I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format.

They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read them), and are presented links to help you find them, so that you can try them out for yourself. Cheers!

• 2015 Frank Family Vineyards Zinfandel (Napa Valley): Jammy, spicy, and maybe needs a personal trainer to take care of that soft-in-the-middle thing it has going on. $38 B+
• 2015 Frank Family Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Dark, potent, deliciously evil spells are being cast, and I’m actually totally okay with that. $54 A-
• 2014 Broadside Margarita Vineyards Merlot (Paso Robles): Won’t wow you with its penchant for simplicity, but what’s there is as juicy and meaty as one could reasonably hope. $18 B
• 2016 Tongue Dancer Bacigalupi Vineyard Chardonnay (Russian River Valley): Stellar fruit, capable hands, killer packaging… fifty clams well-spent, especially if you like your Chard messages to be powerful but understated. $50 A-
• 2016 Tongue Dancer Pinot de Ville Pinot Noir (Sonoma Coast): There’s a sexy-ass red car on the label; annnnnd there’s a sexy-ass red wine in the bottle. $65 A-
• 2016 Baker & Brain Paragon Vineyard Grüner Veltliner (Edna Valley): It’s bigger, and bustier than your normal GV, but yeah, someone with a brain for wine clearly baked this one up for us. $28 B+
• 2010 Bodegas Carlos Serres Rioja Gran Reserva (Rioja):What. The. Actual. F*CK?!?? Spicy vibrancy that amounts to a downright incredible bargain. $25 A-
• 2015 Marco Felluga Russiz Superiore Cabernet Franc Collio (Friuli-Venezia Giulia): Refreshing, spicy, and tart red fruits… someone needs to get some pasta bolognese up in here, stat! $30 B+
• NV Lucien Albrecht Cremant d’Alsace Brut (Alsace): Puttin’ the creamy in Cremant. Also putting the delicious in Cremant. Ok, that doesn’t work… anyway, shut the hell up, you know what I meant! $20 B+
• 2013 Odfjell Aliara (Central Valley): As silky smooth as a ship’s brand new sail, and as alluring as, well, pick your favorite maritime voyage imagery. $40 A-

It’s time once again for Ye Olde Wine Product Review Roundup, in which I turn my critical Sauron-like eye towards wine-related samples that are (usually) inedible. We’re back to hitting the books this month, because, well, I have a sh*t ton of wine book samples piling up at 1WD HQ. Like, seriously, I am tripping over some of them at this point…

First up is the 2019 edition of the perennially (literally) fantastic Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book (Mitchell Beazley, 336 pages, $17). If it seems like I talk about this little marvel of a wine reference every single year, it’s because I do. Once again, Johnson’s cast of contributing characters packs an almost unbelievable amount of useful information on most of the wine world’s important releases/producers/vintages/regions into an equally nearly unbelievably small space. Yeah, it really needs to be an annually updated or subscription-style mobile app at this point, but still, there’s good reason this book sits atop the best seller lists for wine guides for those of us who still occasionally pick up these things made from dead trees. The rotating essay topic this year’s Pocket Wine is Natural/Organic/Biodynamic wines, and it’s well-written and interesting, bringing a refreshingly non-partisan analysis of those categories and making a good case that, when it comes to fine wine production, being sustainable is actually quite mainstream…

Read the rest of this stuff »

I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format.

They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read them), and are presented links to help you find them, so that you can try them out for yourself. Cheers!

• 2016 Quady North Grenache Blanc (Applegate Valley): Flowers, honey, and liveliness… this is basically like an amazing Spring day in a bottle. $23 B+
• 2017 Quady North Rose (Rogue Valley): Wait, you’re not from Provence? Damn, could have fooled me! $18 B+
• 2012 Schmidt Family Vineyards Pinot Noir (Applegate Valley): Leather, pith, and grit; AV is bringing the thunder in this earthy, plummy case. $40 A-
• 2016 Misty Oaks Vineyard Friendswood Gewürztraminer (Umpqua Valley): Textbook levels of roses, stone fruits, lychee, and grip; ok, maybe even more than textbook levels. $14 B+
• 2014 Rex Hill Pinot Noir (Willamette Valley): If you like ’em with tea-like spices and biting structure, you’ll feel like you’re in spitting distance of heaven. $31 A-
• 2017 Wrath EX Unoaked Chardonnay (Monterrey): A delightful, positive example of wine’s core objective – to bring pleasure. $19 B+
• 2014 Eponymous Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): What’s in a name? Apparently a penchant for blackcurrant and a desire to give chocolate-flavored cigars to everyone. $60 A-
• 2015 Mt. Brave Merlot (Mount Veeder): This is soooo f*cking young. And soooo f*cking good. $80 A
• 2014 Chateau Trillol Cucugnan Corbieres Grenache – Syrah- Carignan (Languedoc-Roussillon): Rustic, for sure, in all the good ways, like a gorgeous, distressed piece of antique furniture. $16 B
• 2015 Eva Fricke Kiedrich Riesling Trocken (Rheingau): Toasty and stoney, and rocking its seriousness in very effective ways. $29 B+

Merlot: “Stop picking on me, beeeeaaaatches!”

It’s been nearly fifteen years since a flippant diatribe that disparagingly mentions Merlot came from the mouth of Miles, the main protagonist in the film Sideways (based on the book of the same title by Rex Pickett).

That off-hand and NSFW comment had the unfortunate – and lasting – side-effect of sending U.S. Merlot sales into the toilet; so much so that I had been told over the years by many PR, marketing, and winemaking professionals that they either stopped putting the word Merlot on their labels (or at least  considered it).

But a funny thing happened roughly ten years after Sideways was released in theaters: consumers seemed to stop caring, and instead started to enjoy the fact that Merlot represented one of the best red wine bargains available. Of course, that didn’t stop the media at large from being late to the reporting party when it came to the “Sideways effect.” But whatever.

I mention this brief Merlot sales history lesson because for the past few years October has been declared the #MerlotMe month, in an attempt to bring renewed interest in the much maligned Merlot, and my friend Michael Cervin has quoted me in an article he recently penned for IntoWine.com that takes a closer look as all of the above, and whether or not f–king Merlot even needs its own f–king month. In that article, I basically state that “The Sideways effect has never been as outdated as it is at this moment.”

Look, here’s the scenario with Merlot, people: You can find better (i.e., cleaner, fault-free, varietally-correct, tasty) Merlot at every price point now, and in some cases (particularly in South America) at prices that have better quality-to-price ratios than ever before. While you have to pay larger bucks for the transcendent stuff (Michael rightly suggests La Jota Vineyard Co.’s Merlot as an example), you can still find excellent incarnations in the $30-ish range (another of Michael’s picks, L’Ecole No. 41 Estate Merlot, fits that bill, and makes a good argument for considering Merlot as Washington state’s second best red fine wine grape after Syrah). Even the last five years have seen better Merlot samples cross my critic-lips than ever before.

In other words, despite the temporary corrections afforded by the Sideways effect, Merlot is now exactly like every other f–king fine wine grape in the world.

Merlot is no longer an exception, and it’s high time we stopped acting like it is.

Cheers!