 percent residual sugar. You won’t taste even the slightest hint of sweetness.
The salmon color is typical of a rosé from the French region of Provence. The nose is full of guava and watermelon – promising
Continue reading Consensio 2008 Rosé “Harmony”
So why are we posting tasting notes on a single wine? Because we really liked it!
It’s Wednesday night – our dedicated mid-week break. It’s a tradition we started when we had a junior member in the house (who has since graduated from college, gotten a job and her own place and calls us voluntarily, not that we’re bragging). We made up a simple beef semi-stroganoff – semi because Anne couldn’t quite remember the recipe for a full-on traditional stroganoff and was too tired to look it up. Add some brown rice noodles, steamed broccoli, a basic green
Continue reading Twisted Oak 2006 Grenache
We’ve always loved Open That Bottle Night (which happens the last Saturday of February). And we’ve always loved Kenneth Volk’s wine – in fact, he was one of the first wineries we featured. So it seemed only natural this past Saturday to pick one of Volk’s that we have been sitting on for a while – his 2005 Negrette.
Never heard of negrette? According to Jancis Robinson’s site (scroll down), negrette is a “speciality of Fronton near Toulouse producing supple, perfumed, wine for early to medium-term drinking.“
So what did we prepare on this special occasion? A Coq au
Continue reading Ken Volk’s 2005 Negrette and Open That Bottle Night
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