A little Blue Fish swims in a great white sea…

There are no critters on the bottle of this wine, but I cannot help but feeling the strong hand of marketing as I hold an azure blue bottle of Blue Fish Original Riesling 2007 in my hands. The bottle is simply so blue that it shouts at you, with a relaxed yellow and blue label. The wine’s logo is well designed as the word ‘blue’ spelled out in the shape of a fish. Yes, kudos, very clever.

According to the Palm Bay website, BLUE FISH is a recent initiative from the enterprising growers of Niederkirchen in the Pfalz region of Germany, who first banded together to bottle and sell their wines more than 100 years ago. Today 466 families – almost every second family in Niederkirchen – participate in the venture, of which Blue Fish is the latest creation.

Blue Fish comes from the Pfalz region in Germany, located in the middle of the western edge of the country and bordering France on the south west. According to Wines of Germany, it is Germany's second largest wine region in acreage, but often has the largest crop of all. The word Pfalz is a derivation of the Latin word palatium, meaning palace. The English equivalent, Palatinate, is sometimes used to refer to the Pfalz. Only the Mosel region has more acres of Riesling.

Before I go much farther on this wine I want to take a step back and give some kudos to Palm Bay Imports. I have worked with them for the last couple years and they have always helped me get samples to journalists or for events or even charitable donations. I never realized until I started blogging how good a job they did with accessible information. I always try to look up and research the wines that I write up here and I have such a hard time finding information on any of them. Palm Bay has a fact sheet and winery notes on every wine that they import or distribute in the US. Very gratifying!

Right, back to the wine.

I found this wine for an average of $9 on Wine Searcher (my favorite wine search tool). For a wine in colorful packaging it was reasonably enjoyable. It was simple, a little sweet, a tad bit sparkling on my tongue, and plenty of fruit and acidity to go around. There was a lot of stone fruit and some good minerality that made it interesting without being a thinking wine. Really it was just pleasant to drink, which is everything I could have wanted in this wine and more.

Find it, enjoy it, and don’t let the color of the bottle turn you blue.

Bubbles and all its glory

As the New Year has come, the proper way to celebrate the moment between one year and the next is to break open the bubbly.

And so this year I found myself with a bottle of Prosecco. Prosecco is an Italian wine – generally a dry sparkling wine – made from a variety of white grape of the same name. The grape is grown mainly in the Veneto region of Italy, traditionally in an area near Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, in the hills north of Treviso.

Champagne is the traditional sparkle of choice to bring in the new year, or get rid of the lingering memory of the old year. Champagne however has become extremely expensive, and more party hosts have chosen more alternatives such as Cava from Spain, Sekt from Germany, sparkling wine from California or Prosecco from Italy. Many examples of each of these bubblies are very tasty and perfectly good substitutes for any New Year’s Eve party.

Prosecco is made sparkling by the Charmat method, where the second fermentation (the one in which the bubbles are created in the wine) occurs in steel tanks as opposed to the Champagne or traditional method of having the second fermentation occur in the same bottle in which it will be pouring into your glass.

The Prosecco I tasted was from Cinzano. The grapes were from the Colline trevigiane region in the Veneto appellation of Italy. The Cinzano company started in 1757 with two brothers, Giovanni Giacomo and Carolo Stegano Cinzano. They started their business in Turin, creating vermouth. According to their current importer (Palm Bay International), the Savoy monarchs requested of the Cinzano’s that they create a sparkling wine to emulate French Champagne in the early 19th Century. That resulted in the creation of Cinzano Sparkling wines in 1850. Gruppo Campari currently owns Cincano, having purchased the company in 1999.

I opened the bottle on New Year’s Eve with Julie and Leah and it was a beautiful wine! We opened the bottled at 5 minutes to midnight so that we could toast at the appropriate second and I do not think we could have brought in the new year with a better beverage. It had very pleasing small to medium size bubbles and the nose was a tantalizing pear and yellow apple. The taste was light and crisp in the mouth, just begging for another taste and another and another.

Full disclosure, I received this wine as a sample.