The Wine Cellars' Blog

The following list highlights my favorite wines currently at the store:

 

1)  2007 Wild Rock Pinot Noir ($19.99) - This is one of my new favorite Pinot Noirs.  Except that I eventually had to, I couldn’t stop drinking it.  All the classic Pinot flavors are there - dried cherry, dried leaves, mushrooms, coffee, earth, a faint hint of citrus and spice.  But it wasn’t the flavors that I found mesmerizing.  It was the way the wine moved on the palate.  I call it wave theory - the ability of a wine to dance over the palate in what seems like sequential waves of flavor rushes.  Astounding, lush, long.  A must-experience wine.

 

2)  2004 Taltarni Pyrenees Estate Shiraz ($24.99)  - Powerful, rustic, gutsy (and cheaper than it ought to be), this Shiraz is the kind of satisfying quaffer that Australia built its wine reputation on more than 100 years ago.  The smoke/spicy deep eucalyptus flavors are just waiting for ribs slathered with sticky barbeque sauce, sausages on the grill, or fajitas with a fiery red sauce.

 

3)  2006 Foley Santa Rita Hills Syrah ($36.99) – I believe this Syrah is the most layered of the California Syrah’s.  It is very dark garnet in color with multi-layered  aromas of ripe black cherry, blackberry and blueberry.  There are also earth notes of mushroom, black tea, and smoked meats.  A round mouth feel and flavors of black plum, pomegranate, and a bit of mineral lead to a juicy lengthy finish.  It is a beauty from start to finish, rich and elegant with fine balance.

 

4)  2004 Domaine de Nizas Coteaux du Languedoc ($17.99) – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard friends say “I can’t really afford French wine.”  Even after I suggest that there are plenty of French wines under twenty bucks, they’re still liable to complain that they can’t really afford “good French wine.”  Whenever I have that conversation I find myself wishing I had a backpack full of wines from the Languedoc handy.  I’d whip out a bottle and a corkscrew like a gunslinger from the wild west and set them straight once and for all!

This estate is making wines that fit the profile of what I have come to love about the Languedoc:  solid, characterful, delicious, and relatively inexpensive.  Dark ruby in the glass, this blend of 60% Syrah, 35% Mourvedre, and 5% Grenache has a nose of salami and smoked meats with just the hint of a floral high note.  In the mouth it has a lovely acid balance and a delicious swirling mix of cherry, sour plum, smoke and finally cedar qualities that linger into a substantial finish.  Tres excellente!!.   

5)  2006 Tin Knocker Sauvignon Blanc ($23.99) – THE wine I keep going back to as CHOICE among all our whites.  If my story about the blue crabs a few months back didn’t already explain.  Or, how about the feeling that this wine would have won the Gold Medal of the 2008 TWC Anniversary Tasting?  Ladies and gentleman, go to Micah’s Corner inside the store and buy this wine!  An absolute must for summertime.

Posted by The Wine Cellars at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just returned from my annual rite of passage to the Napa Valley and I got to say its great being a tourist.  Guidebook and camera in my bag, a bottle of water in the car, the map spread out on my knees - what could be finer?

The road from San Francisco to Napa Valley, one of my favorites, levels from terraced waves of grape vines to undulating hills, bright green with cypress and long grasses in spring, and now in late summer, brilliant with golden wheels of mustard grass.  This is the sweetest countryside I know.  Only occasional blasts of cow barn odors remind me that this is not paradise.

My second stop, following a brief interlude to open up the senses at Prager Winery and Port Works, is Calistoga, a funky and unstuffy town on the northwest tip of the valley.  Some of the prettiest roads are found in Calistoga.  This is the best place to start and see what this valley is all about.  Working my way south from this point is best seeing that the temperature will be approaching the 100 degree mark in early afternoon and the expectations of my head spinning from oodles of vino.

Around noon, I cozy up to a winery in St. Helena and unpack some cheeses from the local Cowgirl Creamery.  Along with some Joel Gott Sauvignon Blanc, I feed myself silly with fresh bread, prosciutto, and a heirloom tomato and pesto pasta salad.  In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and his bride, Fanny, honeymooned in the same area as I am eating lunch.  They'd gone there to flee the fogs of San Francisco, which were thought harmful to the writer's sickly and perhaps tubercular lungs.

"The woods sang alound, and gave largely of their healthful breath," Stevenson wrote of his first ascent up the mountain.  "Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the valley.  ...There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands seems like scaling heaven."

Or maybe it was just the wine.

Before long I am back on the Silverado Trail ascending the slopes of Pritchard Hill to my final tasting destination.  Sunlight filters through the trees, and the cooler mountain airs smells of pine, just as Stevenson described it, more than a century before.  I stopped at the top.  "It's amazing," I said.  "I can see 360 degrees."

You could drink in the entire wine country in one gulp.  I spent over two hours on the Pritchard Hill summit before reluctantly returning.

Of course, I had one consolation:  that night I'd be sipping the fruits of these valleys once again

Posted by The Wine Cellars at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A beauty that stands on its own anywhere in the world…..spring in Georgia.

 

 

Curvaceous hills recline like a Burgundy bottle lazing on its side in the sunlight.  With no seed or outcrop to detect, the hills become pure form, color and texture.  And, oh what color!  At first glance a sparkling emerald that seems so subtle to the retina, and once grazed the pupil looks anew and sees sage, and mustard, and cinnamon, and, up there in a fold near the sky a lick of lavender.  And, so this undulating terroir of texture and color pits itself against the opaque blue of the sky, and you long to drink the glory.  What makes this so immensely satisfying, this marriage of opposites, the one so rough and tannic, the other so smooth and silky?  Sky and earth, each remarkable on its own when layered one atop the other creates a profound union, the likes of which we mortals dream.

Sitting outside at the local restaurant I am mesmerized by the flowing, succulent ivy upon the wall, and wonder why this seemingly mundane piece of nature captures my attention.  The longer I look, the more I see it as a recipe for successful living.  In just a few weeks a leaf will not be seen on this wall.  Instead, a skeletal of dead vines, barren and tattered will be clinging to the restaurant from decades of habit.  It will not be dead rather merely dormant.  This is the simple lesson that nature reveals to me this afternoon the rebirth we so desperately long for cannot be gained solely by searching and inventing and consuming.  To grow, we must also be prepared to be dormant.

A tufted line of trees crosses the horizon:  above the milky blue sky:  below, rolling down the slope a field of threaded carpet.  Centuries of sowing and growing and harvesting have worn the earth down like a well-oiled Studebaker, reminding us that that which has eroded by time also becomes its essential self.  

Soon, in the valleys, will appear a dense bed of morning frost like a light fall of snow.  The farmer will pick and peel the last of the dried corn while being nestled in the cockpit of his John Deere.  In spite of everything that tells him winter is upon us, he feels the sun as warm and gentle as a June morning.  Time and light are inextricably linked here, so that each season holds within it the other three, as though light gathers and gives it back to us in its totality.

 

 

Posted by The Wine Cellars at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently at one of our Saturday Wine Tastings, I had a gentleman ask me about the type of German Riesling we were tasting.  Unfortunately, for him, I did not have an answer.  However, I was made aware that German wines are rated according to the ripeness of fruit - the higher the sugar content, the higher the quality of the wine.  In a country with lots of bad weather (hail and frost) and challenging conditions (ex. steep, exposed vineyard slopes), it is easy to understand how this system came to be: ripe grapes (at least until global warming) were not easily achieved.

 

There are six ripeness levels in the German system (Pradikat) - with increasingly hard-to-pronounce names.  The first level is Kabinett, which are the lightest and simplest wines.  After that are the Spatlese wines (this is the first level of truly ripe grapes; these are sweet with a good acidity).  Third are Auslese wines, made from bunches of grapes left on the vines after the Spatlese grapes have been picked.  Then there are the Beernauslese wines, which are made only in great vintages of grapes left even longer on the vine.  Also there are the rare Trockenbeernauslese wines, made from grapes that are shriveled like raisins from botrytis, the same noble rot that creates the dessert wine Sauternes.  Finally the sixth type is Eiswein, wine made from botrytised grapes that actually freeze on the vine.

Posted by The Wine Cellars at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)