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Archive for December, 2011

2009 Seven Deadly Zins

Posted in Wine, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2011 | 4 Comments »

Tonight’s prettypretty wine looks like this:

and comes in a bottle like this:

so you know what you’re looking for.

Region: Lodi
Grapes involved: Zinfandel with some Petite Sirah and Petit Verdot thrown in
Cost: $15-17 or so
Food pairings: BBQ. Seriously, people, pork. If you’ve never had pork and Zinfandel (which the wordpress spellchecker is trying to correct to “infidel,” which tickles me) paired together, and you eat meat, GET ON THIS. Lesse. Other than pork-based products, this would be dreamy with, erm, well, everything. Right now I kind of wish I had a piece of chocolate cheesecake to go with it – there’s just enough acid that it would cut through the creaminess perfectly.
Rating: 90 – Robert Parker*

It smells really bramble-y, like walking through a patch of raspberry bushes while stuffing your face with the fruit. There are a few hints of spice running around as well. Then, after it’s had a few minutes longer to aerate, it develops a caramelly-butterscotch sort of tone before going straight to brown sugar and then throwing in some pink pepper for laughs. Through all of this, there’s still a strong raspberry scent (like, red RED raspberry)(jammy raspberry)(like the sort of raspberry jam that I love smearing all over hot biscuits). The nose is all kinds of layered, and every time I think I’ve figured it out, it throws something else at me.

Y’all, I squealed at this wine. I am not proud, but there it is.

First up on the taste buds is some sort of jammy raspberry-cranberry concoction (again, something I want to slather on a biscuit). That said, it’s not sweet. Not at all. It’s dry in the way that organic cranberry juice is dry - tannic and tart. But it’s still raspberry. And cranberry. And bramble-y. And all sorts of other things – my brain ran through cherry, carnation, pink pepper, rose, bright red-violet (like the Crayola crayon color), butterscotch, vanilla, black pepper, sharp little twigs, dried leaves and mulling spices before half-swooning in happy exhaustion. It’s super-full-bodied, the type of wine that I love running my tongue through because it just feels neat, like thick silk or something. The finish lasts forever – warm tart berries and green, newly snapped twigs.

This is, flat-out, the best Zin I’ve ever had at this price range. It’s not the cheapest thing out there, sure, but it’s huge. It has FLAVORS. Like, LOTS OF THEM. AND I LIKE THEM ALL.

And then Tony brought me a freshly baked brownie, and it was so wonderful I let him have a sip.

___________________________________________________________________________________________ *I’m not ever sure about adding ratings, because they’re all biased and based on the tastes of whomever it is doing the rating. This is why I don’t provide my own ratings – I’m content to tell you what it tastes like (to me) and whether or not I personally liked it. Just because I like or don’t like a wine (or beer) doesn’t mean your taste has to be the same, or that mine is somehow better just because I’m the one spending my time writing.

Besides, terminology gets wonky – it’s definitely individual. For example, here’s Parker’s quote about this Zin: “This hugely popular wine spends 12 months in both French and American oak. Sexy and endearing, it offers a deep ruby/purple color, full-bodied, corpulent flavors and abundant berry fruit, pepper and spice notes. Drink this seductive, full throttle, classic Zinfandel over the next several years.”

Corpulent.

I mean, drinking the wine, I get what he means, but it would never occur to me to use ”corpulent” to describe a wine. Then again, I’m prone to announcing I have a crush on particular wines, or that certain wines strike me as “purple” in flavor and what not, so it’s not like I’m cornering the market in comprehensibility here.

That all being said, I have to agree with him on one point: this wine really is sexy.

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Ruminations on Bad Merlot

Posted in Wine, tagged , , , , , on December 12, 2011 | 5 Comments »

How could something so pretty:

…be so evil?
It doesn’t *look* evil, does it? I mean, look at the lovely color in the bottom of the glass. How could something that color be awful? I mean, it’s VIOLET. It’s PRETTY.

And yet it was mean. Ill-natured. Vindictive. BAD.

See, as far as I can tell (to bastardize a quote beyond recognition): Bad Merlots are all alike. Good Merlots are all good in their own ways.* Because my most recent bottle of bad Merlot was so forcibly reminiscent of every other bottle of bad Merlot I’d ever encountered, I felt the need to see if I could finally put my finger on whatever it is that makes an otherwise innocuous bottle of wine truly, truly suck.

Here’s my most recent experience: 

Open bottle, pour wine into glass.
*sniff*
Feet. It smells like feet. Stale feet, even.

At this point, I wasn’t alarmed. Many reds smell like stale feet when they’re first opened. It’s because they need aeration, which is why wine types will sit with a glass and swirl it absently while they’re chatting. Once the wine aerates, it starts to smell like all kinds of things: fruits, flowers, colors, mushrooms, earth, whatever. Before aeration, however, it’s pretty much stale feet. (Or whatever you’d like to call that smell – for me, stale feet is what comes to mind. Not particularly dirty, stinky feet, mind you, nor particularly clean, fresh feet. Just, you know. Feet.)

Undaunted by the foot smell, I gave the wine a quick, forceful swirl, and ignored it for a few minutes while I threw together an alfredo sauce.** Then I returned to the wine.

Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.

I ate dinner.

Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.

Tired of waiting, I decided to give it a try.
It tasted like feet (I’d imagine, anyway – I don’t make foot-tasting a habit), plus something that struck me as slightly plummy and slightly dusty, plus something that struck me as raspberry vinegar.***

I decided to wait longer. So I read a Cracked article.

Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.

I read a Salon article.

Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.

I read a few Hyperbole and a Half posts.

Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.

*sigh*

Frustrated, I gave the wine the sort of vigorous swirling that makes me relieved to own 16 oz glasses, because smaller glasses would result in one hell of a mess. Then I leaned in, breathed deeply, tried to smell around the feet for something else. I got a faint whiff of plum and violet. The taste remained the same: foot-dust-plum-raspberry vinegar.

The smell *had* changed slightly, however – opened up a bit, I told myself - and this was enough to keep me invested. I left the wine on the coffee table and picked up a book to lose myself in for a while. A solid hour passed.

Swirl.
*sniff*
Feet.

Swirl (violent)
*sniff* (deep)
Feet.
*growl*
*sip*
Foot-dust-plum-raspberry vinegar.

I gave up.

In my mind, a good Merlot is a sensuous creature, velvet in texture, deep purple in color and layered in flavor. A bad Merlot is what I just described - so tightly wound that even if there is anything in there beyond the feet-like smell and taste of tannins, it flat won’t relax enough to let me discover what that might be. A few tantalizing hints might pop up from time to time, seeming heralds of a glorious glass, ultimately meaningless. While I’ll happily wait an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon for a glass to take its time to develop, I do need it to actually do so.

Bad Merlots don’t develop. They just leave you hanging, ultimately wishing something else - something worth drinking – were in the glass in front of you.

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*To Leo Tolstoy, wherever you may be, allow me to offer the deepest of apologies.
**If you don’t make your own alfredo, you should (if you eat alfredo and all that). It takes ten minutes and it’s much better than that jarred stuff. Seriously, throw it together while the pasta boils – it takes about the same amount of time.
***Please note, because this is important to remember: the wine hadn’t gone bad in any way. As in, it wasn’t too old, it wasn’t corked, it wasn’t cooked. It was just BAD.

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2009 B Side Napa Cabernet Sauvignon

Posted in Wine, tagged , , , , , on December 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

This. You want this bottle (or I, at least, want more of them):

Region: Napa Valley
Grapes involved: 90% Cab Sauv, 10% Malbec
Cost: $20ish
Food pairings: It’s a Napa Cab, so think “steak wine!” and go nuts on whatever variation of that theme suits your tastes. I actually had it with a hunk of Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar (like, so sharp that it was flaking) on some wheat crackers and was a happy, happy girl. In a few hours, I will finish the bottle with a giant hamburger topped with the same cheddar, bacon, caramelized onion and brown mustard, and I will be an even happier girl.
Rating: 92 points, Wine Enthusiast

Here’s the wine itself:

This glass of wine produces all kinds of scents: black cherry, black currant, violet, rubber, spun sugar, vanilla and oak, orchid, and lots and lots of earth. It’s really fun (to me, because I’m really nerdy like that) to stick one’s nose in the glass and huff like it’s some sort of illegal substance. I rarely have this much fun smelling any wine that isn’t Pinot Noir (because they smell crazy, like an amalgamation of everything I’ve ever smelled in 31 years of life).

The wine’s flavors are mostly in the blackcurrant arena with some cherries and plum, all dominated by earthiness (like, go outside, dig for a moment and then sniff), woods (cedar comes to mind for some idiot reason, even though I know they age in oak and there’s nothing in this wine that says “hamster cage” to me – instead, it’s more real, clean cedar, like a forest) and some warmth from the alcohol. There are lots of little, tiny whiffs of rubber and leather and mushroom and a bunch of oddities like that which I’d expect more from an Oregon Pinot Noir* than a Napa Cab, but which are fun to pick up and play with. It’s full and thick and layered, with teeth-coating tannins and a long, blackcurrant-y finish (that again, I swear, has some rubber in it)(and yet, it’s good – like, I know I hear “rubber” and think EEWWWRGH WHYYY and yet I like it here)(just trust me here, people).**

So this wine was far too much fun to play with and write about. It’s a bit more expensive than I usually go for (being, like most of us, rather broke), but it’s still a reasonably-priced wine and, well, it’s Sunday late-afternoon and I do not live in an afternoon tea-drinking part of the world. So, forget the tea: I have a few precious hours of leisure time, so I’m spending them with a trippy fun wine.

I hope your day passes as happily.

__________________________________________________________________________________________
*if ever there was a wine that tasted like *everything*, it would be an Oregon Pinot Noir.
**whenever I find a flavor in wine like rubber (or brown leather jacket or whatever else), and I find that I really, really like it, I wonder what’s wrong with me.

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2009 BV Coastal Red Blend

Posted in Wine, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

 Oft-repeated scene from work*:

ME: So I have a new wine to tell you about today.
RETAILER: Is it another Moscato?**
ME: No!  This one shining, glorious time, it’s not a Moscato!***
RETAILER: [raises single eyebrow] They let you sell something else? What is it?
ME: It’s a red blend! [jazzhands, winning smile]
RETAILER: Get out of my store.**** 

For those of you not in on the joke, Moscatos have been surface-of-the-sun-level HOT for a year or so now. In consequence, seemingly every line of wine has come up with their own.+ Meanwhile, nearly everyone not drinking Moscato has taken to drinking some variation on a theme of blended red, usually Menage a Trois or Apothic or something of that ilk. The upshot is that it feels like 95% of the wines I’m selling right now are sweet (typically with “Moscato!” somewhere on the label), red blends, or sweet red blends. So those of us in the industry get tired of them, and we joke about it, but the wines sell, so we continue on continuing on.

Anyway, I’ve had many, MANY red blends, mostly at work meetings. I’ve shared a few of the good ones in the past, and as I quite enjoyed this particular blend, I’m sharing it as well.

Here’s what you’re looking for:

Region: California
Grapes involved: Zinfandel, Merlot, Barbera, Petit Sirah
Cost: $8.99-$10.99 or so
Food pairings: This would be pretty phenomenal with milk or semi-sweet chocolate. I had it with linguine alfredo, because alfredo was what sounded good at the time. Honestly, it worked just fine, but pretty much anything alcoholic would have worked pretty well. I was thirsty, y’all.

Here’s the wine itself:

Smell-wise, this is a big ol’ jammy++ cherry fruit bomb shot through with vanilla and a touch of pink pepper. It’s like the scent equivalent of the sort of red commonly associated with midlife crisis-style tiny sports cars. Flashy, showy, absolutely lacking in any subtlety whatsoever.

Taste-wise, there’s a brief flash of vanilla before getting straight into the cherry, which is a strong, very tart cherry. Then there’s a bit of oak (which is doubtless what gave the vanilla flavor in the beginning, but which I’m separating out here because it develops a slightly woodsier quality after it’s been hanging out on my tongue for a moment), many more cherries, and a sprinkle of pink pepper on top. I’m admittedly persisting in calling the pepper pink because of the color association I get when I taste it – I’ve never actually tried real pink pepper (though I’d like to and should remedy this soon). For the rest of it, the mouthfeel is soft, the finish is short, the tannins are light and easily approachable.

This isn’t a wine likely to win awards or impress wine snots or anything like that. Frankly, it doesn’t need to be. It is yummy as hell, one of those wines that’s easy to drink and enjoy without having to put much thought or attention into it. This makes it an excellent Thursday night wine – good for unwinding, but not so hedonistic that it demands one be able to sleep in the morning after.

____________________________________________________________________________________________
*For those of you who haven’t figured this out or are joining this blog in progress, I’m a wine sales rep for a local-to-me distributor.
**It’s always a Moscato.
***I should point out that I don’t hate Moscatos. I don’t particularly *like* Moscatos, but I don’t hate them (erm, all of them). The only wines I’ve ever encountered that I absolutely, always, undoubtedly and forever *hate* are really sweet reds, like Brachettos and Lambruscos and whatever it is one would call that fermented stuff they make out of Concords (which I cannot convince myself to label wine, FDA regulations notwithstanding). It doesn’t mean that any of those wines are somehow inferior – it simply means that they don’t agree with my taste buds.
****Please note: I’ve never actually been kicked out of a store.

+Honestly, I find myself wondering where on earth all the Muscat grapes are coming from. When Pinot Noir became hot, it took a while for it to really saturate the market because there flat-out weren’t enough grapes to make the wine (because Pinot Noir is an absolute bitch to grow). With Moscato, on the other hand, it got mentioned in a few R&B songs, took off in popularity, and every major line of wine had one in (what feels like) *months*. I’m not trying to point to any kind of weird conspiracy or anything, I’m just intrigued.

++Someone recently said to me that they had no idea what it meant when wine writers use the word “jammy.” In my world, “jammy” is the equivalent of what I’d expect were I to shove my face into a vat of raspberry (or strawberry, or cherry, or cranberry) jam. Like, super-super fruity. With jazzhands, of course.

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