Quick Taste: Olson Ogden Wines

by Rob Bralow, Wine Post Editor

Sometimes it takes me a long time to taste wines. Right now I am working on reviewing wines I received in July. The Olson Ogden wines I received back in May and am sorry it took me so long because these were really delicious.

2008 Olson Ogden Marsanne Margaret's Mandate, Stagecoach Vineyard, Napa Valley, California - The name is a bit of a mouthful when you add in the vineyard, but once you put it in your mouth, you'll want more. I promise.
Appearance - Clear, medium - intensity, lemon-green color, with a pale rim
Aroma - Clean, a medium + intensity, youthful, aroma characteristics: Pear, peach, light minerality, and butterscotch and vanilla.
Palate - Dry, medium + acidity, no tannin, medium alcohol, medium + body, medium + intensity, flavors: More peach and honeysuckle with toasty pears and a creamy butter. The length is medium +
Conclusion - This is a very good wine that is ready to drink but I think can definitely develop more in the bottle. I would put the price at premium ($30+) and it is at $35 suggested retail price.

2008 Olson Ogden Pinot Noir, Manchester Ridge Vineyard, Mendocino, California - I tasted this wine with a healthy bunch of other Pinot Noirs and it stood out head and shoulders above the rest.
Appearance - Clear, medium intensity, a ruby color, and a pale rim.
Aroma - Clean with a medium intensity. The wine is developing with aroma characteristics of raspberry, vanilla and a rich smokiness.
Palate - This is a dry wine, with medium acidity, medium tannin, medium alcohol, and medium body. The taste is very intense at medium + and has similar flavors to the ones found on the nose.
Conclusions - I think this wine is very good and is ready to drink but can develop more in the bottle. The taste to me says premium price ($30+), mostly because good Pinot Noir is rarely inexpensive. At $38 a bottle, this does not break the bank the way many Pinot Noir's can, but it is definitely above an everyday drinking wine.

I have also heard wonderful things about the Syrah from this winery, but I have not tasted the recent vintage.

Elegance of Pinot Noir

by Rob Bralow, Wine Post Editor

I have discovered a new love of Pinot Noir. I was not one of those who watched Sideways and then rushed out and bought up as much Pinot Noir as my wallet could handle. I still mostly drank Cabernet, Merlot, and Sauvignon Blanc (nope, never really got into Chardonnay). Never mind that I was almost 22 at the time and still drank wine from unmarked jugs.

Now I find myself really enjoying the delicate flavors and easily drinkable profile of Pinot Noir. This light-skinned grape walks such a fine line between a reckless abandonment of flavor for a tasteless alcoholic drink and a truly inspired beverage that compliments food and atmosphere. In my tastings I found a wide range of Pinot Noir that went from watery, tasteless grape juice to intense and aromatic alcohol. The true gems were the wines between the two extremes that were elegant and vibrant.

Some of these gems I found are listed below. As you'll notice there are only a few places where all of these wines come from: Burgundy, Oregon (Willamette Valley), and select places in California with cooler climates, such as Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley.

2008 Cloudline Willamette Valley Pinot Noir - This is the beginner Pinot Noir drinker's wine. There is plenty of soft redfruits, predominantly raspberry, tinged with smoky and toasty aromas. The taste is light and smooth, with a good dollop of sweet red fruits. My only critique is that the finish is a little weak.

2008 Benton-Lane Willamette Valley First Class Pinot Noir - This is the wineries top Pinot Noir and it definitely holds its own in the mid-upper price ranges for Pinot. This Pinot Noir is on the fruitier and fuller bodied style of Pinot Noir, with rich red fruits and smooth and silky acidity.

2008 De Loach Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir - This is exactly what I want in a Pinot Noir that is around $20. There is plenty to like about this wine, but the fresh vibrant acidity and the earthy qualities really stuck home with me. Great red fruits like strawberry and raspberry combines incredibly with light toffee notes.

2008 De Loach Russian River Valley Pinot Noir - The bigger brother of the Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir, this Pinot has twice the berries. It is like a fruit explosion on the nose and in the taste, held back by some great acidity. I found out later that this wine had some Syrah added to it to make it slightly more intense and I had a debate with myself on if I thought this was a good or bad thing. My conclusion is that since I enjoyed the wine, a little Syrah did not hurt.

2007 Joseph Drouhin Chorey-Les-Beaune - One of the classic names in wine production in Burgundy, Maison Joseph Drouhin has been producing wine since the end of the 1800's. These are wines of delicate flavor and elegance. The Chorey-Les-Beaune is extremely soft and light, with a sense of earth and richness.

2006 Joseph Drouhin Gevrey-Chambertin - Moving to the Gevrey-Chambertin, this wine has balance of fruit and earth, while keeping its identity as an old world wine. The complexity of flavors and sensations are not worth writing down, but worth experiencing for yourself. This is not an inexpensive wine, but neither will it break the bank if you are looking for a wine for a special occasion. 

2007 Domain Drouhin Willamette Valley Pinot Noir - The Oregon property of Maison Joseph Drouhin, while independent, still keeps its Burgundian identity. This wine reflects both the difference in place and of the American palate. It is a heavier, juicier wine, but with all of the elegance of a French Pinot Noir. I would want this unique wine to age a few years before enjoying, so that the fruit flavors can blend more with the earthy ones.

2008 Flowers Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir - There is definitely a simple beauty in this wine. There is balance and poise, with enough fruit throughout a lengthy taste and a great freshness. 

2006 Flowers Sonoma Coast Andreen-Gale Pinot Noir - Here is another awesome wine. Combining several vineyards in the Sonoma Coast, this wine has a pure sense of California freshness that puts other heavier and flabbier Pinot Noirs to shame.

Disclosures: These wines were tasted over several trade tasting events as well as from press samples. In addition, I currently sell the lower line of Benton-Lane Pinot Noir at Blue Streak Wines & Spirits.

Late Valentine's

By Rob Bralow, Wine Post Editor

Are you having a late Valentine's Day? My girlfriend and I have something of a schedule nightmare most of the times, stemming from her being a doctor and having to work all hours of the day and night. So traditional holidays are delayed, moved up, or canceled as we see fit, especially hallmark holidays like Valentine's Day.

I am both a fan and a critic of the big V-day. On the one hand I am very much a romantic and love those moments when saying the right thing or doing something simple make someone you love very happy. On the other hand I clearly remember when it is one of those holidays and I had no one to share it with.

So for good or not, happy or sad, turning to alcohol is a perfectly acceptable choice (unless one happens to have an uncontrollable compulsion for alcohol, in which case chocolate ice cream is my second choice). So for those who have not yet been a Valentine, or anyone who had to delay because of medical emergencies or thousands of people who walk into the ER with a stubbed toe, may I suggest the NV Elyssia Pinot Noir Brut Cava.

The Elyssia Pinot Noir made by Freixenet is wonderfully balanced and dry. The bright red color goes perfectly with the dozen roses you forgot to get, or the heart shaped box of candy you did not buy. And at $18 a bottle, this wine is packed with enough strawberry to say, "Look how much I love you. No really, I do. Really."

Disclosure: Wine Post received this wine as a sample from the Freixenet PR representatives.

New does not mean bad

By Rob Bralow, Wine Post Editor

So many wineries point to their long heritage as a reason to buy their wines. It is as if hundreds of years of doing things the same way makes a better wine. For some wineries that is true, and I cannot fault them for their inflexibility. When you make damn good wine, why change what you do? But when the wine is not truly amazing, why not tinker with the recipe?

Then there are the hundreds of wineries that spring up every year. There is new land being put to vine, new juice being crushed from young berries, and new wines hitting the market every year. It is impossible to keep track of it all, and plenty of the wine you really do not want to keep track of.

But then there are the gems that appear each year. Hop Kiln Winery, certainly not new to the winemaking game, is making some delicious wine. I was sent some samples and was really impressed, enough so that I send their PR rep an e-mail with questions for the winemaker. I really loved the 2007 HK Generations Pinot Noir. It started off with just a fantastic strawberry red color and continued from there. The nose had delicate red fruits, rich in raspberry and strawberry. Then the taste was ripe and balanced, with a bit of jamy fruit and great vibrant minerality.

From the 24 year old winemaker, Chuck Mansfield:

The HK Generations (HKG) wines are exclusive productions meant to highlight the Hop Kiln Ranch's affinity to produce excellent Pinot Noir. I currently make both the HKG line as well as the wines of Hop Kiln, which total just under 10,000 cases. The vast majority of that production is the Thousand Flowers blend and the Big Red blend. These grapes are sourced from Mendocino, Sonoma, and El Dorado county.

HKG has been produced since 2005. My philosophy is pretty simple, you cannot make a great wine without truly great grapes. So my winemaking begins in the vineyard. I am blessed to have a site where the soil profile ranges from only 18 inches deep near the Russian River's banks, to a hillside made of thick fractured sandstone. We strive to keep each clone ripening evenly, so when we harvest there is little need for additions or manipulations on the crush pad. Pinot Noir clones really show their site specific characteristics, and I try to blend wines that highlight these differences.

I also tasted the 2007 Hop Kiln Big Red. Definitely not as impressive as the HKG Pinot Noir, but was still nice. This wine had sweet plum and black pepper combined with juicy berry notes. The taste had plenty of jammy red fruit with good bright cranberry on a backbone of easy tannins.

Quick Taste: Chronicle Wines

By Rob Bralow

Of course, hard on the heels of yesterday's post on interspersing interesting commentary in my reviews of wines, I am here today reviewing a group of wines. Or perhaps I am peppering my interesting commentary with wine reviews...

Chronicle was started in 2006 and released its first vintage in 2008. The winery is a boutique winery, which is understood to mean that the winery does not make any more than 500 cases of each wine. The proprietor of the winery says that the next vintage will be release in the Spring of 2010. I received four of these wines to taste and my reviews are below:

Chronicle Pinot Noir 2006, Sonoma Coast, California - There is something really interesting about this wine, reminds me of smoked bacon. There is rich raspberry there as well, but the overwhelming sensation is heat. The taste hits me with dark cherry flavors, lots of upfront fruit that has just a wall of heat sitting on it. It is a good wine and might cool off with more age, but the heat really bugs me.

Chronicle Cerise Vineyards Pinot Noir 2006, Anderson Valley, California - A nose of caramel, cherry, and toast. In my mouth the fruit is HOT, streaked with pepper and toast in a blackberry jam. The heat is intense and becomes the only thing I can focus on.

Chronicle Old Vines Zinfandel 2006, Russian River Valley, California - Here is a good wine. There was a great balance of black currant, toast and black pepper. I tasted blackberry, black cherry with a nice balance and good structure.

Chronicle Bacigalupi Vineyards Zinfandel 2006, Russian River Valley, California - I found blackberry, rosemary, and pepper in the glass of this wine. In my mouth I found black pepper, caramel, toast, with blackberry fruit, but not enough to handle the mouth drying structure and the overwhelming heat.

Maybe I am just not used to California wines, but I thought that the alcohol ruled these wines. There is a lot of potential in these wines. I hope I get to taste next year's vintage to see how the evolution progresses.

Quick Taste: Cycles Gladiator

You know how to sell wine? Get it banned in Alabama.

That could basically be a business plan for any product. Honestly, I cannot imagine it would hurt to get a product banned in any state, as long as it is still available in the other 49.

Cycles Gladiator was lucky enough to be banned because of its label. I have the image here, so you will have to tell me if my blog should be banned as well.

However this is old news. Really old news. I think this was reported on 1,238,423 other blogs before I made the decision to write about it. So why am I writing about it? I just tasted the wine. A friend of mine slipped me a bottle at the Wine Blogger's Conference. I guess I am not on the winery's sample list yet (that's me teasing the winery's PR person a little bit).

I tasted the Cycles Gladiator Pinot Noir 2008 from California. The wine had sweet cherry and vanilla aromas and a simple red cherry, raspberry. It is a good table wine, easy drinking and a nice compliment to good company.

The concept behind the brand is all about the freedom of cycling. I have no idea what that feels like, I never learned how to ride a bicycle...

Quick Taste: Delicious Van Duzer

I am not sure how they found me, but I am extremely pleased that they did. I was sent a few bottles to taste from the Van Duzer Vineyards and I enjoyed them thoroughly. As did anyone I could snag to enjoy the wines with me.

The first was the 2007 Estate Pinot Noir. I do not drink a lot of Pinot Noir, but Oregon is definitely the place where I want to have more from. This wine was smooth and elegant with wonderfully ripe cherry and raspberry flavors. There were floral notes of violets on the nose, turning into spice and and a little smokiness. It is $30, so it will take a little while to convince yourself that it is worth the money, but I garantee you will be pleased to have this with Sunday night dinner.

I also tasted the 2008 Estate Pinot Gris. This was a bright and shinny wine. By that I mean it reminded me of a well polished quarter, lively in a bright light. The wine had a ton of tropical fruit flavors like pineapple and kiwi, tempered by a lemon and mineral backbone.

Both good wines, both worth trying.

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.

The Art of a Virtual Tasting

Last Friday night at 8 pm I joined a group of other wine geeks to taste wines and compare our notes. We all went through the proper motions: swirl, sniff, sip, swish and swallow (I don’t think anyone spits in this crowd). We were all meticulous in noting the different flavors and aromas that our senses perceived. I might be the only one to admit it, but some of us got a little tipsy. And we did it while we were all hundreds of miles from each other.

We were all participants of a tasting on Twitter Taste Live. On November 19th Lenn Thompson of LENNDEVOURS announced that he was hosting the tasting and that his choice was four wines from Humanitas Winery, a winery owned by Judd Wallenbrock who is also the winemaker. I read Lenn’s blog all the time so I decided to check it out. Judd blogs at Drink Charitably and the concept of his winery is a beautiful one, to make good wine and to give back to charities in local communities where the wines are sold. The profits from the winery go to three primary causes: hunger, affordable housing and illiteracy. They have chosen Feeding America (formerly America’s Second Harvest), Habitat for Humanity, and Reading is Fundamental as their targeting charities, but do not limit the donations to only those. Judd and company are just as likely to donate to local charities that best address these issues in individual communities. One of the best winery missions I have heard to date.

If you’ve never seen or heard of Twitter before, you are not the only one. It might be the latest online craze, but then again it might not. The format of using Twitter Taste Live (TTL) was an interesting one. The notion is that everyone buys the wines and meets at the same time and tweet about them. Yes, that’s the new verb, and no I did not coin it (thank goodness). TTL was created by Craig Drollett, John Hafferty, and Chris Gillis and was originally connected to their retail store Bin Ends. Today TTL has distanced itself from the store and is completely open to the world of the wine industry, especially the consumers. The userbase is currently nearing 500 with participation in 8 countries. Not bad for a site based on tweets.

“The real vision is that this platform is a direct line of communication between consumers and wine makers,” explains Craig. “So far it’s working out very well.”

The tasting itself was very interesting, but turned into a case of the hiccups that won’t go away. I loved being in an online space where there are so many people who love to talk about wine all expressing their opinions of the same wines. The way it works is that as long as your tweet has #ttl included then it will pop up on the live feed. The only problem was that every ten to fifteen minutes or so the live twitter feed (I almost said tweet feed, but that seemed wrong somehow) would cut out. The only thing that really kept everything together was Matt doing a live video feed from his house.

All said and done, it was a good experience. The wines we tasted were:

• Humanitas Sauvignon Blanc 2006, 13.8% ALC, Monterey County, California, USA


• Humanitas Oak Free Chardonnay 2007, 13.8% ALC, Monterey County, California, USA


• Humanitas Gap’s Crown Pinot Noir 2006, 14.6% ALC, Sonoma Coast, California, USA


• Humanitas Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, 14.2% ALC, Paso Robles, California, USA

My clear favorite and that of the two others I tasted with (ok, so it is also nice to taste wine with live people too) was the Chardonnay. It was that classic pear and apple that Chardonnay should produce and had a great balance on the taste. The Cabernet started coming through for me after it sat out a while; I had not expected to need to decant it. When I first tasted the Cab it had huge tannins and was extremely rough. It started to smooth out and find some fruit after about an hour or so. I’ll know better for next time.

You can buy the wines here, and be sure to check out Twitter if you have not done so yet and Twitter Taste Live.

Wines tasted on October 29th, 2008

Pinot Noir

1) Fleur de California Pinot Noir 2006, 13.5% ALC., Carneros, California, USA

2) Joseph Drouhin Cote de Beaune-Villages 2005, 13% ALC., AOC Cote de Beaune-Villages, Cote D’Or, Burgundy, France

3) Baden Biengener Maltesergarten Pinot Noir 2003, QmP Troken Auslese, Markgraflerland, Germany

Merlot

4) Sterling Vineyards Merlot 2004, 13.5% ALC, Napa Valley, California, USA

5) Chateau Beaumont Cru Bourgeois Supérieur 2005, 13.5 ALC, (51% Merlot, 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 6% Cabernet Franc, 3% Petit Verdot), Haut-Médoc, Bordeaux, France

6) Chateau Haut-Surget Lalande de Pomerol 2005, 13% ALC, AOC Lalande-de-Pomerol, Bordeaux, France

Pinot Noir

Pinot noir (IPA: ['pi.no nw.ar]) is a red wine grape variety of the species Vitis vinifera. The name may also refer to wines produced predominantly from Pinot noir grapes. The name is derived from the french words for "pine" and "black" alluding to the varietals' tightly clustered dark purple pine cone-shaped bunches of fruit.

Pinot noir grapes are grown around the world, mostly in the cooler regions, but the grape is chiefly associated with the Burgundy region of France. It is widely considered to produce some of the finest wines in the world, but is a difficult variety to cultivate and transform into wine.

Pinot noir thrives in France's Burgundy region, particularly on the Côte-d'Or which has produced some of the world's most celebrated wines for centuries. It is also planted in Austria, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, the Republic of Georgia, Germany, Hungary, the Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, New Zealand, South Africa and Switzerland. The United States has increasingly become a major Pinot noir producer, with some of the best regarded coming from the Willamette Valley in Oregon; California's Sonoma County with its Russian River Valley and Sonoma Coast appellations, as well as the Central Coast's Santa Lucia Highlands appellation and the Sta. Rita Hills American Viticultural Area in Santa Barbara County. In New Zealand, it is grown in Martinborough, Waipara, and Central Otago.

The leaves of Pinot noir are generally smaller than those of Cabernet Sauvignon, but larger than those of Syrah. The grape cluster is small and cylindrical, vaguely shaped like a pine cone. Some viticultural historians believe this shape may have given rise to the name. Pinot noir tends to produce narrow trunks and branches. In the vineyard it is sensitive to light exposure, cropping levels (it must be low yielding), soil types and pruning techniques. In the winery it is sensitive to fermentation methods, yeast strains and is highly reflective of its terroir with different regions producing very different wines. Its thin skin makes it highly susceptible to bunch rot and other fungal diseases. The vines themselves are prone to downy mildew, leaf roll, and fanleaf. These complications have given the grape the reputation of being difficult to grow: Jancis Robinson calls Pinot a "minx of a vine" and André Tchelistcheff declared that "God made Cabernet Sauvignon whereas the devil made Pinot noir."

However, Pinot wines are among the most popular in the world. Joel Fleischman of Vanity Fair describes Pinot noir as "the most romantic of wines, with so voluptuous a perfume, so sweet an edge, and so powerful a punch that, like falling in love, they make the blood run hot and the soul wax embarrassingly poetic." Master Sommelier Madeline Triffon calls pinot "sex in a glass". Peter Richardsson of OenoStyle christened it "a seductive yet fickle mistress!"

The tremendously broad range of bouquets, flavors, textures and impressions that Pinot noir can produce sometimes confuses tasters. In the broadest terms, the wine tends to be of light to medium body with an aroma reminiscent of black cherry, raspberry or currant. Traditional red Burgundy is famous for its fleshy, 'farmyard' aromas, but changing fashions and new easier-to-grow clones have favoured a lighter, fruitier style. The grape's color when young, often compared to that of garnet, is often much lighter than that of other red wines. However, an emerging style from California and New Zealand highlights a more powerful, fruit forward and darker wine that can approach syrah in depth.

It is also used in the production of Champagne (usually along with Chardonnay and Pinot meunier) and is planted in most of the world's wine growing regions for use in both still and sparkling wines. Pinot noir grown for dry table wines is generally low-yielding and often difficult to grow well. Pinot noir grown for use in sparkling wines (e.g. Champagne) is generally higher yielding.

In addition to being used for the production of sparkling and still red wine, Pinot noir is also sometimes used for rosé still wines, and even vin gris white wines.