This will look lovely on the veranda overlooking the Mourvèdre block of my vast vineyard empire. Oh wait… that doesn’t exist. Oh well, the chair does: Whit McLeod: Folding Wine Barrel Chair, at 40% off
You may need to sign up with Fab.com to view, but I recommend signing up anyway — it’s free and there’s lots of cool stuff there.
Finally catching up on some old tasting notes. Here are a couple of wines from Alex Elman Wines, an importer who decided to create her own label, featuring wines from Argentina made from organic grapes. You may notice braille on the labels; that’s because Alex Elman lost her sight in her 20s. Read the full story here.
TRIVIA BREAK: What well-known Rhône winery uses braille on it’s labels? (Here’s a lesser known one.)
These wines were provided as samples for review. They each retail for around $12.
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Overall, I think the Torrontes is a solid example of it’s type for the price. It’s just not a style I’m a big fan of. Given the glut of inexpensive Malbec on the shelves of wine shops and grocery stores and gas stations coast to coast (depending on the relative enlightenment of your state’s beverage laws), I’d have a hard time recommending this one.
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And now an offering to the SEO gods (and anyone who needs to cut & paste):
Alex Elman 2010 Torrontes Mendoza (Argentina) | Floral, apricot/peach nose like a car air freshener. More apricot/peachy flavors on a medium-bodied, low-acid frame, with the barest hint of minerality. | C+
Alex Elman 2009 Malbec Mendoza (Argentina) | My first reaction is that it smells cheap. There’s lots of Christmas spice and it reminds me a bit of mulled wine (though maybe I’m just having a flashback to a really terrible tasting room experience in Fredericksburg TX). The flavors are blueberry/blackberry, a bit on the thin side and in need of some backbone. Overall, I don’t get enough of the richness I want when I’m drinking Malbec. | C-
My cellar has been running low on everyday whites, so when I saw this bottle of Montes Sauvignon Blanc at Costco recently, I grabbed it. Chilean Sauvignon Blanc has impressed me in the past and Montes is a very reliable producer up and down the price scale. This wine is from their “Limited Selection” line and at $9.99, the price was right.
I unscrewed it tonight with a Meatless Monday dinner of pasta with fresh corn, grape tomatoes, garlic, scallions and parmesan.
Lots of parmesan.
Producer
Grapes: 100% Sauvignon Blanc
Appellation: Leyda Valley (Chile)
Vineyards: Labeled as “Leyda Vineyard” — presumably a Montes-owned vineyard within the Leyda Valley appellation.
Vintage: 2010
Winemaking: no oak or malolactic fermentation
Alcohol: 13.5%
Price: I got it for $9.99 at Costco. Regular retail is around $15.
Tasting Notes: Crisp, lemon pith acidity cuts through the plump tropical fruit. It’s also got that green, fresh-cut grass character that I love in an SB, plus a bit of minerality at the core. It all comes together to give the sense of a wine teeming with lifeforce, like some magic elixir you could pour upon the earth in a moonlit glade and conjure an Ent. (OK, that was a weird reference).
Overall impression: I think this is a dynamite bottle of wine at $10. Great for a refreshing summer sipper to buy by the case. If you are Costco-deprived and you find it closer to $15, it’s still a good deal. VINEgeek approved. Strong B+
Free association:
Image credit: matildaben via Flickr
More info:
90 POINT ALERT: This wine was well-reviewed by the big publications, receiving a 91 from Wine & Spirits and a 90 from Wine Enthusiast.
But maybe, at the end of the day, we should be happy that most wine talk is so ridiculous. In a world that is oversaturated with overdetermined meaning, there’s something decidedly cheering about this mischievous drink that resists plausible description.from Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters
Where is Kokomo? The Beach Boys made us all think there is some beautiful island named Kokomo somewhere in the vicinity of Aruba or Jamaica (“Ooo, I wanna take ya”), or Bermuda or the Bahamas (“come on, pretty mama”). Well, it ain’t true. They made it up. There is a real place named Kokomo, but it’s a factory town (Chrysler & Delphi) in Indiana. Why do I know this? My wife is from this little burg, and let me tell you – it’s no tropical island.
So why the hell am I talking about Kokomo? Well, it turns out there is a winery by that name as well. It’s not in Indiana; rather it’s a Sonoma-based winery started by a guy from Kokomo, Indiana. These fine folks sent me a couple of bottles of their wine to try. Would they smell of tanning lotion or transmission fluid? Hopefully neither. Let’s check them out.
Kokomo Petite Sirah Dry Creek Valley 2008
Tasting notes: Some enticing woodsy, herbal scents get my attention on the nose. The palate delivers inky dark berry and plum fruit (like a pen leaked in your mouth). It’s a little warm and a little oaky, but not a fruit bomb. There is a tightly-wound, metallic core and a slightly sinister quality.
Overall impression: An intriguing wine that I enjoyed drinking and contemplating. B+
Price: $25-30
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Kokomo Zinfandel Sonoma County 2008
Tasting notes: A bold, fruity nose, accented by woodsmoke aromas. On the palate, the wine brings dark berry and plum flavors similar to the Petite Sirah, but sweeter and riper. The mouthfeel is polished and almost plush. A bit of peach skin and a light peppery bite at the end add interest.
Overall impression: If you like ‘em fruit-forward, I think this is a bottle you’d like. It’s well-made and shows off some character. B/B-
Price: $25-30
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I found the Petite Sirah a bit more compelling, but both are good wines. So if you want to get away from it all … Kokomo may be just the getaway you need.
Disclosure: The wines were provided to me as press samples by the winery.
A friend of mine has a new post on her Tumblr blog called 15 Wines Under $15, where she’s gathered up recommendations from a dozen or so of her wino … er … most festive friends. My contribution was a Mourvèdre (natch): the Cline Ancient Vines Mourvèdre. My favorite of the rest of the recos is one of her own: the Finca el Origen Malbec. A reliably good brand in my experience.
Check out her list and suggest your own.
Cheers!
I love wine delivery days! #vinegeek 
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I’m always game to try something unusual when it comes to wine. On this blog you’ll see as much Baga as Bordeaux, as much Tannat as Tuscany, and more Mourvèdre than Merlot and Malbec combined. So you know when I had a chance to taste a Tempranillo Blanco, I was all over it. That’s right, white Tempranillo. Not white as in “white” zin, but white as in not red. The grapes themselves are not typical red Tempranillo, but a white- (well, green-) skinned mutant.
Producer: Bodegas Juan Carlos Sancha ‘Ad Libitum’
Grapes: 100% Tempranillo Blanco
I’ll let Wikipedia tell the tale:
In 1988, Jesús Galilea Esteban found a cluster of white grapes on one of the Tempranillo vines in his vineyard, Murillo de Rio Leza, located in Rioja. He removed the cluster, leaving a heel which in turn produced two buds of white grapes. Galilea then contacted the Rioja government agency CIDA, who grafted the buds at their research station in February 1989.
CIDA concluded that apart from the leaves and fruit being a little smaller, the new plants were identical to normal Tempranillo in most respects, and confirmed this with DNA evidence. The most notable difference was that the grape skins were green-yellow rather than the usual blue-black, due to a natural mutation in a single skin colour gene. Similar mutations appear to have happened in many other grape varieties, such as Pinot Noir and Grenache.
CIDA, once the mutation had stabilized, expanded their collection to 100 vines in 1993, and started to make wine on an experimental scale. The first bottling of wine was in 2005, from a hectare of vines planted in 2000. It was fermented in stainless steel tanks and aged in oak barrels. The green-tinged wine had discreet aromas of flowers and tropical fruit such as pineapple, refreshing to drink but lacking a little in acidity. White Tempranillo is currently being distributed to growers having been registered with the State and approved for use in the Rioja D.O.Ca.
Appellation: Rioja
Vintage: 2009
Vineyards: Organically-farmed 1.5 hectare vineyard with clay and limestone soils. Dry-farmed.
Winemaking: Stainless steel fermentation. Native yeasts.
Alcohol: 13%
Price: I paid $16.83 via Garagiste. Closer to $25 online.
Tasting notes: I had no idea what to expect with this one. It starts off with a bold, aromatic nose of stone fruit and petrol. On the palate, it’s an intriguing mix of peach, plum skin and nuttiness with a pleasant bitter note. It has an oily palate presence and finishes long.
Overall impression: A must-try wine for the wine geek set. B+
Free association:
More info:
A good read from 2009 in Decanter on “the rise of indigenous grape varieties” in Rioja.
Image used in Oddball Wine of the Week header found here. If anyone knows the original source, let me know and I’ll credit.
I recently finished reading Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters
The central idea of the book is that “wine is among the singular repositories of memory known to man.”
Why is wine unique in its relation to memory? Because it is the only animate vessel of both personal memory – that of the drinker (or maker) and the subjectivity of his experience and the memory of that subjectivity – and communal memory. That is, it is communal to the extent that a wine is also the memory of the terroir, which the wine expresses as an evolving, active taste. As communal memory, it is above all an expression of place as a communal identity, the history of the civilization of that place and the history of the relationship to its nature (especially soil, subsoil, and microclimate).
Like many of Nossiter’s assertions, this may be a bit overblown, but I find myself being sucked in by the romance of the idea nonetheless.
Despite the showy intellectualism of the above quote (and much of the book), the other stated goal is to de-snobify wine, deflate the anointed critics and get you to trust your own palate. Yet the overall sense one gets is that if he overheard you ordering wine in a restaurant, he’d definitely be judging you and putting you in one of two categories: savvy or ignorant.
That said, I really enjoyed reading the book. If you flipped through my copy of this book, you’d find countless circled and underlined passages, notes of agreement and disagreement in the margins, and even a few inspired (but poor) drawings. The book is provocative and cerebral. It makes me fall in love with loving wine if that makes sense.
Whether you are sympathetic to the sentiment of the book or not, it will stretch your thinking about wine. And thinking about wine is almost as fun as drinking it (at least for this geek). I hope you read it if you haven’t already. To encourage that, I plan to share some of my favorite quotes from the book in blog posts over the next few weeks. I’ll start here with this one:
When I enter a wine shop or when I scan a restaurant wine list, I feel a surge of excitement, like someone arriving at the doorstep of a potential love affair.