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HiYa! If you're new here, you may want to Sign Up to get all the latest wine coolness delivered to your virtual doorstep. I've also got short, easily-digestible mini wine reviews and some educational, entertaining wine vids. If you're looking to up your wine tasting IQ, check out my book How to Taste Like a Wine Geek: A practical guide to tasting, enjoying, and learning about the world's greatest beverage. Cheers!

Thanks to all of you budding winos (I mean that in the most endearing sense possible!) who took part in the 2013 New York Wine Expo giveaway.

Given that I’ve been spending a good deal of time up on Seneca lake lately, and gaining a renewed sense of appreciation for the area’s wines as a result, I was pleasantly surprised to see so much love expressed for NY’s own Finger Lakes wines in the comments of our latest giveaway. And so I’m happy to report that one such NY wine lover – Patrick Maas – was the randomly-selected winner of the NYWE 2013 giveaway.

Patrick (assuming that he is 21 or older!) will now have the opportunity to indulge a taste (or two… or several) for free at one of this year’s Grand Tasting events! Now, if you didn’t win the latest giveaway (hint: if you’re not Patrick, then you didn’t win), you’ve still got a few options if you want to be NYWE-bound:

1) Wail and gnash you teeth Old Testament Style at the futility of it all, paying full price at the event, or

2) Buy tickets to the 2013 NYWE and use the special discount code “WineDude” (minus the quotation marks), good for $15 off Friday and Saturday tickets through Feb. 28, 2013!

Personally, I’d go with option #2, but I don’t want to be so bold as to tell you how to live your life, okay? Just don’t say we never did anything for you here at 1WD…

Anyway… Go forth and plan your NYWE excursion, my bargain-hunting thirsty imbibers.

Cheers!

So, like, what is this stuff, anyway?
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 with you via twitter (limited to 140 characters). They are meant to be quirky, fun, and easily-digestible reviews of currently available wines. Below is a wrap-up of those twitter wine reviews from the past week (click here for the skinny on how to read them), along with links to help you find these wines, so that you can try them for yourself. Cheers!

• 10 Greywacke Pinot Noir (Marlborough): Jammy berry shouts in public, but then deftly composes itself and finishes the night a charmer. $39 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Greywacke Wild Sauvignon (Marlborough): Sauv Blanc and wood make surprisingly happy marriage; dig that grassy, chalky Boutonniere. $29 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Greywacke Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough): Pink grapefruit stacked up like a snowman; dried herbs and fresh veggies for arms and legs. $20 B >>find this wine<<
• 08 Poggiotondo Vigna delle Conchiglie Chianti Riserva (Chianti): Vibrant, juicy embrace showing tenderness in most of the right spots $68 A- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Dunham Cellars Lewis Estate Vineyard Riesling (Columbia Valley): Enough petrol in the tank to put this citric ride into high gear. $20 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 09 Poggiotondo Chianti Superiore (Chianti Superiore): Minerals & meat, funk and leather, fruit serious and sensual, and seriously sensual. $20 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Poggiotondo Rosso (Toscana): A soft, gritty, and brambly retreat; a prosciutto sandwich is pretty much required for entry. $11 B- >>find this wine<<
• 11 Poggiotondo Vermentino (Tuscany): Lemons & nuts that are practically kissing cousins with soapy, floral Viognier, wild and fancy free $20 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Chateau Bousquette Saint Chinian Prestige (Saint-Chinian): Not won over by the balance, vibrancy and prettiness? Check your pulse!! $25 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 09 Trimbach Gewurztraminer (Alsace): It likes the spiced life, it’s gotta booogie, at the wine bar toooniiiiiiight, oh yeahhhhhhhh $24 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Nals Margreid Galea Schiava (Alto Adige): Picture a rosé after its wild strawberries did a serious muscle building workout regimen. $23 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Nals Margreid Lyra Gewurztraminer (Alto Adige): Like a lychee and rose petal perfume, sprayed in your face at point blank range. $13 B- >>find this wine<<

While I cannot verify it via personal experience, I strongly suspect that apart from mining, graphic novels, porn (or maybe graphic novels about porn), the wine business is the only other industry in which you can start a story with the phrase “so I once met this guy in a cave…” without raising eyebrows in suspicion of your sanity.

It was, in fact, in a cave – during a dinner event at

Pine Ridge on Napa’s Silverado Trail – that I met San Franciscan Jordan Kivelstadt. Long-time 1WD readers might recall his name as the young winemaker behind Pavo Syrah, a wine that was featured here back in 2009 and one which I compared to the Balrog (but in a good way).

Jordan’s parents bought the vineyard in 2005, on ten acres of farmland at the intersection of three AVAs (Sonoma Valley, Bennett Valley and Sonoma Mountain), which for ten years provided fruit for Landmark’s Steel Plow, and now is the source of their Syrah and red blends. When sending some more recent incarnations of his family’s wines – now called Qualia (named after a sensory perception phenomenon that, interestingly, was also profiled in a post on wine ratings that caused a bit of a stir here last year) – Jordan included a letter to me in which he wrote “I have been busy playing with wine. I cannot wait to see… what mythical creature you associate with it.”

And so it’s in that spirit that I give you some thoughts on Sonoma Syrah, Grenache, the mythical Griffin, and the extinct-but-not-mythical Protoceratops. All of which will make sense in a minute or two. I hope…

Read the rest of this stuff »

Once again, I’m partnering up with the New York Wine Expo to help try to get some of you lushes to this annual – and seminal – Right Coast tasting event in the Galleria at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in NY.

This is a big shindig, and one in which you’ll have the opportunity to taste 600 (!) or so wines from 200+ (!) global exhibitors. For a bit more of your hard-earned money, there are also optional seminars on topics such as California Pinot Noir, Italian cheeses, and Cool Climate Finger Lakes wines.

But one of you won’t have to shell out their hard-earned money to go to NYWE this year, and many more of you will shell out less than the sticker price!

I’m happy to announce that one lucky 1WD reader will receive a free ticket to the event’s Grand Tasting on either Friday March 1st, 6pm-10pm (an $85 value) or Saturday March 2nd, 1pm-5pm (a $95 value) – it’ll be winner’s choice!

And if you play along and don’t win, fear not – when we announce the winner next week, we’ll also be giving you a discount code that’s good for $15 off Friday and/or Saturday tickets (if ordered on or before Feb. 28, 2013)!

Here’s how it will go down:

• Leave a comment on this post telling us (that’s the royal us), which wines, producers or regions you’re most looking forward to trying at the tasting (here’s a list of who will be pouring) and why. You’ll have until 5PM ET on February 4th, 2013 to leave a comment.
• On February 5th, I will announce a randomly selected winner from the comments, and will also reveal the discount code that can be used for those who didn’t win but still want to save some dough when they purchase tickets.

If you’re planning on going (and you should, as it will give your wine tasting IQ a seriously rapid boost), check out my survival guide for getting through big tasting events alive (Hint: Spit!).

Cheers – and good luck!