A candidate for great house wine of the year, I dare you to find a domestic wine that tastes this good for under $13. Almost explosively fruity and clean with an acidity that dares your saliva glands to keep up this wine is food friendly perfection. A great combination of juicy ripe fruit and balance. Yes, you can be deeply fruity without being overweight. Buy cases.
While certainly chunkier and showing more wood than a Beaujolais this is still a very nice wine. More in the cheeseburger with raw onion mode than the omelette with truffle mode when it comes to food. Drink while young and fruity and don’t think too much about it.
A very fine Cru Beaujolais with a graceful, silky texture and a fruit brilliance that shows how much complexity can be packed into a refined and delicate package. Just a delicious wine to drink.
Pungently mineral and firm and almost demanding food, this is a really lovely wine. Lean and mean, but with just enough fruit, every sip demand yet another. Not surprisingly, this is a Louis/Dressner selection, who else would bring in such an obscure Loire appellation. We can be glad they did as this wine is a steal at around $12. Buy, buy, buy! Made from 100% Romorantin, a rare varietal to say the least.
A refined, classically styled Bordeaux for drinking now and over the next several years. As befitting a St. Estephe, this is a real cabernet in style with plenty of herbs and spice that overlay the lovely, but appropriately lean fruit. If you’re wondering what a Haut Medoc Bordeaux is supposed to taste like but don’t want to break the bank this is a very nice wine. Think lamb chops.
Real dolcetto here: bright, zesty and sassy, but offering a good dose of earthy complexity. A really fine effort that shows why dolcetto that tastes like concord jam aren’t what good dolcetto is about. Very, very nice wine.
Here is a zesty, refreshing delight that will match your best seafood and provide the perfect clean, acid driven foil for deep fried fish. Absolutly mouthwatering and fresh. IT COST’S $8.75!!! Anybody buying industrial California/Australian white wine these days is a fool.
Another oaky Tuscan, how exciting. Certainly worth drinking if put in front of you, but why you would buy a bottle is beyond me.
Current winner of the longest name wine award this year, you’ll think the name is short when you taste this wonderful wine. Still a baby, it will develop and expand for many years. A lighting bolt of a wine that in all its leanness still explodes on the palate. Concentrated mineral essence with a delicate balance. A beauty that costs all of 16 bucks. Amazing.
A really fine wine, exotic an balanced and absolute classic Barolo nebbiolo in style. True to type this Villero is forward, round and rich (by Barolo standards). Just starting to drink now, a few more years will be well rewarded. A great wine to recommend to someone who want to know what nebbiolo is really all about. I’m going to grab every bottle I can find.
Yet another oaky white. Yawn. What a waste of fine albariño. Take a pass.
With a balance and refinement only found in fine Burgundy, this wine is an extraordinary value at well under $20. The light color may confuse some, but the expansive delicate aromas explode on the palate with an intense delicacy that is hard to find these days. A fine wine that reminds one about what made Tuscany great to begin with. Buy as much as you can afford. It’s great to drink now and will age for many years.
A bit big and chunky, but overall very good stuff. Like most California pinot it’s on the ripe side, but this wine is quite well balanced and gives more than enough complexity. With a few more years in the bottle it should be really nice, but I would not age it beyond that otherwise the fruit may lose to the funk.
Pure essence of easy drinking pleasure. An absolute delight with brilliant fruit, biting acidity and a perfect balance on the palate. Drink up now as this wine is perfect as it is. If you have a light touch in the kitchen this wine is for you. Buy cases and cases. Yummn!
An explosively attractive blend of cot (malbec) and cabernet franc, this wine is addictive it its pure charm. High on the list of perfect everyday wines, it goes far beyond this as it also offers plenty of complexity along with its fruity charms. This wine sends your saliva glands into high gear. Drink as soon as you can and buy cases of this pleasure
Here’s an excellent big red wine. Big, intense, but balanced. It perfectly matched some garlic lamb kabobs with its bright fruit intensity, structured tannins and racy style. A rich wine, but not overwrought like California zinfandel so often is. I would rate this outstanding as it almost compels you to pick up your glass and bury your nose in it. Drink over the next five years or so to preserve the gorgeous fruit.
Big bright and fruity. Very easy to drink. Wines like this make you wonder why anyone buys all those commercial California and Australian labels as this wine delivers all the easy to like fruit, but far more complexity and, frankly, real wine character. Drink up with your favorite pizza or cheeseburger.
Well I did not expect much from this famed Brunello producer now making a wine from a D.O.C. essentially created by Banfi, but boy was I wrong. This is a lovely wine with an earthy intensity that surprised when I was expecting a bland oaky internationally styled wine. This is a real Tuscan wine worth drinking with a big steak. Outstanding structure, complexity and varietal intensity. Drink now and over the next several years.
Well this is a lovely pinot noir and worthy of any Burgundy fan. I tasted this wine at a restaurant where it was tough to find a bottle I wanted to drink for under a hundred bucks. Frankly the wines were brutally overpriced. This fact forced me to look beyond the obvious and I discovered this beauty. Lean, mean structure and acidity combined with mouth watering bright fruit, a delicate yet firm balance with a long bittersweet fruity-ness that all lead to a hell of a wine. Certainly it can be cellared for a few more years, but if I had more bottles I’d be drinking them now. Delicious and a great value.
“Bitch!” I sneer again in my thoughts as I glare at the all-to-perky blonde weather girl who is amazingly bright and wide-eyed at 5:00 A.M. In a classic case of shooting the messenger, my frustration has to be directed at this former cheerleader as it will do no good to rail against Mother Nature.
The cute plastic blond on the TV had just forecasted rain. I cannot imagine worse news. It has not rained here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley for months. “Why can’t the god damn rain wait just a few more weeks,” I grumble to myself as I stare at the cloudy, damp morning that seems even grayer in the pre-dawn gloom. So far it had been an almost perfect vintage and the vines are loaded with beautiful fruit that is now just a couple of weeks away from harvest - and now this. The mood at the winery changed right with the weather, with sunny smiles and optimism replaced by a gray moodiness as the clouds covered the bright, warm sun that had shined reliably every day since last June. Now all we can do is wait and hope.
It is this visceral relationship with the daily morning weather report that will forever divide the way wines are perceived by critics and winemakers. Giving a wine points in this context is almost insulting nature to someone who has lived with the vines every day. When you see vines on a daily basis, then pick them, crush their fruit and guide it in its journey to becoming wine you see each wine as an individual. Like a parent thinking of their children, you don’t rate them, but appreciate each of them for their strengths, weaknesses and individual quirks. Every vintage has a personality worthy of consideration if the winemaker lets that personality show through. You also learn from them with each generation giving you information that will make you a better parent with the next.
This is a more beautiful way to look at wine than the sterile rankings of people like Parker, The Wine Spectator and Tanzer. Not only is it more beautiful, it is more natural and in line with what wine really is: a product of nature.
I’m not talking about commercial, industrialized plonk like Kendall Jackson, Santa Margherita, Two Buck Chuck, Yellow Tail or the long list of beverage alcohol products that are brands only designed to please inattentive palates with a static style regardless of natures whims, but about the myriad of wines made by producers who live with their vines and to whom winemaking means something beyond making a buck. The market is full of wines that speak of the nature that created them. If you pay attention to what you drink, you can feel the intensity and complexity created by the combination of human aspirations and nature’s power. Points have little to do with wines that exhibit this electric synergy, so depend more on your palate than scores, which are sure to miss the nuance and complexity layered through such wines - be they simple everyday wines or classics for your cellar.
“Bitch!” It’s going to rain again today.