Okay, in retrospect that was a pretty dumb thing to say.

Of course I apologize, but you guys could lay off with the criticism, y’know.

My fellow Americans, I stand before you today humbled, but even more determined to earn your nomination for the United States Presidential election. I’ve run a strong, honest campaign. I’ve avoided the mudslinging and petty indictments of my opponents. I am the only candidate not tarnished by a sex scandal or infidelity of some sort.

And, were it not for this recent slip of the tongue, I believe I’d still be your frontrunner.

Every politician has a slip of the tongue now and then. Howard Dean’s infamous war shriek doomed his campaign. George W. Bush had his famous “Fool me twice” speech. Joe Biden dropped an F bomb on a live mic after the President has finished his address. The point is not to focus on one niggling little mistake and lose sight of my overall qualifications and history!

Look, I have a weakness for white wine. Love it, in fact. You might say it’s my one vice. I mean, not like THAT. I can stop any time. Oh, no. I mean I can actually stop, not “I can stop any time” the way alcoholics say it. Crap. Anyway, the point is someone on my campaign staff had just purchased a 10knots 2010 Viognier White Wine 4-Pack to celebrate our victory in the caucus.

And THAT is why it was reported on CNN that I screamed “White Power!” behind the scenes at the debate. I was just really excited about the Viognier. Honest.

2010 10knots Viognier White Rhône Varietal Blend 

• APPELLATION: Paso Robles
• COMPOSITION: 76% Viognier (ENTAV 642), 12% Roussanne (ENTAV 468), 9% Marsanne (ENTAV 574), 3% Grenache Blanc (ENTAV 141)
• WINEMAKING: Fermented and Aged for 7 months in 85% Neutral Oak Barrels and 15% in Stainless Steel; Malolactic Fermentation ~ 23%
• Total Acidity: .46g
• pH: 3.57
• Residual Sugar: .2
• Alcohol: 14.4%
• Bottled: April, 2011
• Release Date: June, 2011

Not many white wines can offer the complexity that the 2010 10knots Viognier expresses while also being so easy to enjoy. Honey dew melons, hawthorn blossoms, and apricots are plentiful and held wonderfully together with medium-bodied structure. The Viognier varietal by itself makes for a distinct wine, but blending Marsanne and Roussanne grapes, to take a cue from Northern Rhone tradition, infuses almond highlights and slightly grassy notes as well as whetstone characteristics. Finally, a small percentage of Grenache Blanc is like the lemon twist dropped into a top-shelf Martini - it complements the blend, adds to the stimulating finish, and brings to mind a place for everything and everything in its place.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Man Your Positions

First, it was a fort, built to defend the road between Siena and the sea. Today, it’s a vineyard, well-suited for red wine.

CastelGiocondo is an ancient fortress, dating back to 1100 C.E. Of course, back then, it was of strategic importance, and only the very best were assigned to man its gates.

But after a few decades.. well, nobody was invading, nobody was aggressing, and politics in Italy had become much more personal and “hands on.” So the great CastelGiocondo began to loosen up a little. The finest soldiers and the best officers were sent elsewhere, and as we know from old war movies, as soon discipline gets sloppy those slacker troops start looking for a way to get drunk.

Thankfully for them (and us) the fields of CastelGiocondo have always been well-suited for growing terrific grapes. And maybe it didn’t happen just the way we described, but somebody sure put love and time into the lineage from which our 2006 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino two pack was born. Do you think these aromas of wild blackberry, red currant and sour cherry could just appear by themselves? Or that the strong crisp flavors of sour cherry and red fruits just happened without someone’s careful tending? Maybe you think the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino just gives away five star “Exceptional” ratings to any old bottle they find floating in the harbor?

The 2006 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino comes from a long tradition of fine soil, great weather, and hard work. Maybe the fort isn’t so important now, but guess what? The wine certainly is. Grab this two pack to stand honor guard for your next dinner party. This is the mission it was born for.

2006 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino

• Brunello di Montalcino DOCG
• 100% Sangiovese
• 13.5% Alcohol

The 2006 CastelGiocondo Brunello exhibits layered aromas of wild blackberry, red currant and sour cherry, closely followed by floral notes of sweet violets and spicy characters of black pepper, clove and tobacco leaf. Cocoa, roasted espresso bean, vanilla and a slight mineral character add to the complexity of the nose. The palate exhibits a velvety mouthfeel, bright, crisp flavors, and noticeable tannins, with all of the components in fine balance. Fruit-driven flavors dominate the long finish.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Louisiana
• Minnesota
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Too Soon

Wait. It’s only your first date. Do you really want to open one of these bottles of Nebbiolo now?

Sure, it’s been a wonderful evening. She’s intelligent. She’s clever. The dinner conversation was enchanting and never dull. It turns out you’ve got a lot in common, too, like a deep love for 18th century Russian literature, post-industrial minimalist electro-acoustic music, and kitties. The connection you felt on your romantic stroll along the beach under the moonlight was so strong you were able to gather up the courage to invite her in for a night cap. All good signs that a blissful relationship is about to begin.

But, dude, opening up one of your three bottles of 2008 Jacuzzi Nebbiolo may be going a little overboard, don’t you think?

Think about it: You’ve known this lady for what, four, maybe five hours? She’s “enchanting,” sure, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to start whipping out your best stuff on your first date. Who knows? She could be playing some sick game with your mind to steal your comic book collection, or be an escort that your buddies paid to “date” you to keep you from complaining about how lonely you are.

Heck, this woman could have a jealous ex-boyfriend who slaughtered her family years ago, forcing her to go into hiding under a new identity in the Witness Protection Program until they catch him. IF they catch him, of course, and he hasn’t been stalking the two of you all evening, waiting for his chance to strike.

But you won’t know any of that stuff until at LEAST the third or fourth date. Do you really want to share the generous notes of pomegranate and crisp bright cherry of this California rarity with someone whose secret past might shatter the fragile bond you’ve just made? I think not.

Do yourself a favor: Grab a packet of drink mix from the cupboard, pour it into some white soda, and give her a glass of that. If she can stomach it AND agree to a second date, maybe this relationship will work out. But don’t go sharing your 2008 Jacuzzi Nebbiolo until you’re sure.

2008 Jacuzzi Nebbiolo

• Appellation: Carneros
• Harvest Date: October 17, 2008
• Acid: .69
• pH: 3.97
• RS: .30%
• Alcohol: 14.5%

As of 2001 there existed only 186 acres of this rare grape in California. Often the last grapes to be picked for the year, this Nebbiolo has generous notes of pomegranate and crisp bright cherry.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

They’ll never know.

Don’t be intimidated, just act like you know what everyone’s talking about.

“Hey Ronnie, enjoyin’ the party?”

“Yeah! Great! Totally fitting in!”

“Hey man, relax. You’re fine! I know you feel like you’re socially awkward sometimes, but just be yourself. Everyone will be totally cool. Hey, Emily! Have you met Ronnie, yet?”

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Hi, Ronnie.”

“Hiya!”

“I’ll leave you two to chat for a sec.”

“So, Emily. Nice party, eh?”

“Yeah! What do you think of the Summerland Trio?”

“The what?”

“The 2007 Summerland Trio Rhone Blend?”

“Oh! I, uh, LOVE them. Yeah. They’re my favorite.”

“They?”

“Well sure, how could you pick just one? They’re all such great musicians.”

“Musicians?”

“Vocalists. I mean, I consider the voice to be an instrument. And I listen to them every weekend on Prairie Home Companion. Yeah, it just harkens back to a simpler time. Yes sir, the Summerland Trio really are great.”

“I…was talking about the wine.”

“What?”

“The Summerland Trio. It’s a wine. It’s a blend of Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre. It flirts with your palate using red fruit and cedar flavor.”

“Okay.”

“You’re drinking it now.”

“Right! The wine! I knew that! I was…testing YOU! I’m a bit of a wine buff and I just hate when someone’s out of their element but tries to act like they know what they’re talking about, y’know! Ha ha!”

“Oh. So what’s your favorite varietal?”

“Uh, lemon?”

2007 Summerland Trio Rhone Blend

• Appellation: 100% Santa Barbara County
• Varietal: 49% Syrah, 21% Grenache, 30% Mourvedre
• Vineyards: 50% Paradise Road Vineyard, 50% Alta Mesa Vineyard
• Harvest Date: Various dates
• Brix at harvest: 24-25 depending on varietal
• Alcohol: 14.2%
• pH: 3.62
• TA: 0.6g/100ml
• Case Production: 240 cases
• Release date: 8/2009

Inspired by the rustic yet expressive wines of Chateauneuf-du-Pape in the Southern Rhone, this three-varietal blend delivers complex flavors with medium body and a silky finish showcasing red fruits and cedar. Layered, full-bodied, round, and incredibly elegant. The charming strawberry character of Grenache complements the red fruit core of Syrah and the blackberry power of Mourvedre to create a delightful harmony of flavors. Nice, round core fruit, full in mid-palate, prominent tannins.

Serving suggestion: rare beef tenderloin, barbeque meats and sharp cheeses.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Don’t Be Stingy

You wouldn’t think a hummingbird would be a good security guard.

And yet the folks at Clos LaChance chose the noble hummingbird as a brand symbol for two reasons: the first was its beauty, and the second how well it keeps other bird away from the grapes. Can you imagine that? A tiny hummingbird interdicting a no-fly zone around the Clos LaChance vineyards? Strange as it may seem, we’re assured that’s exactly how it works.

So be aware that your Clos LaChance Petite Sirah Vertical 3 Pack might need some extra special protection. These three bottles, 2007, 2008 and 2009, cover a great period of growth for the Clos LaChance Petite Sirah. It’s going to offer great flavors and rich tastes, and there’s a good chance someone’s going to try and steal a bottle.

You’ll understand after a tasting. The 2007 is a dark opaque red with aromas of ripe plums and huckleberries, with a taste of blackberries and huckleberries and chocolate-dipped strawberries. The 2008 smells of cedar and cocoa and dark ripe cherry, with exploding red fruits pouring out in the mouth. And the 2009 closes out the vertical with a nose of sweet cherries and raspberries with flavors of vanilla bean and toasty oak with dried red fruits and cocoa on the palate.

Sounds delicious, right? Sounds like the kind of thing you’d want to try? That’s why the hummingbird protects those vineyards from immoral birds of excellent taste. Stand ready to protect your Clos LaChance Petite Sirah Vertical 3 Pack from those who might fancy a glass.

Or maybe… just give them a bottle? After all, you’re gonna get three.

2007 Clos LaChance Estate Petite Sirah

• Blend: 100% Petite Sirah
• Alcohol: 14.5%
• Appellation: Central Coast
• pH: 3.61
• Harvest Dates: October 21, 2006
• TA: 0.61
• Bottling Dates: July 17, 2008

A beautiful, dark opaque red wine. Aromas of ripe plums, huckleberries and blackberries. A hint of powdered cocoa and vanilla. Rich tannins are balanced with the ripe fruit. Blackberries and huckleberries carry through from the palate. Dark chocolate dipped strawberries. A long finish with a solid acid component that leaves my mouth watering for another sip.

2008 Clos LaChance Estate Petite Sirah

• Blend: 100% Petite Sirah
• Alcohol: 14.5%
• Appellation: Central Coast
• pH: 3.61
• Harvest Dates: October 8, 2009
• TA: 0.61
• Bottling Dates: July 18, 2011
• Total Cases: 406

Beautifully dark, rich and inky—typical of the varietal but always a bit astonishing in the glass. On the nose there's cocoa, raspberries, cedar and dark, dark ripe cherry. On the mouth, bright almost exploding red fruits. Raspberries, super ripe strawberries and cherries jumping out at you. The cocoa is subtle and a little vanilla pairs nicely with it creating a little Neapolitan thing. The fruit carries through nicely into the finish, which is very long with a couple herbal components—a hint of rosemary and dill.

2009 Clos LaChance Reserve Petite Sirah

• Blend: 100% Petite Sirah
• Alcohol: 15.5%
• Appellation: Central Coast
• pH: 3.52
• Harvest Dates: Sept. 30, 2009
• TA: 0.65
• Bottling Dates: May 16, 2011
• Total Cases: 165

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Oh come on, we can’t be the only ones.

If ever a product was crying for Tay Zonday as a pitchman, it’s this.

Sometimes they just write themselves, folks. And when you’ve got a deal like a Rain Republic Guatemalan Chocolate 10-Pack, you don’t stand in the way of pure comedy gold. Come on! RAIN Republic? CHOCOLATE? Let’s do this!

Forget all the nonsense about about a bean-to-bar chocolate maker providing jobs to over 300 Guatemalans making artisan chocolate using Gutaemalan cacao sourced without any pesticides or insecticides at all. No one cares! Fleeting Internet fame is what it’s all about!

Which isn’t to disrespect Mr. Zonday at all. It’s just, well, we’re guessing he’s available. And despite what we or anyone else might think of the quality of his video, you can’t argue with 76 million views. That’ll move a lot of chocolate.

Guatemalan 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate Triple Single Origin

Allergy Information: Contains Milk and soy. May contain traces of peanuts and/or tree nuts.

In the box:

• (3) Rain Republic Guatemalan 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate Triple Single Origin
• (4) Rain Republic Guatemalan 41% Cacao Dark Milk Chocolate with Cinnamon
• (3) Rain Republic Guatemalan 41% Cacao Dark Milk Chocolate with Almonds and Cinnamon

Of Barns And Wolves

I’m not saying I know exactly what they went through but, as someone who was born in a barn, I feel like I can relate a little more than your average person.

It’s tough growing up the way we have. It’s not our fault we leave doors open without thinking to close them. It’s not our fault that we don’t pick up after ourselves or feel the need to eat as messily as possible while using nothing but our hands. It’s just how we were brought up. And to have to relate the story of how we lost our parents in some horrible accident, only to be saved by a kind mother wolf and her pack, let alone face the embarrassment of having to explain the circumstances of one’s barn birth, only reinforces the hurt and suffering we’ve already had to face in our lives.

But folks like Bill and Camis Davis, as well as Camis’ brother Todd Eilert, not only find a way to rise above the misconceptions that weigh down all barn-born and/or wolf-raised people, they revel in it. They slap a label proudly proclaiming the circumstances of their childhoods on each bottle of 2009 Raised by Wolves Washington Cabernet Sauvignon and are unashamed. After all, if not for the lessons they learned at the mouth of their cave home, would they have been able to create a young Cabernet so disciplined and robust? Would the roasted black cherries and wet cobblestones on the nose and full finish with dark plum, white pepper, and cigar blend so beautifully?

Perhaps instead of mocking those who had to endure a lupine-assisted upbringing, we should be celebrating them! Leaving the refrigerator open to cool the entire house isn’t wasteful. It’s thoughtful! Leaving stuff all over the floor isn’t filthy. It helps hone the hunter-gatherer instinct in us all! Rushing outside naked to bay at the moon is… Okay, no, that’s still weird. Sorry, but that’s where a “barnie” like me draws the line.

2009 Raised by Wolves, Walla Walla Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

• Appellation: Walla Walla Valley
• Vineyards: Lowden Hills, Walla Walla 40%; 7 Hills Vineyards, Walla Walla 60%
• Barrel Aging: 20 Months American Oak (40% new)
• Alcohol: 13.9%
• Cases Produced: 560 Cases

Youthfully disciplined, this young Cabernet will stand up with the big boys. Huge aromatics on the nose expressing roasted black cherries and wet cobblestones offering a robust structure and a full finish with dark plum, white pepper and cigar.  Definitely showcasing a beautiful blend of fruit and earth - true characteristics of Walla Walla Vineyards.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

But this is perhaps the most pleasurable kind of review I write. The review of a winery whose wines I can safely say are all spectacularly good -- so good that I will simply buy any wine they make, no questions asked. I'm on very few winery mailing lists, but this is one of them.

In many ways Peay Vineyards represents the quintessential family-run, boutique California winery. Run by brothers Nick and Andy Peay and their winemaker Vanessa Wong (who happens to be Nick's wife) they perfectly embody the care, attention to detail, and vision that marks all the best small wineries in the world.

Coming upon the 100-year-old house perched high on a ridge above Sea Ranch in the far north of Sonoma County, with its vines cascading down the hillside towards the ocean four miles away, you might imagine that the two thirty-somethings sitting on the porch were the latest in a long line of farmers who had worked this land. But before Nick and Andy bought the 80-acre property in 1996, it merely bore the faint traces of a few fruit trees and sheep that once roamed its chilly pastures.

Nick Peay got the wine and food bug early, and after college he headed straight into a career in the wine industry, working first for Schramsberg and then La Jota, before heading for U.C. Davis where he got a degree in Enology and Viticulture. After graduating he moved on to work for Newton and Storrs, and began plotting to convince his brother Andy to help him start a winery one day.

Apparently all it took was a really nice bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a rack of lamb at the right moment, just as Andy Peay was rethinking his likely future as a Wall Street analyst. After taking a year off to travel, Andy dove into the wine and hospitality world, working a harvest at Cain Vineyards and Winery, spending some time working at the Jug Shop in San Francisco, and all the while getting his MBA from Berkeley.

On the weekends, the brothers would hop into a truck and cruise the back roads of California wine regions looking for the perfect piece of land. Their criteria: an extreme, cool-climate vineyard site where they could push the limits of winegrowing and winemaking, utilizing Nick's knowledge of viticulture, and his wife Vanessa's skill at making wines from cool climate fruit.

Vanessa Wong is also U.C. Davis trained and before joining her husband for the first harvest in 2001 she spent several years working as a winemaker around the world for labels that include Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, Domaine Jean Gros Burgundy, and Peter Michael Winery in Sonoma.

The family planted 48 acres of vines on their property in 1998: 35 acres of Pinot Noir, 8 acres of Syrah, 6 acres of Chardonnay, 1.8 acres of Viognier, and two little postage stamp size plots of Roussanne and Marsanne. The vineyards are managed directly by Nick and a full-time crew of 8 vineyard workers, and are farmed organically (though they are not certified). Because of the remoteness of the vineyard, the winery was built in Cloverdale, about an hour away.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Peay Vineyards for me has always been how they seem to have gotten everything right. I'm sure there were missteps along the way, but the fact that they were able to strike out into the middle of nowhere, into a climate that many thought unfit to grow wine grapes, and not only manage to make wine, but to make wine of such distinct character and quality is a testament to the talents of everyone involved. It's not an accident that theirs is one of the coolest Syrah vineyards in the United States.

Vanessa crafts their wines with a delicate touch. The wines are almost always fermented with native yeasts and are carefully managed through the winemaking process according to the needs of each varietal. The oak program involves a minimum of new wood allowing the fruit to shine, and the wines are almost always bottled unfined and unfiltered.

This particular wine comes from those minuscule .6 acres of Roussanne and Marsanne that Nick describes as the "most trying vines we farm." Finicky, temperamental, and susceptible to the vagaries of weather much more so than other grapes (this wine won't be made in 2011, thanks to the rains), these vines yield tiny amounts of extraordinary fruit. The production hovers somewhere between three and six barrels each year (roughly 85-100 cases), and tends to be snapped up by the winery's mailing list customers (the only way I manage to get ahold of it).

Fermented in old oak barrels with indigenous yeasts, this wine ages in neutral oak on its lees (bits of the skins and yeast left over after fermentation) for 11 months before bottling. In 2006, the wine was 65% Roussanne and 35% Marsanne, and only 85 cases were made.

I tend to like what happens to Roussanne and Marsanne as they age, so I've been hanging on to this bottle for some time, and decided to pop it open with dinner this week, and was very happy to have done so. It's a beautiful wine that is both delicious when it is first released, but will reward anyone with the patience to leave it on the shelf for a few years.

Tasting Notes:
This wine has mellowed to a deep medium-gold in the glass, and smells of honey roasted nuts, jasmine flowers, and old parchment. In the mouth it has a wonderful weight on the tongue, with a mix of mineral and herbal flavors like chamomile, while roasted apple, butterscotch, and honey also play across the palate. The finish has a nutty quality, and lingers for some time. Despite having a little weight, the wine's acidity ensures that it is lively and gulpable. Excellent. 14.1% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
This was surprisingly a very good match with a bunch of salumi and mostardas that were on the table while we opened this bottle.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $44

Unfortunately this wine is not available for purchase on the Internet, and this vintage has probably long since disappeared from most people's shelves and cellars. Current vintages are available to mailing list customers only.

Moon Over Sonoma
SONOMA COUNTY, CA: A full moon rises over an oak tree in Alexander Valley.

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The judges hand out hundreds of medals and awards. Those awards are released to the public, and then about a month later, many of the award winning wines, plus a lot more are poured for the public in a four-hour event that takes over Fort Mason for a Saturday afternoon. There are usually cooking demonstrations and food booths, and various other diversions.

Regardless of how I feel about such wine competitions, this tasting, like all such public events, represents an incredible opportunity to educate your palate and discover new wines to enjoy. This tasting in particular offers a unique chance to taste wine from a lot of less well known wine regions (i.e. not California, Oregon, or Washington) in addition to hundreds of wines from the places that most people know and love.

So if you don't have plans February 18th and want to expand your wine horizons, the experience is well worth the price of admission.

2012 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting
Saturday, February 18, 2012 2pm - 5pm
Festival Pavilion - Fort Mason Center
Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, CA 94123 (map)

Tickets are $65 if purchased in advance, $80 at the door. You can purchase tickets online.

My usual tips for large public tastings: get a good night's sleep; go with food in your belly; wear dark clothes; leave the cologne or perfume at home; drink lots of water; and if you want to really enjoy yourself, SPIT!

Big wine companies are favorite punching bags for wine lovers that would never buy their products. Sometime's there's a good reason for this, like when they throw their weight around in the marketplace in ways that aren't exactly good for the industry. The bigger the company, the bigger the mistakes they can make as well.

When they make mistakes, sometimes these companies can be hung out to dry simply because they have deep pockets. And that's exactly what seems to have just happened to Gallo and Constellation Wines .

You may remember a bit of a scandal last year involving these two big players in the wine world. They bought a bunch (3.5 million gallons) of wine from the southern part of France that was supposed to be Pinot Noir and put it into their Red Bicyclette bottles. It turns out, however, that it was only partly Pinot Noir, and happened to contain a lot of Merlot and Syrah as well.

The wines were fraudulently sold by a number of parties in France, all of whom have been prosecuted under French law, even on appeal.

The incident was a severe embarrassment for Gallo in particular, who apparently thought they were buying legitimate Pinot Noir. There are tests, usually involving DNA sequencing, that can determine the grape variety of a wine, but they are very expensive, time consuming, and aren't normally used in the course of, say, buying a few thousand gallons of bulk wine.

Gallo and Constellation took the steps that you would have expected a company to take when faced with this situation. They pulled whatever product they could off the market, apologized, and cooperated with the authorities that were going after the folks who perpetrated this fraud.

But then three wine consumers in California sued Gallo and Constellation, along with two of the guilty parties in France, alleging "unfair competition, fraud and false advertising." Now Gallo and Constellation are paying these people and their lawyers $2 million to settle the case out of court.

We hear various politicians talking about "tort reform" in this country, and stupid lawsuits like this are exactly what they're talking about.

These consumers were in no way damaged or harmed by the fact that the wine they purchased wasn't 100% Pinot Noir. The suggestion that competition or the market as a whole suffered as a result is equally specious. Gallo and Constellation certainly made a mistake by buying the wine they did, but it should not result in paying litigation happy consumers who thought they could make a buck by going after a big wine company with deep pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for consumer protection. If Gallo had failed to disclose that it put peanuts in its wine, and some allergic person died of anaphylactic shock, Gallo should be held responsible. If the wine they sold wasn't actually wine, but was some concocted fake beverage that they synthesized in a lab, then I think there would be grounds for fake advertising claims, like in the 80s when all those "juice" companies were forced to put just how much real fruit juice they were using on their packages.

Those who generally disdain companies like Gallo, will at this point no doubt be shouting at their screens "They knew! They knew," but I don't think that's true. To my knowledge there is not a shred of proof that Gallo or Constellation knew that they were buying adulterated Pinot (which, admittedly says something about the quality of the wine that goes into their bottles). Now, if for some reason it came to light that Gallo and Constellation knew exactly what they were doing, that would change things slightly (i.e. intent to defraud versus an accident) but ultimately the issue is the same: these folks are being wrung for dollars because they did by accident that many winemakers in California do on purpose all the time.

By law in California, in order to call a wine Cabernet Sauvignon and put it on the label, only 75% of the wine has to be Cabernet Sauvignon (and only 95% of it has to come from the same vintage). The rest can be whatever the winemaker wants. And if you think that those $3, $5, and $7 wines you're buying at the grocery store are 100% pure, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Most large (read: non-artisan) winemakers manage their production at some level using the bulk wine market, purchasing juice here and there both to ensure that they can produce the volume they need to meet their targets, as well as to find blending components they think can help them make a more appealing wine. Even smaller winemakers will buy some extra grapes or even some extra wine that allows them to turn a few extra barrels of something into a second label wine or a special bottling. Why? So they can sell it. Remember folks, the wine industry is a business, first and foremost.

So while I'm no apologist for the behemoths of the global wine trade, I certainly am appalled at the fact that our legal system not only permits, but tacitly encourages the kind of lawsuits that these companies have been needlessly subjected to.

I'm sure that in the future I'll be criticizing Gallo and Constellation for something, but for today they have my sympathies.

Punching bag image courtesy of BigStock

Read carefully

Barbera and the Zins: a Lang Wines 4 pack or obscure rock band?

Oh no! I’ve made a mistake! I just wanted some wine to serve at my book club. What I received are four LPs from an 80s New Wave band. I was hoping for some of the 2006 Reserve Zinfandel’s aromas of plum, ripe blackberries or even the 2007 Lang Wines Amador County Zinfandel’s hint of smokiness. Not that these LPs aren’t hazy enough. They kind of sound like they were recorded in a bathroom on an airplane.

This just won’t do. I want to discuss the book over wine, not music. If you even can call this music. I was hoping for something with notes of blueberry jam, cocoa and toast – like the 2007 Lang Wines Amador County Barbera – or something silky and smooth – like the 2008 Sausalito Wines Zinfandel. All I’ve got here, though, are synthesizer notes, just three of them over all four albums. And they’re not played smoothly. Not at all.

Well, I guess without wine, we’ll just have to rely on our discussion of the reading to provide the fun. Oh gosh, this is going to be terrible!

2006 Reserve Zinfandel

• Appellation:  Amador County       
• Grower:  Vicki Delpart-Oakmont Vineyards
• Harvest date:  10/7, 2006       
• Brix at harvest:  26.8               
• pH:  3.80               
• TA:  0.60           
• Alcohol:  14.8               
• Fermentation:  19 days           
• Cooperage:  French & American oak   
• Blend:  90% Zinfandel, 10% Syrah   
• Bottled:  July 21, 2008       
• Cases produced:  150

2007 Lang Wines Amador County Zinfandel – Oakmont Vineyards

• Appellation:   Amador County                   
• Grower:  Vicki Delpart-Oakmont Vineyards   
• Harvest date: 9/25 & 10/7, 2007       
• Brix at harvest: 25.8               
• pH/TA: 3.65/0.66 grams/100ml   
• Alcohol: 14.8   
• Fermentation: 17 days           
• Cooperage: French & American oak   
• Blend: 96% Zinfandel, 4% Syrah
• Bottled: April 12, 2009         
• Cases produced: 1400

This wine is rich, well-structured and fruit-filled with an earthy undertone. It is stressful to wait at harvest-time, but consistent gold medal winning Zinfandels are the reward for that attention and patience.

2007 Lang Wines Amador County Barbera – Oakmont Vineyards

• Appellation: Amador County
• Grower: Vicki Delpart-Oakmont Vineyards   
• Harvest date: October 8 & 31, 2007    
• Brix at harvest: 25.8   
• pH/TA: 3.55 grams/ml/0.66   
• Alcohol: 14.3       
• Fermentation: 17-days       
• Cooperage: Hungarian & French oak
• Time in oak: 19 months
• Blend: 100% Barbera
• Bottled: June 20, 2009       
• Cases produced: 260

Smooth and delicious, its aromas are of vanilla, bacon and raspberry together with hints of cranberry, campfire and mint, all leading to a palate of blueberry jam, cocoa and toast with a juicy even zippy finish. The most food-friendly of red wines, this Barbera pairs well with just about anything…but it certainly “sings” for Italian.

2008 Sausalito Wines Zinfandel - Amador County

• Appellation: Amador County
• Harvest date: October 3, 2008
• Harvest Brix: 25.8       
• pH/TA: 3.65/0.66 grams/100ml
• Alcohol: 14.7%           
• Fermentation: 17 days         
• Cooperage: French & American Oak
• Blend: 96% Zinfandel 4% Petite Sirah
• Bottled: September 10, 2010     
• Cases Produced: 203
• Release Date: December 1, 2010

Bursting with cherry, pomegranate, and mint aromas, rich, well-structured and silky smooth this wine is drinking beautifully right now.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Chill Out

Yes, Detective, I did cause my husband’s death. But the murder weapon was… MY MIND!

You see, Detective, my husband was the sort who was very specific about his wine. Red had to offer a little heat, and the white had to be perfectly chilled. I knew this, all his friends knew this, but it was slowly driving me mad. Oh, that site he visited, just to complain about the daily polls! He ranted and raved about them, and about his wines, and about perfection, until finally I just couldn’t take it. And I bought a True Fabrications Ice Tube Decanter and put my plan into action.

You see, Detective, the True Fabrications Ice Tube Decanter has an inside and an outside. It lets you chill white wine without exposing it to extra water, thanks to that center tube. But my husband, all he saw was me dropping ice into room temperature wine, and then drinking it. And that idea, the idea that his own wife could so betray the very concept of wine he had devoted his whole life to maintaining, it was just too much for him! And he dropped dead on the spot.

I’m not sorry, Detective. And I’d do it again. In fact, I have! Would you care for some wine, Detective? It’s perfectly chilled. Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!AHAHAHAHAHA! AAAAHAHAHAHAHA!

True Fabrications Ice Tube Decanter

• This elegant decanter with an ice compartment makes chilling easy without watering down your wine
• The elongated design is a perfect tabletop accent
• Decanting allows wines to breathe, open up and reveal their full flavor
• The Ice Tube decanter delivers the best wine to every table
• Removable interior column for ice, you can cool your wine without worry
• This stylish decanter is capable of holding 750 ml.
• Separate ice tube chills wine
• Dimensions: 13"H x 4" Diameter
• Hand Blown Lead-Free Glass

In the Box:

• (1) True Fabrications Ice Tube Decanter

This wine’s giving me ideas

Attention uninspired people: I have tasted Inspiration and it is great.

First thing’s first: despite what you might have heard, you don’t get struck by Inspiration; you drink it. You need to do the work: uncork the bottle, pour it into a glass, sniff it, and send it down the hatch.

Second, Inspiration can vary in style and vintage. Sometimes it can taste like a 2009 Syrah with a blackberry and chocolate nose and a palate of rich blackberries, cedar, mocha and coffee. Other times, you’ll swear it’s a 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon with non-astringent tannins and rich flavors of cassis and blackberry and mocha. But no matter what kind of Inspiration you find, one thing’s for sure: it’s always delicious.

Now, convincing your boss that you need a glass of Inspiration Vineyards wine in order to work efficiently – that’s a little tricky.

2009 Syrah ~ Dry Creek Valley

• Vineyard: Palindrome Vineyards
• Appellation: Dry Creek Valley
• Varietal Blend: 93% Syrah, 7% Viognier
• Harvest Date: September 12th 2009
• Brix at Harvest: 24.9°
• Total Acid: .68 g/L
• pH: 3.75
• Alcohol: 15.2%
• Fermentation / Cellaring: Open-top fermented – addition of Viognier at time of fermentation Aged for 23 months in American oak, 1/3rd new
• Bottled Date: August 23rd 2011
• Release Date: November 1st 2011
• Cases Produced: 140

2008 Cabernet Sauvignon ~ Dry Creek Valley

• Vineyard: Gallaway Vineyard
• Appellation: Dry Creek Valley
• Varietal Blend: 80% Cabernet Sauvignon – DC, 10% Merlot – DC, 5% Cabernet Sauvignon – SV, 5% Cabernet Franc – SC
• Harvest Date: August 6th 2008
• Brix at Harvest: 25.0°
• Total Acid: .60 g/L
• pH: 3.49
• Alcohol: 15.5%
• Fermentation / Cellaring: Open-top fermented –Aged for 36 months in European and French oak, 50% new European
• Bottled Date: August 23rd 2011
• Release Date: November 1st 2011
• Cases Produced: 133

Full bodied with soft, non-astringent tannins, rich with flavors of cassis and blackberry and mocha. What’s great about this wine is that in its young age, you can enjoy it now. We also feel that it will only get better with age.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Wine: Not always for drinking

You know what’s they say: two’s company, three’s the perfect number for juggling.

These Saxon Brown wines are classy wines, which is important. When you’re juggling them. That’s what you guys are here for, right? Why else would you be looking at a three-pack, the optimal number of bottles for wine-juggling? Because you want to drink them? No. Wine drinkers buy 2 and 4 packs. Everyone knows a three pack of wine is for wine jugglers only. And anyone who’s ever tried the sport knows you don’t want to be juggling some cheapsy-weepsy, bargain-bin swill. It shows that you’re nervous, that you lack confidence. You need to let the audience see that you’re not messing around, that there are consequences.

With your choice of wines to juggle, you show your skill level. And this Saxon Brown Syrah 3 pack is for experts only. Juggling these three wines is a statement onto itself. You’re saying, “If I fail this bottle of 2007 Camp Block Syrah – with its rich concentration of sweet oak, leather, and tobacco on a layer off dry tannins – could crash to the floor. One false move and could send this bottle of 2007 Owl Block – a rock star of a wine, with wonderful violets, lavender, an exotic fruit tones to go along with its Syrah varietal character, and an almost dark chocolate finish – hurling across the room. If I am not fully present I risk wasting this 2007 Flora Ranch – filled with flavors of blueberry, red fruit, violets, and mocha – but alas, I am fully present. I am sure of myself, and I will succeed!”

You see that’s the key to being a wine juggler, you must always attempt feats that are too big to fail.

2007 Camp Block Syrah

• Case Production: 220 cases

Very dark and dense color; Cassis, blackberry, plum, slight licorice and latex, black current, sweet cigar tobacco, with black olive. On the palate - richness and a concentration of sweet oak, leather and tobacco on a layer off dry tannins. This wine will age up to 15-20 years, but why wait – they’ll make more.

2007 Owl Block

• Case Production: 237 cases

The “Rock-star,” as we like to call this wine. It has a wonderful violets, lavender and an exotic fruit tone to go along with its Syrah varietal character. The mouth feel has a long concentrated presence, with an almost dark chocolate finish. This wine will age up to, and maybe even beyond, 20 years.

2007 Flora Ranch

• Case Production: 264 cases

Very dark, with lots of blueberry, red fruit, violets and mocha. As the wine opens up it moves toward black cherry and dark chocolate, with sweet oak. This wine/vineyard will amaze you with how it evolves in the glass over time. This wine will easily age 10-15 years.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

The Prize

Solar might power a car or a computer, but it sure doesn’t taste good on bread. That’s why I support the oil industry!

It can be kind of hard, since there’s that cartel making sure you can only buy oil from one or two countries, but as long as we keep them happy, they’ll be our allies forever, right? Assuming those jerkfaces in China don’t steal it all up first. After all, if God wanted them to have this oil, she would have given it to them first!

Well, of course God’s a she! Haven’t you ever heard the story? Athena gave the olive to mankind as a gift because… ohhhh, you thought we were talking about petroleum? No, no, sorry if we weren’t clear. We’re talking about real oil, delicious olive oil, the kind you can only find authentic around the Mediterranean Sea. That’s why we’re glad the Asaro Partanna Oil Mill has made the kind of connections you only see in the oil biz, holding packaging and exporting rights to the United States since 1925.

This two pack of flavored olive oil is much more delicious than the stuff you find at the pump. The first 250ml will be the Gli Agrumati Orange Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It was cold-pressed in Sicily, where olives and oranges grow freely. Spill it over grilled vegetables, or maybe some pecorino, or even some delicious salmon. One bite and they’ll be cleaning it up themselves!

Then there’s the Gli Agrumati Lemon Extra Virgin Olive Oil. 250ml means there’s plenty to go around. Drizzle some on pasta shells, or maybe draw an x on your salad. It’ll taste great on those grilled vegetables at your conocookout while still adding zest to your Boiled Potatoes. It’ll even work with nationalized Venezuelan goat cheese!

Yeah, when it comes to oil, the Asaro Partanna Gli Agrumati is just the sort of thing to attract speculators. Our advice is to fill up now, before prices skyrocket. They always tend to around the summer months, right? Anybody else noticed that?

Fresh olives and lemons are crushed together to create this all natural cold-pressed extra virgin gli Agrumati Lemon Olive Oil. This Lemon Olive Oil is produced in Sicily where olives & lemons have inspired foods for centuries. A healthy and delicious way to savor salads, vegetables, poultry, fish & citrus vinaigrette's. Drizzle over pasta with tuna, sauted chicken, grilled vegetables & fresh sole. Delicious over goat cheese or just deep bread and enjoy.

In the box:

• (1) Gli Agrumati Orange Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 250ml
• (1) Gli Agrumati Lemon Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 250ml

No, no. You’ve got the wrong Miller.

Shut up with all this “unmanly” stuff, already.

“Hey! Hey guys, check it out. I ordered a glass of generic red wine.”

“Okay.”

“That’s cool.”

“Aren’t you guys gonna give me a hard time?”

“Why would we do that?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t it unmanly? Don’t you want to threaten to take my man card away or something?”

“What?”

“Were you kicked in the head or something? Who the hell uses the term ‘man card'?”

“I just thought-”

“Look, Gomer. I don’t care what you want to drink. If you want to drink swill, it’s your money. I’ll be sticking with stuff like this Miller Wine Works 2007 Red 2-Pack.”

“Does that have great taste, or is it less filling?”

“This is why no one likes you, Dave.”

2007 The Works, Kimberly’s Selection, Napa Valley

• 3rd Vintage
• Varietal Content: 39% Syrah, 34% Grenache, 17% Mataro, 10% Tinta Cao
• Aging: 27% new French oak for 21 months
• Titratable Acidity: 0.58 g / 100 ml
• pH: 3.92
• Alcohol: 14.4%
• Release Date: October 1, 2011
• Case Production: 563 cases

On the nose, sweet ripe plum, deep red cherry, and rose petals are prominent. Once on the palate, wild strawberries and red raspberries mingle harmoniously, framed by bright acidity, and finishing with notes of leather and spice. This wine will continue to develop complexity and weight with further bottle age.

2007 GM from High Valley, Lake County

• First Vintage
• Varietal Content: 64% Petite Sirah, 13% Tinta Cao, 13% Mataro, 10% Grenache
• Titratable Acidity: 0.65 g/100ml
• pH: 3.98
• Alcohol: 14.5%
• Release Date: May 1st, 2011
• Case Production: 156 cases produced

The 2007 “The GM” from High Valley in Lake County is defined by its opaque blue / black hue. At the moment it is a little restrained, brooding if you will, on the nose – faint hints of pepper and sweet dark fruit eventually emerge. On the palate it is a full-bodied wine. Plump and dense, gushing with juicy boysenberry and blueberry, with just a touch of mocha thrown in for good measure. If ever there was a wine for the grill, this is it. Most any BBQ fare, burgers, lamb, smoked duck, and especially steak (pick your cut!), would be right at home with this quaffable partner.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

I don’t think the usher’s going to like this.

When I said “sneak us a snack into the movie theater,” I meant like a candy bar.

It’s okay, I slipped the kid at the counter a fiver. No one will know we’ve got this Mornington Peninsula Stonier Reserve Australian Chardonnay 3-Pack!

“Three pack?! Tim, the movie’s only an hour and a half long!”

Yeah, but we’ve got buttered popcorn to soak it all up! I read somewhere that Chardonnay is awesome with buttered popcorn! And this is one of the best to come out of Australia!

“I’m sure it’s delicious, I was just thinking more along the lines of a soda.”

Yech! At least drink something pleasant! And what could be more pleasant than an intensely aromatic Chardonnay with crisp flavors of nectarine and grapefruit? Can I pour you one?

“This really goes with popcorn?”

Would the Internet lie?

2004 Stonier Reserve Chardonnay

Aromas including lemons, white peach and hazelnut are supported by hints of wheatmeal and French oak. The palate is a powerful expression of ripe Chardonnay – citrus and figs – balanced with creamy mid-palate complexity, and typically fine acid structure.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

He Would Have Wanted It That Way

Oh Harriet, please try not to be so upset. Regardless of the mix-up with the napkins, it was still a lovely funeral.

I know today has been hard, Harriet, but you can’t let the little things weigh you down. Just try to focus on the good that happened today. Sam looked great, didn’t he? I think it was really sweet how you didn’t have them put him in one of those suits he always hated. No, honey, I thought putting his favorite ball cap on his head was a wonderful gesture. Everyone else said so, too. And speaking of which, wasn’t it just heartwarming to see so many people come by to pay their respects. Lovely, I thought. The whole thing was just lovely. The funeral home just ran out of regular black napkins, that’s all.

No, you can’t go holding it against them. You need to let it go. Things happen. Sometimes others make mistakes that you have to deal with, but you just deal with them and move on. Besides, I heard several people remark on how whimsically creative those Vino’s Party Napkins were. It was probably good for everyone to have a little chuckle due to the witty sayings printed on each one. I mean, honestly, they’re only napkins, after all. Getting all upset over some silly 3-ply, 5” x 5” square paper napkins that come in a 50-count gift box isn’t going to do anyone any good, least of all you.

Of course I’m right, Harriet. Now you just put that Vino’s Party Napkins 4 Variety Pack out of your mind for now. If anything, those randomly selected pack of witty little sayings brought a smile to a few faces on a sad day, and I, for one, think that’s a great thing, I really do.

Vino's Party Napkins

• Napkins are quality 3-ply
• 5” x 5” square
• 50-Count per box
• Housed in black with clear cover gift box
• Paper napkins great for gift or everyday bar needs

• What Time Is It…Wine-thirty
• Cocktails
• It’s Five o’clock…somewhere
• Eat, Drink and….who’s mary?
• Don’t Drink & Dress
• Oh Pool Boy, I’ll Have Another
• Enough About You…Let’s Talk About ME
• Ain’t Life Grape
• I Feel A Personality Coming On
• “I Like It Dirty” Martini

Literal Interpretations

Otter Cove? I don’t see any otters!

Hey, I just finished up the winery tour, and I was going to fill out a comment card, but I thought, this is too complicated for writing; I should really talk this out with someone. Is that okay? Can we do that?

“Um, yeah. Sure. I don’t see why not.”

Well, first of all, let me just say I’m a big fan of everything you do here at Otter Cove: the 2006 Chardonnay Santa Lucia Highlands, with its hints of butterscotch, tropical fruits, honey, and a slight citrus at the end; the 2007 Riesling, which has just the right amount of sweetness; the Dry Gewürztraminer, with that floral bouquet and those flavors of lychee and honeydew. all of it is just so great!

“Thank you!”

Yeah, no problem. My one suggestion is, you should do more with otters.

“What do you mean?”

You know, “Otter” is in your name, but there are no otters anywhere in your winery.

“Huh.”

That’s why I think you gotta build a big tank, fill it with your wine, and then – listen to this – put some otters in that thing. So it’s otters swimming in Otter Cove wine!

“Yeah, wow. That’s an interesting idea… not sure if it would work…”

What do you mean? How could it not work?

“Well, it probably wouldn’t be to good for the otters. Or the wine… but I’ll definitely… pass it along…”

Why wouldn’t it be good for the wine?

“It’d just be a lot of wine to waste on a giant tank.”

Waste? No! That’s the thing: after a couple of weeks of the otters swimming in it, you bottle it up and sell it for even more money than before.

“Sir, we can’t sell wine otters have swam in. Especially not for more money than usual.”

Why not? Just put a sticker on it that says, this wine has been authentically ottered.

“Okay, I think we’re done here.”

• RS: 2.8%
• TA :.59%
• 100% Stainless steel
• 100% AVA Santa Lucia Highlands
• 100% Riesling grapes

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

James Ontiveros, on the other hand, was spending his sophomore year at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo going to classes during the week, and on the weekend, planting a Pinot Noir vineyard that now bears his family name. This wasn't a little project to help out on his family vineyard, which can often be the reason that certain college kids find themselves putting rootstock into the ground in their spare time. While Ontiveros' family has been connected to the Santa Barbara area for a staggering nine generations (which is why their last name is on everything from historic buildings to roads in the area) they were, up until recently, primarily cattle ranchers. But as the lands surrounding his family ranch gradually gave way to vineyards and more vineyards and more vineyards, the young Ontiveros began to think his decision to major in Animal Science might not be the most advantageous for the future.

By the time Ontiveros was a sophomore, he had switched to crop and fruit sciences, and had met Paul Wilkins. The two bonded over wine with some of the other students at the university.

While Cal Poly didn't offer wine studies, that proved no impediment to Ontiveros nor Wilkins, both of whom landed jobs and internships in the wine industry while they were still in school. While he wasn't busy helping Kendall Jackson manage its relationships with winegrowers in the area, Ontiveros was planting 8 acres of his family's ranch to Pinot Noir. Wilkins, for his part, landed an internship at Alban Vineyards, and got the opportunity to learn winemaking at one of California's most prominent boutique wineries.

Their careers in the wine industry diverged for several years, with Ontiveros doing stints at Gallo, and Wilkins becoming assistant winemaker at Alban. But in 2005 Wilkins left Alban and started consulting on his own, and one of his first clients asked him to see if he could track down some fruit from a vineyard named Ontiveros. Reunited, the two college buddies joined forces to make wine from Ontiveros' property under the label native9, and shortly thereafter started another project that they dubbed Alta Maria.

The Alta Maria label offers four wines, a Cabernet, a Chardonnay, a Sauvignon Blanc, and this Pinot Noir, each in quantities of a few hundred cases. The winemaking is done by Wilkins, whose training primarily on Rhone varieties clearly doesn't keep him from doing very fine things with Pinot Noir when he wants to. The winemaking itself tends to be minimalist, using native yeasts whenever possible, and I'm not entirely sure about the filtering regimen. New oak is kept to a minimum, as well.

In fact, minimalism might be a defining characteristic of these wines in many respects, from the rather stunning image on the label -- a cluster of ancient iron nails, the sort of which held together both the houses and the shoes of California's earliest homesteaders -- to the rather remarkable pricing of the wine. I'm not in the habit of regularly commenting on the price of wines, instead letting my readers decide what they think is value or not. However, a California Pinot Noir this good for $25 should not go unremarked upon. It's exceedingly rare to find pretty good Pinot at anywhere close to this price point, let alone a wine this fantastic.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Light to medium garnet in the glass, this wine smells of the damp forest floor and the bright fruit of raspberries. In the mouth, tart, sour cherry and raspberry flavors have a silky coolness to them that is stunning and quite mouthwatering. Green herbs and willow bark mix with earthier tones as the fruit continues to vibrate thanks to excellent acidity. Fine grained tannins hang in the background as the wine lingers through a moderate finish. Quite elegant.13.9% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
What won't this wine go well with? With low alcohol and high acidity, it's a fantastic food wine that I'd love to drink while munching on a chantrelle and goat cheese tart, for instance.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $25

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Earth. The first of the elements that the ancients held as the basis for all life. The source of all our sustenance. Wine has always been inextricably linked to the dirt, the root of terroir. That wine can sometimes taste or smell of earth should come as no surprise. Like walking through the spongy loam of a dark wet forest, scents of soil and mushroom, dust and mud often resonate with a dark bass note underneath other flavors and aromas. Flavors of earth are often borne on the textures of tannin, as if the very liquid had been strained through deep roots. Wines that express something of the dirt from which they spring are revered for this transmutation of place into taste, and justifiably so. The smell of the wet ground touches the deepest memories of our species, reminding us from whence we came, and to where we will return.

Mayacamas Cabernet Sauvignon, Mt. Veeder, Napa Valley, USA
Vignes du Maynes "Manganite" Rouge, Macon Cruzille, Burgundy, France
Chateau Beychevelle, St. Julien, Médoc, Bordeaux, France
Quinta de Roriz "Prazo de Roriz", Douro, Portugal

The flavors of wine are magical and beautiful, and worth celebrating, almost as much as they are worth drinking.

It is my pleasure to introduce a new series of weekly content on Vinography called The Essence of Wine.

This writing and photography project has been years in the making. Or more correctly, I have fantasized about it for several years, and only recently encountered the collaborators that I felt could truly help me bring it to life:

Photographer Leigh Beisch
Capturing the soul of food is more difficult than you would think. Food photography these days is glaringly unoriginal and boring for the most part -- often as hopelessly derivative as it is clinically sterile.

Photographer Leigh Beisch's images of food possess a rare beauty, poetry, and warmth that capture the energy and allure of great food.

Leigh studied painting and photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Moving from New York to San Francisco with her husband, an animator, Leigh opened her own studio and quickly attracted major clients like Williams-Sonoma, making a name for herself by creating stunning photographs for product packaging and cookbooks.

"My work as a painter influences my photography," says Leigh. "Color, shape, texture and the boundaries of the frame are subjects in and of themselves and I try to capture an emotional response to the subject and the setting, as much ad abstract paintings do."

Leigh's visions has led to commissions that range from editorials for magazines to store displays. Her work has won numerous awards including several Communication Arts prizes in photography and design as well as awards from Graphis and American Photography among others. The cookbooks that she has photographed have received awards from IACP, James Beard and Gourmand.

Prop Stylist Sara Slavin
Requiring equal parts sculptor, chef, painter, and engineer, good prop stylists, especially those that work with food, are worth their weight in saffron.

Art director and prop stylist Sara Slavin collaborates with photographers, designers and publishers on commercial and editorial projects throughout the country, with a special emphasis on the culinary and related arts.

She has co-authored numerous lifestyle books and has acted as art director and stylist for such books as Odd Bits, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, Alice Medrich's Bittersweet and Pure Dessert, Salumi, Williams-Sonoma Entertaining, Country Cooking of France, Southern Pies and Gwyneth Paltrow's My Father's Daughter.

Her clients include Williams-Sonoma, Restoration Hardware, Design Within Reach, Diageo Estate Wines, Food & Wine Magazine, Chronicle Books, Artisan Publishing, Sunset Magazine and 10 Speed Press.

Each week, Leigh, Sara and I will be bringing you a bit of visual poetry -- an original photograph and some prose -- that captures some of wines most essential elements. I hope you enjoy these as much as we are enjoying their creation.

See The Essence of Wine.

A big part of wine's allure is that it is so many different things: a source of alcohol, a source of pleasure, a gateway for entry into the mystical, the erotic, the enlightened, the divine, the silly, and sometimes the idiotic. But for thousands of years, it has also been a commodity--and that's where this book comes in.

Worrying about wine as a commodity seems uninspiring, even tawdry, compared, say, to worrying about the distinctive terroir of some patch of dirt in Alsace. But without the buying and selling, we'd all be home winemakers, wine production would still be primitive at best, none of us would ever have heard of Argentine Malbec, and that special spot in Alsace wouldn't have its own Facebook page. Money makes the wine go round, and Wine Wars helps to make sense of it all.

Veseth teaches political economy at the University of Puget Sound, is active in the American Association of Wine Economists, and writes the Wine Economist blog. The book's central metaphor is the "wine wall"--the complicated, diverse array of regions, grapes, brands and price points that can be found at most any wine shop or supermarket. Shelf by shelf, Veseth decodes the logic of what's where on the wine wall and how it got there. The book's subtitle--The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists--highlights three dynamics threaded through the story: the bad old days of cheap, insipid, industrial wine (Blue Nun, a wildly popular parody of good German Riesling a few decades back); the much better days of modern, efficient, technologically advanced, global winemaking (Two Buck Chuck); and the militant defense of fine, terroir-driven wine by another whole tier of producers around the world.

Not to spoil the end of the story, but Veseth remains hopeful in the end about the mix of wine dynamics. Despite the seemingly crushing power of global price-cutting and homogenization, he thinks distinctive, even quirky wines have a bright future--in other words, something for everybody.

Along the way, his overview of economic forces that have shaped wine's career take the reader on a number of historical excursions and international visits. We learn about the German discount wine juggernaut behind the "surfer dude" cosmetics of the Trader Joe's chain, the convoluted, multi-century relationships between French winegrowers and British drinkers, the marketing logic behind how Costco arranges its shelves and bins, and the rise of Hong Kong as the center of world wine auctioneering. The treatment is breezy and easygoing; not only are there no intricate economic formulas, there is not one single table or graph between the covers.

Nonetheless, Veseth does get to some fundamental economic realities behind the surface of wine, and even readers who pay attention to the ups and down of the wine market will learn something. For example, most wine fans know that the emergence of New Zealand as a high-profile player in the international wine trade is a very recent development, maybe two decades old, seemingly out of nowhere. More studious geeks know that the years of New Zealand's obscurity were also years when the main grape varieties grown were French-American hybrids, thought to be more suitable to cooler climates but not likely to make any export waves. That reliance of non-competitive grapes might seem to be the prime reason for decades of international non-competition.

What Veseth adds to the picture is that for many years, New Zealand followed an official policy--known as import substitution--of encouraging domestic production by creating barriers to foreign imports. In the case of wine, this meant that backward production practices and grape choices had a free ride, and no incentive existed for joining join the modern wine world. When New Zealand dumped the import substitution strategy and opened the doors to trade in and out, New Zealand winegrowers suddenly discovered they could grow amazing Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and the rest is drinking history.

This kind of information may not change the way your next glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc tastes, but it surely will help you understand how it got there. And that, to go back to wine's many wondrous properties, gets us back to the lure of enlightenment.

Mike Veseth Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists, Rowman and Littlefield 2011, $24.95 (hardback).

Tim Patterson writes for several wine magazines, blogs at Blind Muscat's Cellarbook, co-edits the Vinography book review section, and is the author of Home Winemaking for Dummies.

The Mustard
RUSSIAN RIVER VALLEY, CA: Flowering mustard growing between the grapevines signals the beginning of spring as seen in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, California.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow these instructions, while PC users should follow these.

PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

Unforgettable

Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my wine the most.

Honey?! Honey, have you seen my AlexEli Vineyards & Winery Willamette Valley Sampler 4-pack? I swear I just had it here a second ago. No, sweetie, I’m talking about the one with a bottle of 2008 AlexEli Willamette Valley Gewürztraminer, a bottle of 2009 AlexEli Willamette Valley Riesling, and two bottles of 2008 AlexEli Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. I must have set them down absentmindedly and now I can’t find them anywhere!

Come on, think. If I were a couple of bottles of 2008 Pinot Noir with dark cherry, sour cranberry and vanilla flavors with a black pepper and maple finish, where would I be? Did I leave them on the dryer? No. They aren’t on the coffee table either. Crap, what did I do with them?

Yes, yes, I know if I’d put my wine away in the place where it’s supposed to go we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but being snarky isn’t going to get us to the Oswald’s dinner party any faster, is it? No, it’s not. You know how much Jacob loves Gewürztraminers, and I’ve been raving about the 2008 AlexEli Willamette Valley Gewürztraminer for weeks now. I promised he’d get a chance to experience the solid grapefruit, peach, ginger, gardenia and mint aromas and flavors for himself, so will you just help me look without the commentary?

Hold on. Just gimme a minute while I retrace my steps. Okay, I walked in the door carrying all four bottles and the mail. I put the mail on the table with the lamp, and then went into the kitchen to chill the 2009 AlexEli Willamette Valley Riesling in the refrigerator so that its well-balanced and light-bodied citrus palate is nice and crisp. Is it there? No, that’s right, I told myself I’d put it in the fridge after I took a…

That’s it! Honey, are you in the bathroom? Will you turn around and check the tub for the AlexEli Vineyards & Winery Willamette Valley Sampler 4-pack? It’s there?! Oh good! I thought I was losing my mind for a second. Could you wipe those down with a towel and bring them downstairs when you’re done?

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

It tastes like damnation and sweet chocolate.

When I drink this 1000 Faces Coffee 4-Pack Sampler, I can see them all. I can hear them.

“Diana? Diana, what’s wrong? Why are you staring off into space like that? Oh, Diana, your eyes. What have you seen?”

“It’s this coffee, Jeff. Ever since you brought home that 1000 Faces Coffee 4-Pack Sampler I can’t turn it off. Every drink brings their soulless, moaning faces into my mind’s eye! Jeff, I can’t take it any more!”

“Faces?! What do you mean?!”

“Every sip, be it from the Carmen Estate, the Aldo’s Blend, the Bell’s Blend, or the Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza, floods my consciousness with a thousand faces, all of them gray and haunted, their eyes white and their hair black as night, howling and moaning! I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, every waking moment I’m terrorized by these phantasms!”

“So stop drinking the coffee!”

“I can’t!”

“Why?! Are the faces making you?”

“No, but it’s really good coffee!”

In the box:

• (1) 1000 Faces Coffee Carmen Estate, Panama 16oz
• (1) 1000 Faces Coffee Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza, Brazil 16oz
• (1) 1000 Faces Coffee Aldo's Blend 16oz
• (1) 1000 Faces Coffee Bell's Blend 16oz

Highbrow Drinkin’

You ever hear the paradox of Theseus’ Ship?

More or less, it goes like this: Theseus had a ship that was put in a museum, and it always looked just as good as the day it was built. When someone asked how the ship was kept in such good condition, the curator said that the museum kept replacing the planks as they began to rot, just as Theseus would have done. In fact, at the point the question was asked, every plank had been replaced at least twice!

Of course, the question now becomes “Is it the same ship?” And that’s the question you face now, with the 2009 Scott Harvey Reserve Old Vine Zinfandel. Is this four pack from an Old World vineyard… or from a 21st Century winery?

You see, the 2009 Scott Harvey Reserve Old Vine Zinfandel began at the Norton Vineyard, in small bunches of high extraction. The Old Vine Vineyards were first planted long ago, in the days when horses were used for cultivation, and the wine’s been coming strong ever since. Those classic vines have carried the vineyard through to today… but are they still the same grape? And is the ship still the ship of Theseus?

This is the kind of thing you can debate with friends as you enjoy the taste of deep raspberry, allspice, cloves and peppermint, balanced with a rich center of chocolate covered cherries and steak tartar. Since you’re getting four bottles, the debate can go on well into the night. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one to finally solve this paradox once and for all!

After which, you can move on to Zeno. Well, we say move on, but how does one really know that they move? After all, to go a mile you first must go a half-mile, and to go a half-mile you first must go a quarter-mile, and…

2009 Scott Harvey Reserve Old Vine  Zinfandel

• Appellation: Amador County
• Vineyard Sources: 66% DeMille/Norton Vineyard, “84 Year Old Vines” -  28% Vineyard 1869, “141 Year Old America’s Oldest Documented Zinfandel Vineyard,” 6% Fiddletown Zinfandel from the York Vineyard
• Blend:  94% Zinfandel, 6% Syrah
• Alcohol:  14.5%   
• pH:  3.54   
• RS:  Dry <.3%       
• Cases Produced:  222 cases
• Cooperage:  19 months in French Oak
• Bottling Date: 7/22/10

Produced in the old world style of balanced wine making, this wine was made to express the Amador Zinfandel terroir with a good balance of fruit, French oak, structural tannins and medium alcohol.  Deep raspberry, allspice, cloves and peppermint, balanced with a rich full center of chocolate covered cherries and reminiscent of steak tartar.  Long lingering finish showing a complete wine from beginning to end.   Old Vine complexity with first growth quality.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

The Power Is Yours

“Genuine quality… does not mean simply well-made or acceptable.” Well, Scheid Vineyards, you’ve just thrown a gauntlet.

It’s one thing to say you want people to have fun at a party. Then the standard’s kinda low! If someone laughs or bobs their head to the music or makes a new friend… home run with the party wine! But to flat out say “Real quality is that which is superior” means you’re setting yourself above a great many people. And if you’re gonna do that, Scheid Vineyards, it’s only fair you be judged in kind.

So don’t take our word that the Scheid Vineyards 2007 Estate Red 3 Pack is a quality wine. Take it home and decide for yourself. Pop the cork and stare at each glass with a critical eye. No, go on, we don’t mind. If they can’t bring it, it’s best they learn the lesson now.

Probably you’ll find the 2007 Scheid Vineyards Estate Cabernet Sauvignon intense and focused, with rich blackberry fruit and spicy notes of cedar and tobacco. And there’s a good chance the 2007 Scheid Vineyards Estate Merlot will appeal to your serious side, with a bold, full body rolling into rich oak and notes of chocolate and cinnamon. We’ll even be audacious enough to suggest the 2007 Scheid Vineyards Estate Syrah could end up your go-to table wine, impressing you with a velvet mouthfeel and a supple, lingering finish of mocha, vanilla and smoke.

But, ultimately, you’re the one who has to make the judgement. Because the people at Scheid Vineyards have decided what their standard will be, and if they don’t meet it… well, that’s their problem, right? And anyway, we suspect you’ll find the Scheid Vineyards 2007 Estate Red 3 Pack is exactly as good as they promise it will be.

The gauntlet’s down. We’re all staring at you now. Make your judgement.

Gold medal winner at the 2010 Jerry D. Mead New World International Wine Competition.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Illinois
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Hey, why not?

Finally, you can do some good by simply buying a bottle.

I have a surprise for you, Maureen!

“Oooh, what is it?”

It’s a McClean Vineyards Estate Private Reserve Syrah Vertical 2-Pack!

“What? I thought we talked about this, honey! We need to tighten our belts in the new year, and frivolous wine purchases are one of the first things to cut out!”

But honey, this is a vertical! With bottles of McClean Vineyards Paso Robles Syrah, Estate Private Reserve from 2003 and 2005!

“It’s still money we could have used on expenses, Justin.”

Okay, I didn’t want to bring this up. I just wanted us to enjoy big, bold Syrah flavors of boysenberry, dark cherry, and deep spice while sipping on the 2003 or rich notes of currant and plum from the 2005. But you’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?

“If by ‘it,’ you mean, ‘I’m sorry for spending money on wine I promised I wouldn’t,’ then yes. I’m going to make you say it.”

Look, this wine, this vineyard, it’s owned by a war hero. One of the most decorated soldiers of the Vietnam War, in fact.

“Well that’s a wonderful success story, but-”

AND he believes not only in making fantastic wines, but in giving back. So he’s donating 10% of all proceeds to help returning soldiers’ rehabilitation through the Armed Forces Foundation. Okay? I didn’t want to brag, but there.

“I agree it’s a noble cause, Justin, but we need the money-”

I didn’t buy this for us. I bought it for them. Now the wine’s already ours, so the best way to honor them would be to drink it and enjoy.

“I still think we have to talk about our finance-”

Hey. Show some respect. Drink up.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Just The Two of Us

Man, I can’t believe I drew the shorter straw!

I mean, it was just me and a bottle of 2010 Esoterica Sauvignon Blanc out there in the lifeboat after the shipwreck, right? Well, we’d been out here on the water for a few days, and my lips were starting to get so dry that they hurt, so I looked at the bottle and I said, “Hey, one of us is going to have to sacrifice himself for the greater good. One of us is going to have to get drank.”

It felt so good to finally say it. I mean, I’d been thinking about it every waking hour since we boarded that lifeboat together. I’d been imagining that austere, flinty and crisp wine on my lips. I so desired to taste the explosion of all the good things that Sauvignon Blanc can be without that pesky “winemaker interference.” I wanted it so bad. But then, when we drew straws, sure enough, mine was dwarfed by the bottle’s.

Well, I wasn’t going out like that. Not a chance. That bottle wasn’t going to have a glass of me. So what did I do? I jumped overboard and I swam and swam until I got to shore. Then I got a room at the hotel in town, washed up, looked through the employment section of the newspaper, and came here.

So, anyway, long story short: yes, I am very willing to travel, Mr. Job Interviewer.

Kent Rasmussen Esoterica 2010 Sauvignon Blanc

• Grape Source -Suisun Valley    

• pH: 3.36
• Total Acidity: 6.4 grams/liter
• Alcohol: 13.18%
• Free Sulfur Dioxide: 25 parts per million
• Total Sulfur Dioxide: 63parts per million
• Residual Sugar - dry

This wine is clean and austere, flinty and crisp—an explosion of all the good things that Sauvignon Blanc can be without “winemaker interference” and not made in the typical “big California style.”

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Paranoid Wine Reviews

Gary Thompson, wine savant and conspiracy theorist, discusses the 2009 Cruz Andina Malbec.

2009 not only marked the end of free thought (see my November 2011 blog post, “Diet Soda and Mind Control: Has it Happened To You?” if you’re new here), it was also a nice vintage year for red wines! The cool conditions led to concentrated flavors, which in turn helped wineries, such as the Veramonte Winery, produce reds that will age well over many years, not that the Earth will last many years (see “Meteor or Space Ship? Doesn’t matter because it’s heading straight for us!” from December 2010 ), but it’s the effort that counts after all.

And this 2009 Cruz Andina Malbec is a splendid effort, indeed! Take a sip and taste the raspberry, plum, and blueberry flavors merge with floral notes of violet, or what we believe to be notes of violet, but may in fact be the taste of some synthetic compound that, once in our system, records our dreams and beams them to some corporate hackers who then insert advertisements and beam them back (see “Dream Weaver? More like Dream Thieve-er!” from May 2009). These flavors are followed by the subtle tastes of black pepper and tobacco; in fact, they’re so subtle, it’s almost as though you’re not supposed to know they’re there. How odd…

Overall, it’s a very nice wine: full, structured, with well-integrated tannins and a lengthy finish. In fact, I’m sure I would still enjoy it, even if I still had the power to choose what I enjoy and what I don’t, but alas, those days are behind us.

2009 Cruz Andina Malbec

• APPELATION: Lujan de Cuyo and Uco Valley. Mendoza. Argentina
• VARIETAL COMPOSITION: 81% Malbec, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon, 9% Syrah
• HARVEST DATE:  April 2009
• TIME IN OAK: 14 months
• TYPE OF OAK: 100% French oak. 30% new oak
• ALCOHOL: 15.2%
• TOTAL ACIDITY: 5.7 giL
• pH: 3.57
• COLOR: Deep violet purple
• AROMA:  Dark plum. blackberry and violet notes

Raspberry, plum and blueberry flavors merge with floral notes of violet. Subtle black pepper and tobacco. Full and structured with well-integrated tannins and a lengthy finish.

90 points from Wine Enthusiast

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Iowa
• Minnesota
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Virginia
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

St. Emilion
BORDEAUX, FRANCE: The historical village of St. Emilion, located in the famed Bordeaux wine region, is viewed in this spring photo looking southeast.

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A similar small delight is to be found in the pages of the newly translated Drops of God, by Tadashi Agi and Shu Agimoto. Drops of God, or Kami no Shizuku, as it is known in its original Japanese, may well be the most widely read wine book in history, that is, if you are willing to grant this Japanese manga cartoon status as a wine book. I've written about the phenomenon of Kami no Shizuku several times here on Vinography, with amazement at just how popular the wine infused adventures of a young businessman could be. The readership in Japan is close to 500,000 people, and the series is purportedly just as popular in Korea.

And now the first volume of the comic has been released in the US by Vertical, Inc. in conjunction with Kodansha U.S.A.

Curious wine lovers will find several surprises in the book, starting with the fact that it must be read right-to-left, top-to-bottom, just as it is in native Japanese. This format, which will take a little getting used to for most readers, stems from the fact that while the words can easily be translated to English, the drawn panels cannot as easily be rearranged to read in the traditional Western flow.

Perhaps more surprising is just how fun a story that completely revolves around serious wine geekery can be. From the finer points of Left Bank chateaux to the revered icons of Burgundy to the influence of terroir and time on the flavors of a wine, The Drops of God is suffused with a near mystical reverence for wine. Of course, this is manga, so the profundity level is much closer to that of a soap opera than a Rex Pickett novel, but that shouldn't stop you from giving it a try.

The story centers around a reluctant protagonist, Shizuku Kanazaki, a low-level employee at a beer company who just happens to be the estranged son of Japan's most famous, and as it turns out, recently deceased wine critic. While Kanazaki doesn't like or drink wine, it quickly becomes clear that his father has taught him more about wine than he was aware himself. And a good thing this turns out to be, as his father's last will and testament throws Kanazaki into a mysterious contest for his estate and wine collection, against his father's somewhat sinister wine-critic protégé Issei Tomine.

Kanazaki teams up with the studious, sweet, and adorably self-conscious sommelier, Miss Shinohara, to plumb the mysteries of his father's legacy and take a crash course on all the more practical wine knowledge that he needs to accompany his uncanny palate and decanting abilities.

As is typical for such comics, plenty of hijinks ensue, from the typical teenage-level obliviousness to developing romance, to shouting matches with aggressive bosses, to chases around the city to find a particular bottle of wine. The art is cinematic in quality, with a mix of great drama and subtle detail, much lavished on the fine reproduction of wine labels. The sub-plots multiply as the pages go by, just as some of the world's great wines surface everywhere from tragic messes on the floor of a cellar to buried in a city park. The storyline is quite compelling, and the mysterious plot can easily lead you to devour the entire book in a single sitting.

While many adults might not ordinarily consider spending their time with a comic book in hand, The Drops of God is worth a look. In any wine loving household with a teenager, and parents who aren't afraid of glorifying the consumption of wine (with an occasional bout of over-consumption depicted) the book will likely be a big hit.

Frankly, the book's biggest disappointment lies in the fact that it is merely the first in a series, and as a result, leaves every thread of the plot hanging for resolution in the subsequent volumes.

Luckily for me, the second one came out a few weeks ago, the third is due in March, and the fourth in June.

Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto The Drops of God, Vol. 1, Vertical, Inc. / Kodansha U.S.A 2011, $9.65, (softcover).

Full disclosure: I received a review copy of this book.

And that, as they say, was the first day of the rest of my life. I've been writing about wine almost every day since then, pausing only to go on my honeymoon, hang out with my new baby girl, and go fishing in Alaska this past August.

It's been quite a ride.

I'm not in a position to offer significant insights into the overall growth of blogging as a practice or as a medium, but I've watched essentially the entire lifetime of wine blogs on the internet. From the intrepid few who joined me in 2004, experimenting with personal wine writing and amateur criticism, to the era of intercontinental Wine Blogger Conferences and the professional wine blog.

Here are my thoughts on what's happened over the last eight years.

The early days of wine blogging felt like strangers meeting on a desert island. We were delighted for the company, and bolstered by the idea that there were others just as passionate and equally insane to spend hours and hours writing about wine for free, not really knowing or caring who would read what we had written.

Dozens became scores, and scores became hundreds, and then we really felt like something was going on. You could almost feel the throbbing pulses of hundreds of little wine magazines, our little streams of content churning out to fill the servers of Google with wine keywords bit by bit. Most were in English to start, but then gradually wine blogs in Italian, French, German, Swedish, and more began to pop up. The vast majority of the blogs in the first two years were written by enthusiasts -- passionate consumers like me --that felt like we had something to say about wine, never mind who was listening.

Eventually some regional wine journalists and wine writers started their own blogs, suggesting that it was only a matter of time before major, nationally read wine writers got into the game. Eric Asimov of the New York Times dove into the pool in 2006, followed by several other well-known names in the year or two that followed.

By the time Eric joined us, wine blogs had begun to sort themselves out into what I see as several categories, which continue to persist today.

The first category I will call the Deliberates. These folks, myself included, eventually decided that wine blogging wasn't just something we did for fun, like updating our Facebook page. Instead we were trying to produce good content, regularly, that met some standard we each invented for ourselves. We self-consciously wrote for an audience, and took our roles as writers and/or critics seriously, opining, reviewing, and commenting on wine and the wine world. There was a significant mix, as there is today, of quality, literary merit, and specific areas of focus.

The second category of bloggers were the Passionate Journalers. These folks continue to make up a large portion of the wine blogging community. These wine bloggers perhaps lack the depth of journalistic aspirations possessed by the Deliberates, but nonetheless cultivate an audience of readers who read their writings as for personal stories as well as for wine recommendations. These folks are often highly engaged in the wine blogging community, and take their blogging seriously.

Thousands, even tens of thousands of Casuals have started wine blogs. Some continue to post, while many tire of the experiment and abandon their efforts to the dusty corners of the interwebs. Most of these bloggers do not cultivate an audience beyond their immediate friends and family, and use their blogs often as a personal record of what they ate and drank. These folks don't and never will think of themselves as journalists.

Morphers generally came later to the wine blogging game, since they were publishing online already, just not in blog form. Several wine writers had web sites where they did some or all of their writing, and as the blog form demonstrated both its power and popularity, these writers smartly got into the game, bringing with them their audiences, and adapting with varying ease to the format.

Then there were the Bizzers -- the folks "in the biz" who understood the blogging medium (or didn't, as the case may be) and dove in to see what they might find. PR wonks, winemakers, wine marketers and more started to write blogs, some for personal reasons, others as an extension of their jobs.

And finally came the Professionals. The wine writers who made their living writing about wine for newspapers, magazines, or other print outlets and eventually got into the blog world. Most professional blogs were and still are under the aegis of the writer's primary outlet, some even restricted to viewing by paid subscribers only. In the past year or two, however, several career wine writers, often after leaving their bylines, have begun blogs that are maintained assiduously.

Any attempt to produce a limited taxonomy of something as dynamic as a constantly growing niche of the blogosphere must be taken with a grain of salt. I'm sure there are those who either object to or believe they defy the categorization I've offered. But that's the landscape as I see it.

I think several key changes have taken place across this landscape over time. Some, especially in the Deliberates category, have settled into more specific niches of either editorial writing or wine criticism, while others, like myself, have deliberately attempted to span across these concerns.

Wine bloggers in all categories, especially the savvy, newer bloggers often focus on niches. While it was enough in 2004 to have something called a "wine blog" to gather readers from across the Internet, these days any new blog is instantly lost in a sea of thousands. As a result many wine bloggers are beginning to specialize.

The relationship between the wine blogging community, especially the Deliberates, and the world of traditional wine media has shifted. In the early days, bloggers and those we labeled "old school" journalists were rather equally suspicious of each other. Many bloggers saw themselves as deliberately countering the values and traditions of mainstream wine writing, while for their part, many mainstream journalists saw bloggers as rank amateurs or even poseurs. With a few notable exceptions (in particular the Wine Spectator which to my knowledge is the only major wine publication in the world that has never actually mentioned the name of any independent wine blog in its pages) the gap between wine blogger and wine writer has closed significantly. With so many "mainstream" wine journalists now blogging, and several prominent wine bloggers writing regularly in magazines, books, and other traditional media, it's clear that a convergence is well underway.

And so we find ourselves in a new era of wine blogging. What it will hold, I am not sure, but one of the trends appears to be a sorting out. More than one of the long-standing Deliberates have decided to stop blogging all together. Keeping this up for years on end, often with little more renumeration than accolades from readers, a few wine samples to review, and an award or two requires a level of dedication that not everyone can muster or maintain.

Eight years and tens of thousands of blogs later, it's also clear that cream rises to the top. The blogs that gain and hold public attention are generally of higher quality, and this will always be the case, as the bar raises ever higher. With professional writers getting into the wine blogging arena, those of us who aren't career wine writers will find ourselves competing for readers, for stories, and for attention, inasmuch as writers ever really compete.

For me, writing Vinography continues to be what it has always been -- both a discipline and an aesthetic pursuit. When people ask me why or how I manage to do it, I tell them the truth: some people knit, I write about wine. Sitting here in front of my blog is an aesthetic pursuit as much as it is anything else. I enjoy it infinitely more than watching television (or, sadly, exercise) or any of the other things that we all find to fill the interstices between work and other obligations.

While the core of my enjoyment remains the pursuit itself -- expressing my opinions and judgments about everything vinous -- one of the greatest pleasures of what I do here comes from my readers. The gift you give when you read, and especially when you comment, keeps me coming back to the keyboard so regularly. I love interacting with you, and deeply appreciate how your thoughts add so much to whatever value or entertainment my own might provide everyone.

So let me conclude this, my 2415th entry on the 8th anniversary of this little endeavor, with my thanks for reading Vinography and for your support over the years. I hope we continue this relationship for many more. I know I'll certainly keep doing this as long as it remains fun, and I don't see any end to that in sight.

Eighth birthday cake image courtesy of BigStock.

Three years ago, the Pinot Days Festival came to Los Angeles, and now every year SoCal Pinot lovers have a reason to celebrate.

This year's Grand Tasting will offer the opportunity to taste more than 300 Pinot Noirs from about 100 different producers over the course of 4 hours, with snacks to nibble on from local food purveyors. Wineries from all over California, as well as a few from Oregon and even farther afield will be in attendance.

Of course, if you're a hardcore Pinot lover, you may want to participate in more than the Saturday Grand Tasting. Thursday and Friday nights feature winemakers' dinners and Saturday morning seminars are available for the truly dedicated. You can find out more about these activities on the event web site.

Pinot Days Southern California Grand Tasting
Saturday, January 28, 2012 1:00pm-5:00pm
Barker Hangar
3021 Airport Avenue Suite 203
Santa Monica, CA 90405

Tickets are $60 per person and should be purchased online in advance.

My usual tips for large public tastings apply: get a good night's sleep; wear dark colors; drink lots of water; go with a full stomach; and spit so you can taste more than 5 or 10 wines and actually remember them.

Those grape seeds are genetically identical to the seeds that you will find at the bottom of clay amphorae buried behind almost every rural house in the country of Georgia, just as the amphorae, and the winemaking methods that utilize them also remain essentially unchanged across eight millennia. Georgia is the land that time forgot, at least when it comes to winemaking. For eight thousand years, the humble families of this region, through the rise and fall of empires and invasions, have made wine because a life without wine is no life at all.

This is not some romantic or philosophical ideal. There are no wine stores in the Republic of Georgia. The twenty or so commercial wineries that exist in Georgia exist only because of international (for a long time, international merely meant: Russian) demand for Georgian wine.

But even if the country had not a single commercial winery, it would be one of the world's most vibrant wine cultures. Everyone literally makes their own wine. Larger towns have farmer's markets dedicated only to selling grapes, which are purchased by anyone lacking vineyards. The grapes are carted away to make wine according to a recipe that is so ingrained in the Georgian culture that most children could easily tell you how it is done.

Ironically, the Georgian method of making wine without changing has gone from being ancient history to being cutting edge. Some of the world's most innovative and risk-taking winemakers now make wine the Georgian way: harvesting grapes; throwing crushed whole bunches of grapes into giant clay pots lined with beeswax and buried in the ground; then sealing them up for six to eight months; and then returning to remove the skins and seeds and stems before sealing the clay vessels again for one to eight years. While the rest of the world calls this radical, risky, "natural" winemaking, the Georgians know it as simply the way that wine has been made since time began.

Perhaps a sense of being lost in time was what a young artist named John Wurdeman was looking for when he finally made his way to Georgia. Trained as a painter at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, John felt that the kind of painting he wanted to do couldn't be done in the U.S. So he went looking for the place that was right, eventually making his way to Moscow where he finished his MFA at the Surikov Institute of Art. But Moscow wasn't quite right either. So John kept looking until, in 2005, he found himself sitting in a vineyard in the Republic of Georgia, and everything seemed to be perfect.

And then a stranger on a tractor yelled at him to come have dinner.

We all reach points in our lives where once we have passed over a threshold, it is impossible to go back to the life we had before that fateful step. For Wurdeman, that passing dinner invitation represented the beginning of a love affair with the Republic of Georgia that quickly turned into owning a vineyard, and as Russia clamped a trade embargo on the region, the daring plan to sell Georgian wine in the United States.

The man on the tractor was Gela Patalishvili, who is now the winemaker for a winery the two formed together called Pheasant's Tears. This small winery is now leading the way for the relatively fledgling commercial wine industry in Georgia to look beyond Russia as a market for its wines.

The time may, in fact, be right for Georgian wine to gain wider attention. Aside from being the cradle of winemaking, its wines and winemaking techniques have inspired some of the most iconoclastic winemakers of today, most notably the italian Josko Gravner, whose visit to Georgia led to his adoption of amphorae and the extended maceration of white grapes that yield what is gradually becoming accepted as a fourth color (after red, white, and pink) of wine: orange.

Gravner and his disciples, along with others like Paulo Bea have been popularizing (at least among a subset of wine lovers like myself) orange wines over the past decade. There's a (fantastic) wine bar and restaurant in New York now called Amphora that always has at least one orange wine served by the glass and several more on its wine list. Some restaurants, including San Francisco's Barbacco, now dedicate an entire section of their wine lists to orange wines.

The Georgians don't use the term orange wine, of course. Wine is just wine. It comes in two varieties. Light and dark (or "black" and "white" as their terms would have it). Black wine is usually made from the grape Saperavi (sah-per-aah-vee), while white wine is usually made from Rkatsiteli (rih-kaht-sih-tell-ee). But these are only two of the roughly 500 different kinds of indigenous grapes that can be found in Georgia (of which about 120 are used to make wine, some often unique to a specific village).

This particular wine is made from the Rkatsiteli grape, which is crushed, often as a full cluster, and slopped into the wax-lined clay vessels known as qvevri (kweh-vree). These vessels, whose name in Georgian simply means "beneath the earth" are often called amphorae by the rest of the world, but the Georgians insist that they are not the same thing. Buried in the ground, qvevri promote a long, steady, fermentation, and their egg-like shape promotes the natural mixing of the skins and lees with the wine.

After about six months, the wine is painstakingly removed from the qvevri with a ladle, drained off from the solids (stems, seeds, skins) and returned to the qvevri. If the winery were the kind of backyard outfit that most Georgians seem to possess, the wine would just sit there until it was time for a supra, or feast. At which point the qvevri would be opened up, wine ladled out and served. As this is a commercial bottling, the wine is removed after some further time (I'm not entirely sure of the duration) and bottled in glass. Note that this process involves no added yeast, no filtration, and no fining. Just grapes and a qvevri.

For anyone who has yet to try an orange wine, this is as good a place to start as any, and the price is right. While not as complex as some of the efforts produced by Gravner and others, it is delicious and possesses all the wonderful qualities that led me to fall in love with orange wines the moment I had my first -- exotic aromas, mysterious tannins, and wonderful abilities to complement food.

You'll have to be the judge as to whether it lives up to the winery's namesake -- the wine that was so good it could make a pheasant cry.

Tasting Notes:
Earning its local nickname as "fire wine" this bright, nearly neon orange glass smells of exotic flowers, candle wax, candied apricots and just a hint of tomato. In the mouth the wine has a wonderful creaminess that is offset by somewhat stiff tannins and bright acidity. That creaminess leans towards a waxiness as flavors of orange peel, fresh ripe apricots, and exotic spices swirl in a beautifully textured concerto. The finish is long and features that waxy quality along with floral notes and the grip of tannins. Excellent, and exotic. Will benefit from decanting. 12.5% alcohol.

Food Pairing:

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $18

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

So you’ve suddenly got some extra free time.

You’ll need something to do now that you’ve dropped out of the race, right?

Hey there, champ. Dry the tears; it’s all over and there’s no shame in that. Not everyone gets to be president, or even a presidential candidate, but you gave it your best. Now that your campaign has run its course, kick back and relax with a Tallulah Wines 2007 Del Rio Syrah and Shake Ridge GSM 4-Pack.

The 2007 Shake Ridge Les Trois Voix GSM features fruit picked after a long growing season, bottled unfined and unfiltered, with dark notes, lovely tannins, and sweet Grenache on the nose. Now this is a caucus you could do well in! No awkward conversations about marriage equality or how to end a recession, just delicious flavor!

And hey, we guarantee the 2007 Tallulah Del Rio Oregon Syrah will poll higher with your taste buds than you did with, well, everyone. You’ll enjoy notes of black fruit, cherries, and raspberries gilded with hints of rose petal and peppercorn. Finally, Oregon will stand for strong wines and delicious flavors in your mind, rather than a liberal wasteland not worth wasting any time or money on campaigning!

And hey, there’s always next election! Or, y’know, the usual route of highly-profitable book-writing career followed by talking head punditry.

2007 Shake Ridge Les Trois Voix GSM

• Blend: Mourvedre 35%, Syrah 34%,Grenache 31%

This is a superb vineyard owned and farmed by Ann Kraemer.  It sits high in the Sierras at elevations ranging from 1600 to 2000 feet.  Farmed in steep volcanic soils to a level of perfection rarely seen.  The Syrah that comes off Shake Ridge resonates with a dark brooding character with resolved tannins. The Grenache adds a firm sweet note that elevates the nose.  The Mourvedre brings a tactile quality that seems to hold the 3 together.

2007 Tallulah Del Rio Oregon Syrah

• 14.5% Alcohol
• 3.74 pH
• 6.3 g/l TA
• 412 cases produced

Layers upon layers unfold in the expressive nose of this chef’s favorite.  Black fruits, black cherry, and raspberry combine with notes of rose petal and carbon, and savory characters of black olive, peppercorn, and beef tartare.  Expansive on the palate, carbon and black fruits dominate, giving way to rich minerally tannins and a long and smooth finish for this well-balanced wine.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

The Prize

Solar might power a car or a computer, but it sure doesn’t taste good on bread. That’s why I support the oil industry!

It can be kind of hard, since there’s that cartel making sure you can only buy oil from one or two countries, but as long as we keep them happy, they’ll be our allies forever, right? Assuming those jerkfaces in China don’t steal it all up first. After all, if God wanted them to have this oil, she would have given it to them first!

Well, of course God’s a she! Haven’t you ever heard the story? Athena gave the olive to mankind as a gift because… ohhhh, you thought we were talking about petroleum? No, no, sorry if we weren’t clear. We’re talking about real oil, delicious olive oil, the kind you can only find authentic around the Mediterranean Sea. That’s why we’re glad the Asaro Partanna Oil Mill has made the kind of connections you only see in the oil biz, holding packaging and exporting rights to the United States since 1925.

This two pack of flavored olive oil is much more delicious than the stuff you find at the pump. The first 250ml will be the Gli Agrumati Orange Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It was cold-pressed in Sicily, where olives and oranges grow freely. Spill it over grilled vegetables, or maybe some pecorino, or even some delicious salmon. One bite and they’ll be cleaning it up themselves!

Then there’s the Gli Agrumati Lemon Extra Virgin Olive Oil. 250ml means there’s plenty to go around. Drizzle some on pasta shells, or maybe draw an x on your salad. It’ll taste great on those grilled vegetables at your conocookout while still adding zest to your Boiled Potatoes. It’ll even work with nationalized Venezuelan goat cheese!

Yeah, when it comes to oil, the Asaro Partanna Gli Agrumati is just the sort of thing to attract speculators. Our advice is to fill up now, before prices skyrocket. They always tend to around the summer months, right? Anybody else noticed that?

Fresh olives and lemons are crushed together to create this all natural cold-pressed extra virgin gli Agrumati Lemon Olive Oil. This Lemon Olive Oil is produced in Sicily where olives & lemons have inspired foods for centuries. A healthy and delicious way to savor salads, vegetables, poultry, fish & citrus vinaigrette's. Drizzle over pasta with tuna, sauted chicken, grilled vegetables & fresh sole. Delicious over goat cheese or just deep bread and enjoy.

In the box:

• (1) Gli Agrumati Orange Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 250ml
• (1) Gli Agrumati Lemon Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 250ml

Primitivo Moderno

Baby, let’s be cavepersons. Let’s get in touch with our Primitivo side.

I’m really getting into this back-to-the-cave movement. You can crochet some leopard-print loincloths. I can glue some prosthetic sabre-teeth on the cat. I’ll sculpt some clubs out of hobby foam, and we’ll do up our bikes to look like woolly mammoths. It’ll be savage.

And then, as we crouch in our bedsheet cave gnawing on tofu bones, we’ll toast the Fire Gods with the Castoro Cellars 2008 Primitivo. This Zinfandel clone is raised organically – or, as I prefer to put it, Neolithic-style – in the Whale Rock Vineyard, which is a totally caveperson kind of name for a vineyard. It’s lively and fruity, with boysenberry and blackberry preserves on the nose and dark berries, plums, and a hint of ancient smoke on the palate.

But hey, what are you doing? Don’t just drink it out of the bottle! We may be cavepersons, but there’s no reason to be uncivilized!

2008 Castoro Primitivo

• Harvest Date  Oct 3, 2008
• Harvest Sugar 26.8 Brix
• pH 3.68   
• Total Acidity .68g/100ml
• Alcohol 15.9%
• 11 1⁄2 month old American Oak
• 840 Cases produced. 
• Bottled  June 17, 2010

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

No, wait. Bear with us.

Just because it’s January doesn’t mean there aren’t holidays to celebrate.

Man, it’s easy to coast on a Wine site through the months of November and December. Every single day a wine deal comes up you can go to that old standby of “holidays!” Mention it’d make a great gift! Did you already do that? Mention it’d be great to serve at a party! Did you already do that? Mention it’d be great to treat yourself after buying everyone else gifts! Did you already do that? Mention it’s a great gift again, tons of people have to give gifts.

It can spoil us, you see. These things aren’t easy to write, believe it or not. I mean, obviously they don’t require a lot of effort, but compared to our usual slew of fart jokes and ranting about the insidious libertarian agenda on our other family sites, Wine.Woot keeps it kind of classy. Something about wineries not wanting to be associated with “reckless libel and poop humor.”

But we went ahead and did something unusual: we paused our Netflix Instant stream of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and researched some upcoming holidays you can use this Sapphire Hill 2009 Russian River Valley Chardonnay & Pinot Noir 2-Pack as a gift, to serve at parties, or treat yourself after buying presents and attending parties.

You know when a glass of 2009 Ketcham Estate Reserve Russian River Pinot Noir would really hit the spot? If there are any holidays that call for rich, full-bodied flavors of cherry, blackberry, and sultry vanilla, it’s Old Rock Day (the 7th), Male Watcher’s Day (the 8th), Houseplant Appreciation Day (the 10th), and of course Martin Luther King Jr. Day (the 16th this year).

And how ‘bout the crisp notes of Asian pear and crisp apple from the 2009 Russian River Valley Chardonnay? Sounds like the perfect accompaniment for Thesaurus Day (the 18th), Penguin Awareness Day (the 20th), Measure Your Feet Day (the 23rd), and National Cornchip Day!

Keep the wines comin’, ‘cause we’ve got plenty of holidays left!

2009 Ketcham Estate Reserve Russian River Pinot Noir

• Alcohol: 14.5%
• pH: 3.71
• RS: .44 g/l
• SO2 Free: 11 ppm
• TA: .46g/100ml
• VA: .041g/100ml

The Ketcham vineyard is on Eastside road on the north end of Russian River Valley. Aged in 50% new French oak for 17 months, this Pinot Noir showcases the rich texture, and velvet vanilla finish that has made Sapphire Hill one of the most consistent producers over than last 15 years.  This wine is Sapphire Hill's finest expression of a rich full-bodied Pinot Noir with cherry, blackberry, and hints of sweet raspberry and a sultry vanilla finish.

2009 Russian River Valley Chardonnay

• Alcohol: 14.5%
• pH: 3.78
• RS: .52 g/l
• SO2 Free: 13 ppm
• TA: .48g/100ml
• VA: .042g/100ml

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

We All Grow Up Sometime

Man, I was punk rock once, but now I do wine criticism. Really, it’s the same thing, you know?

What got me was that night, when I was in the back alley with Joey and Dee Dee, and Joey said “Hey, bro, the scene’s really changing, you know?” and I said “Yeah, it used to be just the wild kids, and now it’s all the cultured kids.” And that’s when it hit me: punk rock was just like the Saxon Brown 2008 One Oak Zinfandel Two Pack. The wild yeast came in over cold soaked fruit, made some exciting changes, made a difference, then the cultured yeast stole the scene and everything it used to stand for. And that’s when I decided it was time for me to make some money!

So I threw away my studded leather jacket and that pin in my nose, and I bought, get this, a tie. And I took a long drink of the Saxon Brown 2008 One Oak Zinfandel and said as loud as I could, “I TASTE DARK CHOCOLATE, MOCHA, RASPBERRY, AND AN ELEGANT COMPLEXITY THAT EVOLVES IN THE GLASS!” And wouldn’t you know it? Some guy who ran a gallery heard me, and hired me full time as his wine buyer! Talk about luck!

What? The 70s? Man, are you kidding? I wasn’t around back then. I was talking about my buddy, Joel Thornton, and his little sister Dee Dee who always tagged along. Where’d you get this “70s” thing from? I already said I was drinking a Saxon Brown 2008 One Oak Zinfandel Two Pack. Didn’t you notice 2008 was the year? Man, you wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds with a real punk back in my era. You know, of four years ago. Back when it was wild.

2008 One Oak Zin

• Alcohol: 15.0%
• % rs: dry
• Total acid 0.61
• pH: 3.63
• Brix: 25.3
• Cellaring: 7 – 12 years
• Case Production: only 175 cases

Great color again!  One Oak was planted approximately ten years ago, on lean soils at the southwest part of Sonoma Valley.  The 2008 vintage of One Oak has the site’s signature of dark chocolate, mocha and raspberry, along with claret like elegance.  The 2008 seems to have another level of complexity that evolves in the glass after 10-15 minutes…making it a wine to go back to over a period of time.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Get Well Soon

You heard the doctor tell me to drink more orange juice, honey. I’m just following her orders.

See, the problem here isn’t that the combination of head gunk and lung butter I’m currently experiencing is impairing my judgment, dear. The real problem is that your definition of orange juice is way too narrow.

First of all, this 2010 Old World Winery Pinot Gris I’m drinking is technically juice. It was at one time, at least. Yeah, okay, it was grape juice, but let’s not spilt hairs here. And, in case you haven’t noticed, this is an ORANGE wine. Just look at this beautiful hue it picked up during its maceration time in the grape skins. I bet if I could smell anything right now, its intense aroma of apricots, nectarines, orange – did you catch that, dear? ORANGE! – blossom honey would perk me right up. Instead, I’ll just have to take comfort in knowing that the subtle, yet sweet tropical fruit flavors and dry crisp finish are making me better with each sip.

Honestly, honey, you’re being way too stubborn about this. Even if it isn’t quite as healthy as boring old orange juice, you’ve got to give me credit for drinking more fluids which, I’d like to point out, is something the doctor also told me to do. You know, my mother warned me that you might be closed-minded like this. I don’t know whether it’s this cold or the two glasses of this 2010 Old World Winery Pinot Gris I’ve already had, but I’m beginning to see what she’s talking about.

Old World Winery 2010 Pinot Gris

• Appellation: Russian River Valley
• Vineyard: Mononi Ranch
• Harvest Date: October 1, 2010
• Fermentation: 50% Used Oak, 50% Stainless
• Alcohol: 13.8%
• Bottling date: June 24, 2011
• Production: 538 cases

Extended contact with the skins gives this rich Pinot Gris a peach hue. The aroma is an intense mix of apricots, nectarine and orange blossom honey with a background of thyme. The attack is subtlety sweet and bursting with tropical fruit, but the finish is dry and crisp, making this the perfect summer wine.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Friends are overrated

Buying wine? Don’t be ridiculous.

There’s an easy 10-step way to get all the wine you want for free! Here’s how:

Step 1: Invite friends over for a dinner party. When each friend asks what he or she should bring, say, “a bottle of 2008 Argento Chardonnay Mendoza.”

Step 2: Don’t cook anything. Just wait for your friends to show up with the wine.

Step 3: When they arrive and ask you where they should set down their bottles, tell them “Right there on that table with the duffel bag on it.” (Note: Make sure the duffel bag is at least as big as the table, so guests have no choice but to place wine inside duffel bag.)

Step 4: After last friend arrives and places wine into duffel bag, say you’ve got to grab something from the kitchen.

Step 5: Safely inside kitchen, put on gas mask.

Step 6: Throw smoke bomb into room with friends.

Step 7: Escape out window with duffel bag full of wine.

Step 8: Once in your hideout, pour yourself a glass of 2008 Argento Chardonnay Mendoza.

Step 9: Enjoy the aromas of ripe citrus and tropical fruits and flavors of concentrated grapefruit, apple, and pear, which are complemented with subtle minerality that leads into a fresh crisp finish.

Step 10: Say goodbye to your home and the people you once called friends. You’ll never see them again.

2008 Argento Chardonnay, Argentina

• VARIETAL COMPOSITION: 100% Chardonnay
• REGION: Maipú, Alto Agrelo, Tupungato (West Valley)
• 2,950-4,265 feet above sea level
• ABV: 13.1%
• FERMENTATION: Stainless steel fermentation at 59/64°F for 25/30 days
• OAK: 20% volume for 4 months aging and malolactic fermentation in French oak
• RESIDUAL SUGAR: 2.59g/L
• ACIDITY/pH: 5.7g/L 3.43pH
• WINEMAKERS: Silvia Corti and Gerardo Cirrincione

An exceptional Chardonnay, this wine offers aromas of ripe citrus and tropical fruits. Concentrated grapefruit, apple and pear fruit flavors are complemented with subtle minerality leading into a fresh crisp finish.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Iowa
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Actually, I wrote an article for Fine Cooking Magazine's last issue with five New Years wine resolutions. Mine were focused on exploring niches of the wine world that are generally ignored. Check it out if you're interested. It's an excellent magazine and is on newsstands now.

But let's talk now about a different sort of list: the stuff that should go away. Here's the list of stuff that the wine world would be better off leaving behind in 2012.

#1 Extra heavy bottles
It's been clearly demonstrated that the wine industry has a big impact on the environment from the standpoint of CO2 emissions. Most of this impact comes from the pollution involved in shipping wine, thanks to the carbon footprint of shipping big heavy boxes of wine around the country and the world. Given that, it's time for wineries to swallow their egos and find some other way to make their wines seem impressive besides huge, heavy wine bottles. The arguments that these weighty, oversize bottles somehow protect wine from sunlight and temperature are ridiculous from my perspective. I have yet to see any real scientific evidence that justifies them. Instead they represent only the egos and vanity of the wineries that employ them. It's time they went away. The wine tastes just as good in a humble bottle that fits on everyone's wine rack, costs less to ship, and reduces a winery's carbon footprint. And before anyone says anything: no, tetra-paks and wine in cans are not the answer.

#2 Carping about all the wines over 14% alcohol
I've addressed this topic at length elsewhere, but I'm still sick of people making sweeping generalizations that categorizes (or perhaps condemns is a better word) wines over a certain alcoholic strength as too high-octane. I love lower alcohol wines, and often object to overtly rich wines that burn in the finish. I encourage anyone who wants to drink such wines to drink them. I encourage anyone who prefers such wines to go right ahead. But don't draw lines in the sand and suggest that wines higher than your arbitrary line are somehow undrinkable or the scourges of the wine world. There are great 15% alcohol wines, and lousy ones. Just as there are lousy 13% alcohol wines, and great ones.

So what if all the [insert wine style here] in [insert your favorite (usually California) wine region here] used to be 12.5% alcohol? There were different rootstocks, a cooler climate, and different standards for winemaking. It would be difficult, if not impossible to make wines at that level of alcohol (2011 may be a vintage where some come close), and there's the risk that consumers might just not like them. But that is really beside the point. Complaining about alcohol levels in wines is like complaining about the grammar skills and inscrutable language of today's teenagers. And if I had a dollar for every hypocrite who fed me this line of argument but readily admitted to liking Chateauneuf-du-Pape (99% of which is in the 14.5% range and higher) I'd be a rich, rich man.

#3 Anti-consumer wine shipping legislation
Hoping that the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America and monopolistic state governments will somehow give up their fight to ensure consumers have no choice of where and how they buy their wine is a bit like hoping Vladimir Putin will decide he doesn't want to be Prime Minister of Russia after all. The phrase "pry it from my cold, dead fingers" comes to mind. But this isn't a set of predictions about what will really happen in 2012, merely a wish list, and a lot of states in this country of ours need some electroshock-therapy-enabled attitude adjustments. It's time to put the interests of ordinary consumers first. There are glimmers of hope that this can be possible with enough pressure on legislators. Washington State just got out of the state-run liquor business, allowing for competition by private companies. The law wasn't perfect, but it was a great first step. C'mon Texas and Pennsylvania, you know you want to join the party!

#4 Dogmatic wine assholes
As if wine culture didn't have enough of a problem with many consumers thinking of it as elitist and snobbish? Yet it seems that I hear more and more polarized, entrenched, and vituperative rhetoric from various wine factions every month. Everyone needs to chill the fuck out, and stop making wine into some religious landscape where the righteous battle the philistines. You want to make wine without sulfur? Great. Just don't imply that anyone who chooses to put sulfur in their wine is poisoning their customers. You think Biodynamic is the way to go? Fantastic. Then don't suggest that everyone who farms conventionally is producing lousy industrial swill. It's time to end categorical statements that ignore the complexity of reality. It's called growing up. And there's a lot of it to be done in the wine world.

#5 Styrofoam
It is the work of the devil. You can't compress it (without industrial equipment), recycle it (as a basic consumer), burn it (without poisoning yourself), or move it (without hurting your ears). And the claims that it is a much better insulator than cardboard or other packaging inserts do not seem to be conclusive. Why does anyone still think it is a good idea to package wine in this shit? Wineries, get with the times and buy recycled cardboard inserts for your wine boxes. Your warehouse managers, shippers, customers, and employees will all thank you.

#6 The never-ending parade of wine aeration gadgets and their promises
Air is good for many wines, to be sure. I always decant my Sangiovese, no matter what. But this cult of aeration has gone too far. How do I know that? Take a look at this ridiculous stunt. If you really want air in your wine, pour out a glass, push the cork back in, and then shake the hell out of that bottle. Not prepared to turn your wine into a shake-weight? Then just relax a little and open that bottle a little before you want to drink it, or pour it into something and swirl it around. Decanters don't need to be fancy. Here's what I use.

#7 TCA: 2,4,6-trichloroanisole
OK, maybe we've got only a slightly better shot at ridding the world of cork taint than we do of getting the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers Association to roll over and let us scratch their tender underbelly. But every time I open a bottle to the smell of wet cardboard I get so damn pissed off. TCA has ruined probably north of $400 worth of wine that I or a friend paid for and opened expectantly this past year. It's so ridiculous that we have to put up with this. It's so ridiculous that we DO put up with this. As long as I'm wishing for things, I'm definitely wishing for someone to solve this damn problem once and for all.

#8 Endless magical health claims (or danger claims) about wine
Haven't we heard just about enough from everyone wanting to convince us that red wine will either make us live forever, or will kill us just slightly slower than smoking? Let's just agree that there is some rock solid proof that a bit of red wine in moderation is good for your heart, and that drinking 750ml of anything alcoholic per day is going to hurt you more than it helps. The main hitch here is that those damn researchers love doing studies about drinking red wine because they have an excuse to drink in the lab. It beats the pants off of testing the latest artificial sweetener for carcinogens.

#9 Treating serious bloggers as if they're different than print journalists
From the FTC to some nincompoop Federal judge, to legions of old-school print-only journalists who don't understand the Internet, the time has come for people to stop worrying about the channel, and start worrying about the content and how it was created. If it acts like a journalist, writes like a journalist, and people read it like a journalist, then we all ought to treat it like one. And as for wine blogs in particular, well, some of us yearn so much to be thought of like regular wine writers, we'll even resort to writing inane lists of things at the beginning of the year. But then we'll use a couple of four letter words in the process and totally ruin the illusion.

Here's to a year where the scourges of the wine world, whatever yours may be, are vanquished!

Photo of 2012 calendar courtesy of Bigstockphoto.Com

After assigning everyone a number and then using a true random number generator, I have picked the following six names "out of a hat" as winners. Each of the people below will receive two tickets to the grand tasting, courtesy of Vinography. I will send you each an e-mail, but you can pick up your tickets the day of the event at will call under the name you left in your comments (or another one you send me by e-mail). Congratulations.

Helene
Alyssa
Marcia J.
Leslie
Donna V.
Tim B.

Additionally, I said I would award an extra pair of tickets to the Epicuria event on Thursday January 26th to my favorite of the haiku poems. My favorite was:

This poem happened to be submitted by Leslie, so she and a friend will be having a major Zinfandel weekend.

Thanks for playing! Now go drink some Zinfandel.

Nicole's Vineyard
RUSSIAN RIVER VALLEY, CA: Green grasses growing between the grapevines signals the start of spring as seen in Nicole's Vineyard in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, California.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow these instructions, while PC users should follow these.

PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

It’s A Batter Of National Security

The C.I.A. is training pastry chefs now? The state of the world must be more dire than I thought.

I’ll admit that I don’t watch the news much anymore. It’s always “THIS THING YOU LIKE IS KILLING YOU” or “THESE PEOPLE YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WANT TO KILL YOU” or “DO THIS THING TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM PEOPLE KILLING YOU, NOT THAT IT WILL MATTER.” It just makes me anxious all the time and who wants that? All I’m trying to do is live my life and eat a few sweets when I can. I figure it’s much easier that way.

But this Marché Noir All Natural Cabernet Brownie 9-pack has got me worried. What kind of messages might CIA-trained Pastry Chef Rachel Marie Klemek be sending with her wine flour-made treats? Why is the government teaching their operatives how to make incredibly rich and tasty, all-natural brownies that are high in fiber, iron, and antioxidants? Have things gotten so bad that all that is standing between us and incredible danger are the currant and cherries of the Special Reserve, the yummy hazelnut of the Nutty Noir, and the intense cocoa pleasure of the Brut Cacao? And if that can’t save us, WHAT CAN?

I can’t believe we’ve let the world come to this. Thank goodness my great-grandpa still has that fallout shelter he built back in the fifties. About how long can a guy survive on brownies, do you think?

Cabernet Brownie Brut Cacao

 * Percent Daily Values (DV) are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Cabernet Brownie Special Preserve

Currant and Cherry:  Jammy notes of  chewy currants and plump cherries complement Cabernet undertones to create the ultimate connoisseur’s delight.

Ingredients - Evaporated Cane Juice, Unsalted Butter (milk), Eggs, Unbleached Pastry Flour, Cocoa Powder, Wine Flour (Grape Skin Powder), Dried Currants, Dark Chocolate, Dried Cherries, Sea Salt.

 * Percent Daily Values (DV) are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Cabernet Brownie Nutty Noir

 * Percent Daily Values (DV) are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

In the box:

• (3) Marché Noir All Natural Cabernet Brownie Brut Cacao, 2.2oz
• (3) Marché Noir All Natural Cabernet Brownie Special Preserve, 2.2oz
• (3) Marché Noir All Natural Cabernet Brownie Nutty Noir, 2.2oz

Ah, the sweet smell of low-hanging fruit.

Sometimes a comparison just begs to be made.

Oh, the more things change the more they stay the same! Remember, Julie? Remember that dank corner of my dad’s basement in the ‘70s where we set up our very first hydroponic grass-growing kit? Ah, those were the days. Just a nonstop blur of Zeppelin, Hendrix, and (yes I’m not to proud to admit it) Foghat as we focused on perfecting our homegrown.

And now, here we are, 40 years later and doing it all over again with this Hydroponic Wheatgrass Kit from Living Whole Foods.

Yeah, okay, the strain might’ve changed a bit over the years, but the motivation’s still the same: a healthy, natural alternative to the harsh, fabricated stuff in the real world. Am I right or am I right? Okay, so we’ve gone from glassware to just a glass, but we’re still using stuff like this Azomite Trace Mineral Fertilizer and Cocotek Hydroponic Grow Mats to produce the best grass.

Only now we drink it to take in more oxygen instead of, y’know, whatever the hell we were taking in before.

Introduction to Wheatgrass Growing Kit

Perfect for growing grasses even in small kitchens or apartments. Each kit comes with simple easy to follow growing and harvesting instructions that will have you juicing healthy super-nutritious juice. To insure the highest possible mineral content and grass yield, included is an organic growing mix and Azomite, a natural mineral additive that insures that your grass contains all of the trace minerals required by the human body for maximum health. For tips and tricks on growing and juicing wheatgrass, see the wheatgrass growing videos.

Each Kit Contains:

• Laminated Hydroponic Growing Instructions
• 4 Oz. Azomite trace mineral fertilizer:
  - Azomite has 67 major and trace elements
  - Its name means “A to Z Of Minerals Including Trace Elements”
  - Typical analysis shows every element that’s beneficial to plants and animals, and other elements (micro-nutrients) scientists believe essential
• 1 Tray with no holes and 2 Trays with drain holes:
  - These durable growing trays can be reused over and over again
  - Drain holes and easy portable size make these trays perfect for growing wheatgrass even in your own kitchen
  - Each tray of wheatgrass will yield 14 to 18 ounces of juice
• 3 lbs of wheat grass seed (3 pre measured bags):
  - Seed is quality tested for Germination Rate, Purity and Pathogens
  - Most sprouting seeds are 100% Certified Organic
  - Living Whole Foods offer full support and guarantee with seeds, they will sprout for you; if you have any problems sprouting them we will help you to get them sprouting, or they will replace the seed
• 3 Cocotek Hydroponic Grow Mats:
  - Coco mats are an alternative to those who wish to grow using the hydroponics method
  - They are completely natural and bio-degradable—made of a combination of coconut fiber and natural organic rubber latex
  - The grass is grown exactly the same way, using the coco mat instead of soil

In the box:

• (1) Living Whole Foods Hydroponic Wheatgrass Kit
• (PLEASE NOTE:  Fully-Grown Wheatgrass is NOT Included)

I Wanna Go Back

Four years as a kid? Huge! Four years now? Eh, it’s not so far, really.

It’s almost 2012, right? Four years ago it was just 2008. Go on, say it aloud. 2008. Wasn’t so far away, was it?

Now think back to when you were a high school senior. And then remember yourself in 9th grade. Pretty big difference, right? Different music, different clothes, different friends… and that was also just four years. But when you remember it… man, how could you have packed in so much changing?

That’s the feeling you’ll be replicating with the St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage Vertical 4 Pack. These four bottles carry the St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage from 2006 to 2009. You’ll be able to recreate the feeling of maturity as you enjoy the changes and tastes each year had to offer. Shall we take you on a tour?

The 2006 St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage is eager, still wide-eyed and innocent. It’s got notes of tea and plum that lead to smooth oak and a daring hint of tobacco (as long as no one catches it!). Sweet acids finish with a daringly youthful splash of red currant, raspberry and dark cherry fruit.

The 2007 St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage is a little more confident. It’s a lovingly rich black raspberry compote, with dark spices and some sour cherry. Tobacco, rich spice, this wine goes well with meat. You’ll find this wine dry like an adult, but still fruity and fun. Call it the “Goth” phase.

The 2008 St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage has serious cherry and red plum with a strong backbone of oak. Tobacco in a cedar chest is the way to describe the undernotes. So poetic! This wine is light and lean, peppery with red cherry to the finish. It’s a wine that could support itself.. but maybe it’s just not ready? Maybe it’s gonna have one last great year before it grows up once and for all?

And, at last, here we are. The 2009 St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage. Chocolate-covered espresso bean and cherry pie aromas, and why not? It’s a celebration! Everything’s done, the next stop’s tomorrow. The future’s gonna take care of itself, isn’t it? Today’s for black raspberry, ripe currant, silky tannins and a hint of clay in the finish. It’s elegant and will age… well, let’s just say it’s made for aging. And whatever path it takes, we expect great things from it.

Four years. Depending on where you are, that can be a lot or a little. Maybe in your life, these days, four years tends to go by in a blur. But in the life of the St. Julian Braganini Reserve Meritage Vertical 4 Pack… well, we all were young once, weren’t we?

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Rebranding

We’re going to change your image a little bit, Nancy, or should I say, Copa Del Rey.

That’s right! A new name! Why? Well, we did some research, talked to some focus groups, etc., and we really just found that people weren’t so intrigued by the name Nancy Quinn. So we hired a team of writers to come something a little bit more exciting and a bit more proven when it comes to grabbing people’s attention. And currently, there’s just no name more exciting and attention-grabbing than, Del Rey.

Now, about the whole singer-songwriter thing. It works for some people, but with you, we’re just not seeing it. So, we’re going to tweak that a little bit, too. Instead of going with the traditional girl-with-guitar motif, we’re thinking we’d like to promote you more as of a bottle of 2008 Rey Maipo Valley Merlot.

Trust us: wine is the new music. People these days, they don’t want some soft heartfelt ballad about a relationship ending. They want a glass of wine that is elegant and rich in the nose. They don’t want music videos with choreographed dance moves. They want bold expressions of fruit and a touch of toasted oak, spiced notes and cherry aromas.

These days, the biggest stars aren’t on stage; they’re in bottles. So what do you think? Are you ready for superstardom… Copa?

2008 Copa del Rey Maipo Valley Merlot

• Appellation: Maipo Valley
• Varietal Composition: 100% Merlot
• Brix at Harvest: 24-24.5
• Cooperage: 50% French oak
• Total Acidity: 5.6
• Total pH: 3.62
• Residual Sugar: Dry
• Alcohol: 14.5
• Release Date: 6/1/2009
• Cases Produced: 5000
• Bottle Size: 750 ml

The Copa del Rey Merlot is decidedly different than other Merlots made from grapes from the same region. The fusion of Chilean fruit, climate and terroir combined with the New World style of this wine, results in a level of quality at an unmatched price. Elegant and rich in the nose, with bold expressions of fruit and a touch of toasted oak, spiced notes and cherry aromas make this wine a perfect match for both entrees with a kick as well as rich, decadent desserts.

97 Points – JustWinePoints

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Respect the Ritual

You’ve got your Ritual, and I’ve got mine. Okay, Chris?

Sure, they’re different kinds of rituals. Your Ritual is a 2007 Chilean Pinot Noir that opens with aromas of deep red fruit, soft Earthiness, and a hint of spice. Your Ritual is rich and smooth on the palate and features flavors of dark fruit mingling gently with hints of smoky oak and dried herb. My ritual involves smelling salts, speaking in tongues, and giving myself tattoos that spell out a message of peace for when They arrive. But these are both rituals, Chris, and they both demand respect. You don’t see me complaining when you do your Ritual in the living room, but when I do mine, it’s all, “Eric, stop!” or “Eric, that’s against the law!” or “Eric, is that my sweater? Why does it smell like it’s been soaked in kerosene?”

But you know what really gets my goat, Chris? You never participate. I’ll join in on your Ritual. I’ll comment on how your Ritual is a complex wine with balanced acidity and a long finish. I’ll even have some of your Ritual when you’re at work. Because I care, Chris. I don’t want us to feel like we’re just roommates; I want us to be friends. But we can’t be friends if you’re always turning your back on me. We can’t be friends if you’re not going to bow down next to me and speak the Forbidden Syllables at least once. We can’t be friends if you’re going to call the Sacred Drape of Autonomy a “weird, sparkly scarf.”

What I’m getting at is maybe, before you call the landlord to have me evicted, you should take a minute and ask yourself, “Is this really as one-sided as I’m making it, or could I have possibly done something wrong, something that may have offended poor Eric, something that may have made him feel ashamed of his system of beliefs?” The answer to that question might surprise you, Chris. It might surprise you a whole lot.

2007 Ritual Pinot Noir

• Appellation: Casablanca Valley, Chile
• Varietal Composition: 100% Pinot Noir
• Harvest Date: April 2-6, 2007
• Time in Oak: 12 months
• Oak Aging: 100% French oak, 30% new
• Appearance: Deep garnet red
• Aromas: Deep red and dark fruit, cherry and spice

2007 Ritual opens with aromas of deep red fruit, soft Earthiness and a hint of spice.  On the palate, the wine is rich and smooth, featuring flavors of dark fruit mingling gently with hints of smoky oak and dried herbs.  It is a complex wine with balanced acidity and a long finish.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Justice is Served

Stop right there and put your hands up, bank robber! I’m going to have to take you in!

“Who are you?”

I’m Todd, the Gewürztraminer of Mendocino County.

“Wait, the what of Mendocino County?”

The Gewürztraminer. It’s German for sheriff.

“I don’t know German, but I’m not sure that’s what that means.”

Well, whatever! It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’m the law around these parts, and I just can’t let you walk away with all that money. Now, stick em up high!

“But, why should I? You’re not even armed.”

Oh yeah? What do you call this?

“A bottle of wine.”

Yes! A bottle of 2008 Pacific Wine Works Gewürztraminer to be exact. So we can do this the easy way – you drop your pistol and let me cuff you and bring you down to the station – or we could do this the hard way – I uncork this bottle and pour us a couple glasses.

“Wait, we just drink wine together? That’s the hard way?”

Just drink wine? Are you serious? No way! This wine has undergone a long, cold fermentation process so you better watch out! It’s gonna be left hook: sweet Bosch, right hook: Asian pear! Then slap, bright acidity on the palate that elevates the pear and pineapple notes from out of nowhere! Think that’s all? Nope! Think again! You’re looking at a long, spicy finish with notes of black pepper and citron! So, tell me: are you scared yet, punk?

“I’m not sure you’re going to like how I answer this one…”

2008 Pacific Wine Works Gewürztraminer, Mendocino County

• Varietal: Gewurztraminer
• Appellation: Mendocino County
• Blend: 98% Gewurztraminer, 2% Chardonnay
• Date Picked: Sept. 13, 2008
• pH at Harvest: 3.71
• Alcohol By Volume: 13.6%
• Bottling Date: April 2009
• Oak Program: Nada
• Production 714 Cases

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

The Dark Wine Rises

We swear, we’re not making any of the following story up:

This six pack of 2007 Rockus Bockus Proprietary Red Wine tastes of blackberries, chocolate, and Mexican spice. Why are we being so straightforward? Because we’re about to tell you what they told us, and frankly, we don’t think you’ll believe it’s real.

See, Jeff Bundschu named his company (the Blue Nomad Wine Company) after a proud Saharan tribe, the Tuareg, who once gave him and his wife hospitality. The label’s handled by illustrator Ben Newman, who designs monsters for exhibition and has an exclusive line for the Tate museum. And the whole idea began because Jeff has a passion for urban art and wanted to make wine for the type of people who might be scared away if things got too snobby. That’s right, Jeff’s looking out for the little guy and fighting against the corrupt wine traditions.

The 2007 Rockus Bockus Proprietary Red Wine Six Pack is affordable, delicious, and has a story that sounds vaguely like a Batman plot. What more could you ask from a Wine.Woot deal?

2007 Rockus Bockus Proprietary Red Wine, Sonoma County

• Alcohol: 14.5%
• pH: 3.85
• TA: 0.59
• Cases produced: 1,800

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

'There's a lot of really, really fucked up wine out there', he confessed to me forcefully in a recent phone interview.

I've spent the past few weeks speaking with dozens of winemakers from Santa Barbara, to Walla Walla, to the North Fork of Long Island trying to get a sense of how 2011 treated some of America's most prominent wine regions....

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com.

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her web site. If you're not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It's only £6.99 a month or £69 per year ($11/mo or $109 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image credit: Koolbe

The fact that Galloni's scores for Napa have just come out wouldn't ordinarily merit much attention from me, except for the fact that I had made some predictions about what might change as a result. My prediction was: nothing.

And it turns out that's pretty much what happened.

To save you, and anyone else insane enough to waste a few hours of their time, the trouble, I cross-analyzed Parker's most recent scores in Napa with Galloni's first scores for the region that were released on Friday in Issue #198 of the Wine Advocate.

Anyone who was hoping the traditional order would be upset, or that all the cult wines so long vaunted by Parker would be knocked off their pedestals will be sorely disappointed.

Galloni's scores match Parkers with an almost scary precision, except for the fact that Galloni seems to be a tougher grader. 98 is the new 100, so to speak. If Parker gave a wine a 98, Galloni gives the same wine a 96, and so on down the ladder. Last time Parker came through Napa he handed out seven 100-point scores for 2007 and 2008 vintage wines. Galloni offered six scores of 98, with two of those being for barrel samples scored with a 97-99 point range.

I could list for you the top wines that each scored, but the list is essentially the same, with mostly the same names jockeying for position amongst the top thirty or forty wines.

Perhaps the one exception in the top scoring wines were those from Dunn Vineyards, which have generally been languishing (if one might call it that) in the low 90s according to Parker's last round of scores (he seems to have stopped tasting the wines after the 2004 vintage, to which he gave a 94+, his highest score since the early 00's). Galloni clearly fell in love with Randy Dunn's wines during his most recent trip, scoring most over 95 points and giving the 2008 his highest score awarded in the valley (98+).

There are a scarce few deviations in opinion between Parker and Galloni. I had to look very hard to find them. In fact, I could only find two instances (apart from the level of praise leveled at the Dunn above) where Parker and Galloni's opinions seemed to differ sharply over a wine or a producer as a whole. One was the 2009 Forman Cabernet Sauvignon which Parker thought was a very good effort (89-91) and which Galloni thought was exceptional (96+). The second was the 2009 Maybach Amouenus, which Parker loved (96-98) and Galloni thought was very good, but not fantastic (91).

Those were the only two points of real disagreement that I could tell from the scores available to me. I should note that because the Wine Advocate almost never publishes scores below 85 points, there may be wines that Galloni rated less than 85 points that Parker rated higher, and vice versa. There were certainly wines that appeared in the Wine Advocate for the first time via Galloni's reports, and others which have been there in the past that did not appear (Blackbird wines were noticeably absent from Galloni's report, for instance).

So there you have it. Galloni's palate does not appear to be reshaping the landscape of Napa, except to say that he may be making the 100 point score something more of an elusive achievement than his predecessor.

There are those, however, that believe this lack of 100 point scores may, in fact, have a more profound effect on the marketplace than you might think. Spend only a little time poking around in the secondary market for Napa cult wines (people re-selling bottles they have purchased directly from the producer) and you'll see that wines with 100 points from both the Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator sell for significant markups. When wines have only a single 100 point score, they tend to sell for less.

By refusing to hand out 100 point scores (at least in his first go-round) Galloni may be knocking down the prices of these wines on the secondary market a bit. So who cares if Schrader Cellars Cabernet sells for $700 a bottle instead of $1200? Maybe no one. But more than one Napa winemaker has suggested to me that these secondary market prices certainly help justify the very high release prices (the prices that mailing list customers pay) of Napa's highest scoring wineries. The intimation being that should these secondary market prices fall in any real way, there might be some sort of consumer backlash against paying a winery $700 for a bottle that you can only resell for $750.

For my part, I think the law of supply and demand will weigh more heavily on Napa's wine prices than the residual effects of a dampening secondary market price. A lot of people love these wines, and a lot more people want to own them than are able, given their production levels.

Now it's just back to business as usual in Napa.

Photo of Napa sign courtesy of Bigstock

Of course it's not just San Franciscans that turn out for this one-of-a-kind weekend. People come from all over. The Zinfreaks crawl out of the woodwork, so to speak, and march their way into San Francisco to celebrate their grape of choice, along with the rest of us who sometimes wonder where the rest of these folks hide themselves the rest of the year.

But come one, come all, there's plenty of Zin to go around.

The weekend begins on Thursday January 26th with the an event called Epicuria, which involves a walk around event that features dishes prepared by chefs from all over the U.S. specifically designed to match 50 specific Zinfandel wines. Attendees can wander from station to station with glass and plate in hand trying different combinations of food and wine until they find their favorites (or until they topple over like plump rabbits in a food coma).

Friday features a series of seminars that allow attendees to taste flights of wines in a guided fashion with commentary from winemakers. That evening a winemakers dinner features a live auction and a silent auction. You can buy some great wine while supporting the ZAP organization, and then you can have a great meal while a winemaker pours a selection of their wines and answers all the questions you ever might have about making Zinfandel.

And finally on Saturday, the ultimate San Francisco wine tasting begins. Starting at 2:00 PM, the floodgates open and hundreds of Zinfandel wines are available to the public for tasting. There is simply no other opportunity like this to educate your palate about Zinfandel as a wine, and no other chance to so easily discover new Zins for yourself. A list of the producers pouring is available on the event web site.

The event tends to get a little crazy as the afternoon progresses, both in terms of the size of the crowd and its level of inebriation, but don't let that stop you from showing up early, enjoying yourself, and then making your exit before the sloshing and stumbling begin.

Especially because you might get to go to the tasting for free

I've got six pairs of tickets to give away to the Grand Tasting that I will award to six individuals by random drawing. All you have to do to enter the drawing is make up a haiku about Zinfandel and put it in a comment below by midnight on December 31st.

I'll also choose what I think is the best haiku, and that person will also receive two tickets to the Epicuria event on Thursday night.

Be sure to leave me your real name and your e-mail address in the form fields provided below. I'll announce the winners on January 2nd.

2012 ZAP Zinfandel Advocates and Producers Festival
Grand Tasting: Saturday January 28th
Doors open to the public at 2:00 PM (members of ZAP can get in an hour earlier)
The Concourse Exhibition Center
635 8th Street (at Brannan)
San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

Regular attendees please note the NEW LOCATION above, as the event is no longer being held at Fort Mason.

Tickets for the Grand Tasting are $59 if purchased in advance (which you should do most assuredly). Tickets for other events range from $75 to $125 depending on the event. ZAP members receive discounts on all tickets. For more information about the event and to purchase tickets, please see the ZAP event web site.

Tasting tips: I recommend wearing dark clothes that you won't mind getting a drop or two of red wine on when someone accidentally jostles your glass (or theirs). I also recommend showing up with a full stomach, drinking lots of water as you go, and spitting instead of swallowing. You ain't got any taste buds in your throat, and if you want to learn anything you need to stay sober. Also, please leave the perfume and the cologne off for the day.

See you there.

Sparkling wine coverage in December seems to me to be the product of the same unimaginative North American editorial calendar that suggests Thanksgiving Wine Pairing recommendations, Hearty Winter Reds, Rosé in Spring, and Crisp Summer Sippers in August. Yawn. Who came up with this crap, and why does it continue to be perpetuated?

In part, such calendars are probably driven by consumer demand. Regardless of how much a crying shame it is that people don't drink sparkling wine every week (they should), the fact remains that more sparkling wine is sold and consumed between Christmas and New Years Day than at any other time of the year. So if people are going to buy it, presumably they should have some recommendations for what to buy.

I understand. I truly do. But I don't agree with it. Of course, I have the luxury of not having to answer to an editor (or get paid for what I'm doing), so I'm free to criticize. I find such regular, repetitive wine writing boring and of little service to the consumer. Sure, if you're a wine writer and you've discovered the world's greatest new sparkling wine, sing its praises to the heavens. But I'll bet you big money you didn't discover it last week, did you?

What wine writers scribble down shouldn't be dictated by the weeks when most consumers go and buy a particular kind of wine. Those who recommend wines should spend their time trying to change the drinking habits of the average wine drinker, not reinforce them.

By the "average wine drinker" I mean those who are hesitant to experiment with their wine choices. People who stick to one or two domestically produced wines that they buy every week at the grocery store, and have their requisite bottle of sparkling wine over the holidays. There's nothing wrong with such behavior, of course, and one might argue it's just this sort of customer that keeps the American wine industry humming. But there's so much more to the world of wine, and those who write about wine should expend their efforts encouraging their readers to explore deeper, wider, and more adventurously, all the time.

And you don't do that by writing yet another predictable sparkling wine column the third week of December.

So what should you be drinking tonight? Simply put: good wine that you and the people you are drinking with will enjoy. It doesn't matter whether it's a $10 Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, or a $150 Chave Hermitage. If you want to drink sparkling wine, go right ahead. But make sure to drink more next week, and the week after that.

For my part, I'm holed up in the woods with a bunch of my closest friends. Right now I've got many of them doing a Cahors vs. Argentinean Malbec taste test (Argentina is winning, but Cahors has some loyalists). We've also got an Alto Adige Lagrein, an Austrian Gemischter Satz, an Anderson Valley Pinot, a Santa Maria Valley Pinot, a Napa Cabernet, and a bottle of Argentinian Bonarda open, with eight more bottles waiting in the wings. Later on this evening we'll be ringing in the new year with Yarra Valley sparkling wine and Canadian icewine.

I hope wherever you are, that you find yourself surrounded by good friends, good food, and drinking wine that makes you happy. Happy New Year.

Image of sparkling wine courtesy of Bigstock.Com.

Vineyard Snow
UKIAH VALLEY, CA: Rows of head-pruned zinfandel grapevines stand as winter sentinels in this Mendocino County photo taken at Eaglepoint Ranch. Happy New Year!

INSTRUCTIONS:
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PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

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ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

Pop

Bubbles. Some love them. Some don’t care about them. Some hate them. That’s where bubble therapy comes in.

Alright, Brian. Let’s try this. Close your eyes and imagine your fears rising like vapor from your body.

“Okay.”

Now imagine your fears forming a cloud.

“Okay.”

But wait, you look closer to see that it’s not a cloud. It’s actually… a bubble.

“SOMEONE GIVE ME A PIN! I GOTTA POP THIS THING!”

But then all of your fears will be back, Brian. The bubble is helping you.

“I DON’T CARE! I NEED TO POP THAT STUPID SPHERE!”

Okay, open your eyes, Brian. Take it easy. It’s going to be alright. That was just an exercise.

“I could see it! I could see it like it was real! And all I could think was, I want to end that stupid bubble!”

I understand, I understand. We’ll try a different exercise. Something a bit less… scary. Here, this is a bottle of 2003 Keller Estate Sparkling Brut.

“Sparkling? You mean, like glittery?”

Um, sure. I’m going to pour you a glass.

“Wait. This seems weird. Why are you giving me wine at a therapy session?”

I’ll explain later. Try it. What are you picking up?

“A lovely bouquet of earthy yeasts and créme brulée.”

Good. Now, Brian: can you taste the almost – how do I say this? – fuzziness?

“Yeah.”

It’s nice, is it not?

“It’s great.”

Do you know what makes that fuzziness, Brian?

“No. What is it?”

It’s bubbles, Brian.

“What? Are you saying… that I just… drank…”

Yes, Brian. And you enjoyed it! Don’t you see? Bubbles are your friends, Brian!

“Oh my! All these years! I thought! Bubbles! Were evil! I never! Knew! They! Were! Like this!”

Breath, Brian.

“I think! I think! I think I’m going to cry!”

That’s okay. Let it out.

“WILL I CRY BUBBLY TEARS WITH ALL THE BUBBLES INSIDE OF ME?”

No, Brian. That’s completely ridiculous.

2003 Keller Estate Sparkling Brut

• Harvest Date: April 2003
• Clones: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir
• Bottling Date: December 15th, 2009
• Production: 278 cases
• Alcohol: 12.5%

Keller Estate selected both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes and made this wine using the traditional méthode champenoise.  This brut features a lovely bouquet of earthy yeasts and créme brulée. Their ambition was to create a beautiful bubbly that would transcend moments of celebration and would be served with a variety of exciting culinary creations, from smoky to spicy to deliciously salty.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Food Pairing: Serious Business

The Wine.Woot Guide to Salmon Freshness:

With its notes of cherry, earth, and rose petal on the nose, its core of luscious dark cherry supported by highlights of cranberry on the pallet, and its hint of spice that creeps into the finish, the Miller Wine Works 2007 Pinot Noir pairs perfectly with fresh salmon. But how do you define “fresh” when it comes to the anadromous fish? Simply use the following guide:

Acceptably Fresh Salmon: Salmon that was caught semi-recently and has not yet gone bad.

Perfectly Fine Fresh Salmon: Salmon that was caught today or yesterday.

Very Fresh Salmon: Salmon that was caught within the hour.

Very Very Fresh Salmon: Salmon caught within the hour that has very recently made a dramatic life change.

Really Totally Fresh Salmon: Salmon in the process of reinventing itself, that is prepared for consumption in the stream so it can be eaten directly out of the water.

Extremely Fresh Salmon: Salmon that is yet to be born.

Ridiculously Stupidly Fresh Salmon: Salmon that is yet to be born and may very well never be born and even if it were to be born, it probably wouldn’t look or act like any salmon we’ve ever seen.

Miller Wine Works 2007 Pinot Noir, Kendric Vineyard, Marin County

• 4th Vintage
• Varietal Content: 100% Pinot Noir
• Titratable Acidity: 0.57 g/100ml
• pH: 3.80
• Alcohol: 14.1%
• Release Date: May 1st, 2011
• Case Production: 284 cases produced

The 2007 Pinot Noir from Kendric Vineyard in Marin County exhibits a beautiful rich color – with notes of cherry, earth, and rose petal on the nose. It is a medium-bodied wine, while remaining light on its feet and retaining nice acidity. A core of luscious dark cherry is supported by highlights of cranberry on the pallet, as a hint of spice creeps into the finish. This wine would sing out loud when paired with fresh salmon and grilled portabellas, or roast game birds with truffled polenta.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Working Together

The Sterlings came together as a family to make great sparkling wines. The least you guys could do is help me clean the house once in a while.

Come on! It’s not that hard. One of you dusts, the other one vacuums, I’ll get started on the laundry and, honey, you can pick things up and take out the trash. We’ll be done in no time! What do you say? Anyone? Anyone at all?

You see, this is the problem with our family. We’re lazy. I can’t even get you all to look up from your phones or videogames or eReaders long enough to even acknowledge each other’s presence, much less get things done around here. If Audrey and Barry Sterling’s family had been this way, there’d be no Iron Horse Vineyards, you know. Their children didn’t sigh and moan when their parents handed them the reigns of one of the most prestigious independent family owned wineries in Green Valley, OH NO. They got up and they worked together to produce the great sparkling wines they’ve become known for.

Take this 2006 Classic Vintage Brut, for example. Do you think Joy Sterling whined about being too tired or too busy posting things to Facebook to learn how this wonderfully rich and creamy Brut is made? Of course not! She spent her days making memories that she’ll cherish for a lifetime just by spending time watching her folks perfect the ripe red apple, yeast, and lime flavors contained within the bottle.

And I bet you anything that Laurence Sterling wasn’t so fixated with some warfare video game that he couldn’t be bothered to help out with the 2006 Russian Cuvée. In fact, I bet he was more than willing to learn the secrets of making such an opulent, slightly sweet sparkling wine that gives you caramel, vanilla and warm milk on the nose while exciting the taste buds with mandarin orange and custard flavors combined with a creamy mouthfeel.

Those kids? They grew up to be the CEO and the Director of Operations of Iron Horse Wineries. I’m not even asking you to do THAT much. I just want the house to look nice every once in a while! We’ll even get ice cream afterwards! Can we do it? Aw, forget it. Just hand me a glass and a wine opener.

2006 Classic Vintage Brut

• Harvest Dates: August 30 - September 22, 2006
• Date Bottled: July 2007
• Release Date: Current disgorging, August 2011
• Total Production: 1,525 Cases
• Appellation: Green Valley of Russian River Valley
• Blend: 75% Pinot Noir 25% Chardonnay
• Alcohol: 13.5% v/v
• Acidity: .80 g/100ml
• Residual Sugar: .85 g/100ml
• pH: 3.06
• Malolactic Fermentation: None
• Barrels: 25% Barrel Fermented

2006 Russian Cuvée

• Harvest Dates: August 30 - September 22, 2006
• Date Bottled: July 2007
• Release Date: 1st disgorging, November 2010
• Total Production: 675 Cases
• Appellation: Green Valley of Russian River Valley
• Blend: 75% Pinot Noir 25% Chardonnay
• Alcohol: 13.5% v/v
• Acidity: .80 g/100ml
• Residual Sugar: 1.3 g/100ml
• pH: 3.06
• Malolactic Fermentation: None
• Barrels: 25% Barrel Fermented

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.