All posts by Jim/VINEgeek

Price: 11-15 bucks, Tasting Notes

Flechas de los Andes Gran Malbec 2007 Mendoza

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Producer: Bodega Flechas de los Andes (partnership between Baron Benjamin de Rothschild and Mr. Laurent Dassault)

Grapes: Malbec (can’t confirm it’s 100%)

Appellation: Mendoza (Argentina)

Vineyards: no info

Winemaking: The wine spent 14 months in a mix new French oak, 2nd year French oak and stainless steel (1/3 each).

Alcohol: 14.5%

Price: $14.99 at Costco in Austin. Originally a $29 bottle.

My tasting notes: Deep, sexy purple color. Big, fumey nose of blueberry pie-filling, cola-like spice notes, chocolate and a touch of violets. Very dense, extracted black and blue fruit flavors with some smoke, spice and creamy vanilla. While it’s full-bodied and mouth-filling, it seems to go a bit hollow near the end.

Overall impression: When you’re in the mood for a mouthful of fruit, this fits the bill. Let it breathe a while for best results. B/B-

Free association: Something about the label of this bottle makes me think of propaganda posters and/or currency.

More info:

CellarTracker notes (avg. 88.5)

92 point from Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate.

Apparently this is a kosher wine. Good tasting notes over at kosherwinemusings.com.

Price: 10 bucks or less, Tasting Notes

Cameron Hughes Lot 160 Old Vines Zin 2008 Lodi

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I always feel a little guilty when I buy a wine from Cameron Hughes and their ilk. If you aren’t familiar with the model, Cameron Hughes calls itself a “modern international negociant.” Negociant is French for “Man Without Dirt”. OK, I just made that up. But a negociant owns no vineyards and buys up various “lots” of wine from wineries and vineyards that are selling them off instead of bottling them. The negociant typically blends them into wines they sell under their own label. For the Cameron Hughes Lot Series, the purchased lots are not blended, but bottled separately. Their website explains a number of reasons why a winery might sell off a perfectly good lot of wine instead of bottling it. And I get it, but I just don’t like not knowing where the wine comes from and who made it. It spoils the romance for me.

But I do buy them occasionally (as well as wines from Vineyard Block Estates, a similar operation). I bought this one because I did a series on Lodi old vines Zin a while back and struck out on most of those wines. I keep wanting to find better examples.

Producer: Who the hell knows. “Cellared and Bottled by Cameron Hughes Wine.”

Grapes: Zinfandel (presumably 100%)

Appellation: Lodi (AVA, California)

Vineyards: It’s a secret. They say the source vineyard consists of 30-60 year old vines.

Winemaking: no idea

Alcohol: 14.9%

Price: $8.99 at Costco in Austin

My tasting notes: Pretty cherry/raspberry/blackberry juice aromas wrapped in creamy oak. A touch of white pepper or maybe clove as well. On the palate it’s very Robitussin, with cherry and vanilla flavors and a peppery bite at the finish. Smooth textured with just a touch of tannic presence. Got awkward on day two.

Overall impression: It tastes good, but isn’t terribly interesting for me. But a good value for a burger/BBQ/party wine at $9. C+/B-

Free association:

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/belljar/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

More info:

6875 cases produced.

Info on the wine (including a video) at the Cameron Hughes website.

Price: 11-15 bucks, Tasting Notes

Mourvèdre Monday #1: Barahonda Monastrell 2006

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Just after the New Year, I decided to make 2010 ‘The Year of Mourvèdre‘ for VINEgeek and pledged to institute Mourvèdre Mondays. For this, the first installment, I didn’t want to begin with a top-dog wine (Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape, for example), mostly because I didn’t want the rest of the year to seem like a letdown. I want to ease into this thing. We’ve got 50 weeks to go, dear readers. So I decided to go with an affordable bottle from Spain, where Mourvèdre (or Monastrell as they call it) originated. And fittingly for the first installment, we start with a winery whose “major ambition is to reveal the great potential of wines made with 100% Monastrell.”

Producer: Señorio de Barahonda

Grapes: 100% Monastrell

Appellation: Yecla (DO, Spain). 85% of the grapes grown in this region are Monastrell, according to the Oxford Companion to Wine (2006).

Vineyards: Barahonda owns 840 acres of vineyards in Yecla, with 500 planted to Monastrell. The age of the vines range from 15-120 years. The soils are composed of limestone and chalk topsoil with clay and gravel subsoil.

Winemaking: No oak treatment. (They do a version called Barahonda Barrica which sees time in oak and gets some Cab blended in.)

Alcohol: 15%

Price: I paid $13 at Central Market, but I see it online for $10.

My tasting notes: Rich blackberry jam and earth notes on the nose. More blackberry and maybe cherry flavors on the palate with a sort of meaty, roasted fruit quality. It’s somewhat soft-textured in the mid-palate, but not flabby. There’s a nice little prickle of minerality and acidity at the end. It finishes with a bit of tannic grip and some definite heat from the 15% abv.

Overall impression: A solid start to Mourvèdre Mondays. Tasty dark fruit with some character. If you can get it for around $10, that’s a good value. B-

Free association:

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drwhimsy/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

More info:

Other reviews at CellarTracker.

Some nice photos from the Barahonda website:

Price: 10 bucks or less, Tasting Notes

Oddball Wine of the Week: Slovenian Tocai

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This is the 5th installment of VINEgeek’s Oddball Wine of the Week. Click here for links to each wine in the series.

QuattroMani_Tocai_07_snapshotQuattro Mani [toh-kai] 2007

Producer: Well, the brand is Quattro Mani, which is a label from Domaine Select Wine Estates, an importer. But the wine is made by Ales Kristancic of Movia.

Grapes: 100% Tocai

Appellation: Goriska Brda (DOC, Slovenia). While your first thought (and mine) might have been that Slovenia sounds like a wine backwoods, recall that it shares a border with Italy and the Goriska Brda region is on that border. In fact, this region is virtually an extension of Italy’s Collio DOC.

Vineyard: Exto Gredic. Soils are “Flysch of Collio, with marl and sandstone layers”.  Average vine age is 18 years.

Winemaking: no oak

Alcohol: 12.5%

Price: I paid $9 at Costco in Austin.

My tasting notes: Very rich yellow color, leaning toward orange. Serious spearmint and menthol on the nose overshadowing some basic appley fruit. It’s goes for the odd trifecta (color, nose and palate) with jarring nutty, salty, medicinal notes on top of ripe melon flavors. The wine has an oily texture and the finish is medicinal and seems hot (though it’s only 12.5%), almost like Listerine.

Overall impression: This is one of those bottles that is just so different from what I typically drink that I don’t know how to judge it. I can’t say I really enjoy the flavor profile. But for $9, it was worth it to me just to experience something out of the ordinary. I doubt you’ll make it your house white, but if you’re looking for something unusual, give it a go. C

Free association: Believe it or not, there does not appear to be a single photo of a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum stuck up someone’s nose anywhere on the Internet. WTF, people? Can someone get on that? Instead you get this lazy association…

GeorgeTakei_Sulu

More info:

Big pub scores: Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate – 91 pts, Wine & Spirits – 87 pts and Wine Spectator – 86 pts. (The links are to the importer’s site where they’ve collected the reviews. You ought to click through to the Parker review – it’s pretty over the top. At the end you’re thinking “Only 91 pts? Sounds like a 98-pointer or something.”

More tasting notes at CellarTracker (user Chomsky nails my experience with this wine) and Cork’d.

5 Top Slovenian Wines by Ales Kristancic in Food & Wine.

Here’s an interesting piece from the WSJ.com Food & Drink section on the emerging wine cred of Croatia, Slovenia and other Eastern European countries: The Lure of the Unpronounceable

Price: 11-15 bucks, Tasting Notes

Sylvan Springs Hard Yards Shiraz 2007 McLaren Vale

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000233_Hard_Yards_Shiraz_05.aiProducer: Sylvan Springs

Grapes: Shiraz (presumably 100%, but it doesn’t say so on the tech sheet)

Appellation: McLaren Vale (Australia)

Vineyard: Soils are “grey sand over ironstone gravel layer over orange permeable clay.” At least some of the fruit comes from the Blewitt Springs sub-region.

Winemaking: No new oak – the wine spent 12 months in a mix of 2-4 year old French and American oak barrels.

Alcohol: 14.6%

Price: I paid around $12 or $13 at Costco. I found the receipt: $10.99

My tasting notes: Big, wild, brambly fruit on the nose along with floral/violet and cedar notes. It’s a bit “fumey” from the alcohol. On the palate, it’s dense and weighty, hitting you with smooth-textured, mouth-filling blackberry and black currant flavors with an herbal edge. Despite the extracted fruit, it manages to feel tense, muscular – I even wrote down lean, though that’s often used to indicate lack of fruit, which isn’t the case here. There’s a very nice minerality as well and it finishes with a pleasant little sharpness or bitterness.

Overall impression: This is striking the right chord for me tonight. Give me expressive fruit, but balanced with minerality and acid, and I’m a happy wino. B+

Free association:

JackBlack_abs

More info:

2000 cases produced.

This wine was scored 90 points by Jay Miller in Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate.

Commentary

A Trumpet Blast

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Here’s an interesting post from Randall Grahm on the Been Doon So Long blog titled “Chick Vit or What Do Women Want (in their Wine)”. While the post starts out with the question of whether his wines might appeal more to women than men, Randall covers lots of interesting ground (as usual). Worth a full read, but my favorite bit is this:

Maybe in some of my wines the standard signifiers of “quality,” if not missing, are at least perhaps a bit occluded.12 What actually is “quality” in a New World wine? I think that one would be hard pressed to insist that it is authenticity or trueness to its Platonic essence, because likely there is no such Platonic essence, especially if the wine does not come from a singular vineyard, and that vineyard is not farmed in such a way to optimally express its unique character. I believe that all of us hold some sort of template in our brains as far as what constitutes “quality” and what provokes our interest in a particular wine; likely we respond to wine in ways analogous to other sensual stimuli. Perhaps wine affects us a bit like music does, though its balance and logic does not have the same kind of temporal sequencing. With wine the elements are initially apprehended all at once in a sort of trumpet blast and then slowly, almost imperceptibly they shape-shift and unfold with time. Most people, at least us Westerners, are attuned to tonal music, with a recognizable structure and a predictable, inevitable logic; there is satisfaction and resolution when the melody returns to the tonic, a harmonic resonance of a few key elements. In wine maybe these elements are wood, fruit, tannin and minerals (though nobody really knows what this last category really means). Withal, I would suggest that these flavor elements cannot simply be present but they need to be organized in such a way that suggests that they represent something. Put another way, in a vin de terroir, the unique qualities of the site are driving the bus, in a vin d’effort, a winemaker with a strong stylistic vision is driving the bus. But somebody’s driving.

By the way, it you’re not following him on Twitter, fix that.

Price: Over 20 bucks, Tasting Notes

Does This Wine Still Make Me “Smiley”?

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florasprings_cab_2000_snapshotI bought this wine on a trip to Napa/Sonoma about 5 years ago. It was my favorite wine of the trip and I splurged the $85 in the tasting room to bring home a bottle. Now if you’ve ever been on a wine country trip, I’m sure you’re familiar with the phenomenon whereby your capacity for objective evaluation and cost/benefit analysis diminishes as the day wears on. Well, Flora Springs was the 5th stop that day and I had not done enough spitting. So in my notes on this wine I wrote: “Smiley!” As in, this wine makes me feel smiley. See, I told you I should have done more spitting.

Anyhow, I’ve been holding on to this wine for a special occasion, but I never seem to find one, so I decided just to uncork it tonight with my grilled leg of lamb. Let’s check it out. Does it still make me smiley?

Flora Springs Wild Boar Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 Napa Valley

Producer: Flora Springs

Grapes: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon

Appellation: Napa Valley (from the Pope Valley sub-region)

Matt Kramer, in his book New California Wine (published in 2004), picks on Pope Valley  saying “However much various Napa Valley powers … insist that Pope Valley really is a legitimate part of the Napa Valley appellation – which it legally is – the wines tell us differently.”

Vineyard: The grapes for this wine come from a hillside block of the winery’s Cypress Ranch Vineyard, which reaches 1200 feet.

Winemaking: The wine spent 30 months in barrel, mostly French.

Alcohol: 14.4%

Price: I paid about $85 at the winery about 5-6 years ago.

My tasting notes: The color of this wine is still inky dark, showing no real signs of age yet. The nose is rich and bold, with dark, blackberry fruit and notes of chocolate/cocoa and cedar. The flavors are similarly rich, with cherries and more blackberries, along with spice and sweet tobacco notes. It feels polished in the mouth; not a lot of tannin here. I’m wanting a little more structure. It has a lengthy finish.

Overall impression: It’s good. I’m enjoying it. If you get a chance to drink it, go for it. But after 85 bucks and 5 years taking up a slot in my cellar, I’m not feeling quite as smiley as I did that buzzy afternoon 5 years ago. B

Free association:

smileyface_smirking

Image credit: SuanSKatra

More info:

Even though this bottle didn’t live up to my memory of it, if you’re in Napa and hitting the wineries on the main drag, Flora Springs is a good stop. I liked just about every wine they were pouring, including a Sangiovese.

330 cases of the wine were produced.

I can’t find any other reviews of this wine online.

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The Year of Mourvèdre

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At the beginning of a new year, I have usually tried to pick a focus for my wine drinking in the upcoming year. This year I considered a number of regions that have been intriguing me:

  • Portugal
  • Montsant (Spain)
  • Northern Italy
  • Washington

I’m sure I’ll be seeking out stuff from these regions this year, but in the end I’ve decided to make Mourvèdre my focus. I’ve been a fan of this grape for a long time and I recently noticed that almost every wine I reviewed on my blog that included Mourvèdre in the blend was a winner. Picking a grape instead of a region will also allow me to include wines from lots of places I love: the Southern Rhône, the old-vines stuff in California, the GSMs of Australia, the Monastrell in Spain. Plus, Bandol and other parts of Provence – areas I’ve not had much experience with.

Now this doesn’t mean VINEgeek will be all Mourvèdre, all the time in 2010. My plan is to start Mourvèdre Mondays in the next couple of weeks. With weekly posts, I’ll make it through 50 or so Mourvèdre wines over the course of the year. That ought to help me get to know this grape better. I hope you’ll join me.

If you have a favorite Mourvèdre-based wine you’d like to see me try, leave a comment.

Wineries: If you have a Mourvèdre-based wine you’d like me to include in Mourvèdre Mondays, see the Sample Policy.

Price: 10 bucks or less, Tasting Notes

Árido Malbec 2007 Mendoza

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Arido_Malbec_2007_snapshotProducer: CAP Vistalba

Grapes: 90% Malbec, 10% Merlot

Appellation: Mendoza (Argentina)

Vineyard: Finca Los Álamos, Upper Uco Valley. The soils are sandy loam and limestone. These vineyards are at serious altitude – 3500 feet above sea level – with only 4 inches of rainfall per year (Árido means arid. Presumably they irrigate.) Wineries like to talk about the “diurnal shift“, the difference in the daytime high and nighttime low temperatures. A hot days and cool nights allow the grapes to ripen fully while preserving acidity. Arido claims a 60 degree swing.

Winemaking: no info

Alcohol: a modest 13.5%

Package: A screwcap closure. I didn’t “get” the label until I read that Árido means arid. Now I dig it.

Price: $8.99 at Spec’s in Austin

My tasting notes: Good deep purple color. Interesting nose of violet, black currant, a little prune and a kind of crushed rock/gravel dust note. The palate is less interesting, but serves up some ripe, juicy, plummy fruit with good acid. Medium-to-full bodied with fine tannins and decent length.

Overall assessment: Another wine that piques my interest with the nose, then underwhelms on the palate. I need to come up with name for those. (Any suggestions?) C+

Free association:
nose_disguise
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/myklroventine/ / CC BY 2.0

More info:

Wine Spectator scored this wine an 88.

Price: 11-15 bucks, Tasting Notes

Helfrich Riesling 2007 Alsace

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helfrich_riesling_2007_snapshotProducer: Helfrich

Grapes: 100% Riesling

Appellation: Alsace (AOC, France). This region of France has been handed back and forth between France & Germany numerous times depending on who won the last war. So many of the names don’t sound very French. If you generally avoid Riesling because you’ve tried German ones and found them too sweet or you can’t figure out their labeling, give Alsace a try. The wines are almost always dry or just off-dry and I’ve rarely found a dud.

Vineyards: “The grapes come from the Couronne d’Or (Golden Crown), an association of local vineyards that run through the middle of Alsace. The vineyards are sloped with a South/South East exposure, while the soil is mostly calcareous and thin. The vines are dry farmed and trained upwards for maximum exposure to the sun.” [From the importer’s press release]

Winemaking: no info

Alcohol: 12.5%

Price: Around $15 (I paid $13.67 at Spec’s in Austin)

My tasting notes: The wine is a green-tinged pale yellow in the glass with a steely, stony, citrusy nose. On the palate, the citrus fades and more apple & pear flavors emerge, accented with baking spices. Though just off-dry, it’s fairly crisp – but not as racy as the Rieslings I enjoy most. The wine improved a bit by the second glass.

Overall assessment: Not bad. I like the nose, but I wasn’t thrilled with it in the mouth. You could do a lot worse…  B-

Free association:

silversurfer

More info:

The guys at WineGeekTV reviewed this bottle and Helfrich’s Pinot Gris and Gewurztraminer from the same vintage.

Other blogger reviews at The 89 Project and Gabe’s View. And few more reviews at CellarTracker (avg. 90).

Sonadora over at Wannabe Wino recently reviewed the Helfrich Pinot Gris and has a review of the Riesling coming soon, I think.