Through the redwoods

Continuing to taste my samples grab bag, I received a bottle of Redwood Creek Sauvignon Blanc 2007 a little while ago. Redwood Creek is owned by Frei Brothers, a winery that I tasted a few wines from a while ago and really enjoyed.

When I went to the website for Redwood Creek, I got a little confused. It is a very pretty website, but the menus are a little weird. Where do I got to find more information about the winery? What if I wanted to contact the press person there and get more information? It was not obvious to me where I should click if I wanted to find more information about the wines.

I didn’t get it. I am sure there is some logic behind it, a story to tell. Obviously this wine is very connected with hiking in wine country. Maybe I should ask Russ the Winehiker…

Anyway, the Sauvignon Blanc I received was from California. That’s the best I can tell you because that is what was on the label. In the glass the wine was full of perfume, a little citrus, and a massive amount of olives (not unpleasant! I like olives). Then the taste kept the same theme, with a super creamy beginning, a briny middle with a tart grapefruit at the end. Not a great example of Sauvignon Blanc, but if you want something to go with fish or oysters, this will do.

Someone called Jacob

A while ago, I received a few samples from Jacob’s Creek. Jacob’s Creek is a winery located in Australia, in the Barossa Valley. They are not shy about the fact that they make a lot of wine. On the website it says that over 2,000,000 glasses of Jacob’s Creek are poured, daily.

I will let that sink in for a moment.

That is a heck of a lot of wine. By my estimates there are about 5 glasses of wine in a bottle (some say 4, others say 6… really it just depends on how large your glass is). That is 400,000 bottles of wine opened a day. That means Jacob’s Creek claims that there are 146,000,000 bottles (approximately 12.17 million cases) of wine from their winery opened a year.

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!

Well, I was lucky enough to be sent a bottle of the Jacob’s Creek Brut Cuvée NV and a bottle of the Jacob’s Creek Reserve Pinot Noir 2006.

The sparkling wine was a bubbler. There were some medium to large bubbles that rushed to the surface the moment I poured the wine into my glass. It had some beautiful pear, white pepper, and bready aromas. Then there was an extreme granny smith apple flavors. The word zippy does not come close to covering it. Overall, decent but nothing I would buy myself.

The Pinot Noir had some heat coming from it. Smoky cherry, spicy raspberry and heat. Not much more I can say about it as the temperature of the wine coming out was too much for me to really get into it. I probably should have cooled this wine down in the fridge before tasting it, but… c’est la vie.

A leap of faith – the Laboratory Sample

Blind tasting is a skill. You train you palate to the point where minute degrees of taste will clue you in to the difference between a Italian Pinot Grigio and an Oregonian Pinot Gris. For those attempting to earn the rank of Master Sommelier (one of the highest certifications in the wine industry), in a blind tasting you are given a black wine glass (so you do not know what could be inside) and you must pinpoint the wine by nothing but taste.

For those who do not think that is hard, try it. I would bet you one dollar that you could possibly name the grape (maybe). If you could then name country, region, vineyard, producer, and vintage… then you are probably already a Master Sommelier or Master of Wine.

I was handed a bottle that said nothing but, “Laboratory Sample.” Most smart people do not put something called “Laboratory Sample” in their mouths, but I never claimed to be smart. So I popped open the cork, a soft plastic cork which felt more like a piece of chewed up gum than something that should keep a bottle closed. The cork almost scared me off, but the bottle was open, and I was told it was wine, so… into the mouth it went.

The wine was the color of straw and had very tropical fruit smells. Things like kiwi and banana. In my mouth it tasted round (medium acidity) and fleshy, like a ripe peach mixed with apricot and banana. Not a bad smoothie, now that I think about it. It was also a bit creamy.

My best guess – a new world, unoaked (or slightly oaked), Chardonnay that has gone through malolactic fermentation. That was really geeky, so for those that did not follow that, I’m sorry.

The real answer – I have no idea.

Barefoot back again

I am not going to take too long with this post, since I have already talked about Barefoot wines. They are cheap, inoffensive, and sweet enough to please an American palate and give you a good ol’ American hang over.

I received a sample of the Barefoot Riesling. There is no vintage on the bottle, so this could be a year old or 10 years old. There were also some bubbles that I did not expect when I opened the bottle, but I guess that is what happens to the tiniest bit of yeast and what sugar is left in the bottle.

The wine was shrouded with sugared Welches Grape Juice flavors. It was pleasant, sugary, and tasteless. The perfect drink for girls at frat parties.

Can you see the bubbles?

A whim of a wine

On a whim I went into a wine shop I was passing that had a sandwich board blocking my path on the sidewalk that side, “Free Wine Tasting.” How could I refuse?

So I walked in and not a whole lot appealed to me. There were a few French wines, a few Argentine wines, maybe something from Italy. I tasted a few of them and did not love them. But since they had dragged me into the shop, I decided to buy something.

Then on the shelf a colorful label caught my eye. Yup, I went with the label. That and I had just had a conversation on twitter with a few other bloggers, one of which made a note that she loved Viognier and this bottle happened to be a Viognier.

So I bought it. The Ninet de Pena Viognier 2006. It was priced at about $10 and it just screamed “try me!”

Well I did, and I was completely surprised by what I found in the bottle.

No, it was not the winning Mega Millions lottery ticket (although that would have been nice).

I found strawberries! Specifically strawberry preserve. My tasting notes read, “Fresh out of the jar and onto a peanut butter & jelly sandwich!” I was prepared for a perfumed nose with a round white stone-fruit (peach, apricot, etc.) taste. What I got was strawberries, with more strawberries, rife with minerality.

It was a good trick and certainly worth the cost. But not really what I wanted out of the wine.

Terracita Tempranillo

Those are two names that are fun to put next to each other. Terracita Tempranillo. It just rolls off the tongue. What is better is that it rolls easily into your hand too. I received this wine as a sample from Pasternak Imports and was extremely happy that I did. I might have found myself a new house wine.

Coming from Spain, this wine is labeled as Tierra de Castilla la Mancha, giving it a very general sense of place. The winery is Bodega (means winery) Roqueta.

This wine, the Terracita Tempranillo 2008, is an easy drinking and fresh red wine. So easy to drink that I could have easily finished the entire bottle if I did not have someone else there drinking it with me. There were really lovely cherry and raspberry fruits throughout this wine. There was a healthy dose of acidity that kept the taste fresh and light.

This wine retails for about $9, making it easy to pick up a case for everyday drinking, to use as a gift or to bring over to a friend’s place for dinner.

Been a while since I posted

Sorry for being absent. Between a all too brief vacation, a load of work, and making sure I have something resembling a social life, I have not had too much time to blog. I have tasted oodles of wines, so hopefully this weekend I will write up a short review of each to post each day in the following weeks. I think I will reserve longer posts for topics, while giving a wine review post its due without going into too much detail about the production of the winery.

I do have some exciting news (or at least exciting for me): I purchased an iPhone. I told you exciting for me, so I do not want to hear how utterly boring this news is for the rest of you.

Why did I buy the iPhone? Customer service. I talked to most of the major brands that supply a wireless phone service and AT&T was by far the best. I walked into several retail outlets in New York and I WAS IGNORED by half of them. Unbelievable.

So, I am entering the world of toy phones, with apps for all. I noticed at the Wine Bloggers' Conference that the majority of bloggers owned an iPhone. It gave me i-jealousy. And I will now stop adding the letter "i" to the front of words.

When TV and Wine Collide

There are plenty of people who make a lot of money and then decide they would like to own a winery or make wine. Lil John is now making wine in California, Antonio Banderas owns a winery in Spain, Jay-Z launched a Blanc de Blanc champaign, etc. Sometimes it is even a business decision; a brand can become so large that all you have to do is stick the name on a label and slap that label on a bottle of wine and it will fly out the door.

Or at least that is the hope of the makers of the Sopranos' wines. The brand was launched back in September of 2008 (ah the good old days). About a month or so ago, I was sent a few bottles and I am embarrassed at how long it took me to open them up. I got around to popping the corks this past weekend and I was not disappointed.

Nope, not disappointed at all. The wines were as lacking in flavor and typicity as I could have wished. My expectations were that the wine was being sold on its namesake instead of the juice inside, and I feel as if I were right on the money. The Pinot Grigio smelled nice, lots of citrus and grapefruit with a little minerality. However the taste was so off I had to look back at the label to make sure I was not drinking a California Chardonnay. It said made in Friuli. Then I tasted the Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot/Sangiovese blend. Not bad, but certainly not exciting. There was nothing in the taste that I could point to and say "yup, that's a fruit."

Does that make this wine something to be avoided? Not if you are doing a Sopranos marathon party...