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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!

“It’s the tiiiiiime, for the seeeeeaaason of… giveawaaaaaaaaaays….”

It does indeed seem to be the season of giveaway action here on 1WD, and this week we’ve got another one; I’m teaming up with ClubW.com to giveaway one month’s free subscription to their wine club (that’s three bottles, or about $50 worth)! We’ll also be announcing a discount code next week (so that those who play along and don’t win won’t have to wail and gnash their wine-stained teeth).

Living in the Communistwealth of Pennsylvania, I’m unable to indulge in activities that threaten the stability of the state, such as receiving a wine from a wine club. But make no mistake, I adore our enlightened Harrisburg dictators! Honest! Please, don’t bulldoze my home!

Anyway, ClubW.com happens to be one of the wine clubs that I wouldn’t at all mind checking out, given that their wine curators have picked some very interesting selections, all of which are $19 or under. The ClubW selections include capable, off-the-beaten-path producers like Colorado’s Infinite Monkey Theroem (remember them? I do, because they impressed me when I tasted their wares in CO last year), as well as other wine brands that I’ve been following for a little while now, like Tuscany’s Poggiotondo, and Yarra Valley’s Innocent Bystander (headed up by Giant Steps pioneer Phil Sexton). They also have wines I’ve liked from John Duval and Casas del Bosque (the latter of which really kicked ass in `07 with their Private Reserve blend).

One of the most interesting aspects of ClubW.com is that it offers you subsets of their selections based on a taste profile that you fill out before signing up for the service. So, in this giveaway, we’re going to explore, in practice, how it works…

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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 Mud House Pinot Noir (Central Otago): Through a red currant, darkly. Also spicily, pith-ily, and somewhat sweet-toast-ily. $19 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Mud House South Island Pinot Gris (South Island): Toasty, friendly, and carrying melons. Like, back-up-the-truck volume of melons. $16 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Mud House Waipara Riesling (Waipara): Mineral water bath, in a slate-and-flint tub, lime zest soap and can of diesel at the ready. $12 B- >>find this wine<<
• NV Grahams Twenty Year Tawny Porto (Porto): Richer than a sultan, toastier and smokier than his hookah, and silkier than his robes. $59 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Firestone Vineyard Syrah (Santa Ynez Valley): An entire meal here, from jammy fruit to smokey meat to a Nilla Wafer for dessert. $25 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Firestone Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (Santa Ynez Valley): Has energy, but gets picked on by its cheaper South American cousins. $22 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Firestone Vineyard Merlot (Santa Ynez Valley): An amorphous black fruit form that eventually settles into a smokey, solid stance. $20 B >>find this wine<<
• 11 Firestone Vineyard Riesling (Santa Ynez Valley): A bit wobbly on its feet, but it is trying very hard to make friends with you. $14 B- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Cuvelier Los Andes (Mendoza): If dark plums made some sort of blood sausages out of themselves in a hedonistic, cannibalistic feast $25 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gloria Ferrer Sonoma Brut (Sonoma County): An orchard full of green apples, aggressively blowing bubbles at frequent intervals. $22 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noirs (Carneros): Remember Cherry Jam from Strawberry Shortcake? This is like her baking high-end pastries. $22 B >>find this wine<<
• NV Gloria Ferrer VA de VI Ultra Cuvee (Sonoma County): Lemon peel, peach, and bread walk into a bar… then they get pretty wasted. $22 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Gloria Ferrer Carneros Chardonnay (Carneros): Trying to make itself look busty, but its slim and slender build is already pretty. $18 B >>find this wine<<
• 10 Gloria Ferrer Carneros Pinot Noir (Carneros): Floral/fruity shirt with tight, taut leather pants. But moves well on the dance floor $27 B >>find this wine<<
• 07 Navarro Correas Structura Ultra (Mendoza): A burly, burlesque entry buffeted by a broad, bracing, bright, and brisk denouement. $40 A- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Kaiken Ultra Cabernet Sauvignon (Mendoza): Dark cassis, toast and the depth you'd expect from vines twice as old as most of you. $22 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Kaiken Ultra Malbec (Mendoza): So chewy, meaty, big and savory, you just might think you'd been served steak in that glass. $20 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Pence Ranch Estate Pinot Noir (Santa Barbara County): Carries a redcurrant-and-leather whip, ready and able for cattle rustlin'. $30 B+ >>find this wine<<

Central Coast-ish California’s Pence Ranch, and its charismatic owner, Blair Pence (who, with toothy grin and cowboy hat looks every bit the part of a rancher) have been making the wine scene headlines so far in 2013, and not in a good way.

To bring you up to speed on what has become the U.S. wine biz equivalent of tossing flaming poop bags about AVA boundaries, let’s quote a few spots and then we can talk about what no one else seems to be getting at in this battle, which is Pence’s wine itself.

To the tape, from Independent.com (emphasis mine):

Vintner Blair Pence filed with the federal government this February to expand the borders of the increasingly renowned Sta. Rita Hills wine-grape-growing appellation to the east to include his vineyard, which he planted in 2006 outside of Buellton… USC-educated developer-turned-farmer has been dealing with the wrath of his winemaking neighbors, and their terroir tussle is now making headlines in the international wine press. “If you look at the history, you look at the geology, you look at the weather, it belongs in the appellation,” said Pence, who built Los Angeles office buildings and industrial parks before growing grapes, ranching cattle, and raising avocados. “The science is so clear-cut.”

And the opposition summary, via WineSpectator.com (emphasis mine):

The board of the Sta. Rita Hills Winegrower Alliance (SRHWA) disagreed with Pence’s arguments, however, and voted unanimously to oppose expansion. Wes Hagen of Clos Pepe, the original petitioner who crafted the AVA boundaries, is against the expansion, saying the new border would extend into a distinct landmass called the Buellton Flats, which has a north-south orientation, while the current AVA has an east-west orientation. According to Hagen, the areas Pence wants included also lack the maritime influence that growers insist make the region ideal for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. “We’ve spent $25 million and 20 years promoting the area,” said Hagen. “We don’t want to be catty, but we want to protect what we’ve built.”

Reaction has not been kind, probably because this seems like a bit of a money grab for Pence, who stands to gain higher grape prices if his AVA expansion bid is successful. Since I visited Pence Ranch and talked about this with Blair Pence last August, I thought I’d chime in on the debate/debacle; mostly because I find it very odd that little has been said about whether or not the Pence Ranch wine itself seems to fit what one might call the Sta. Rita Hills Pinot profile…

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In this episode of 1WDTV, I rant about why it’s stupid to make a distinction between wine bloggers and fine wine consumers, as if the two populations couldn’t possibly overlap (they do); and yet, the wine media tries to make this distinction time and time again, effectively setting everyone off on a wild goose chase.

To illustrate this, I play off a theme I tackled during a recent interview I gave in South America, only this time with a (very crude) graph to show how I believe the U.S. population of wine consumers and wine bloggers is distributed, which involves a standard deviation bell curve (actually, alcohol consumption probably more closely follows a Gamma distribution, but that’s splitting hairs).

Anyway, enjoy!

The Artificial Distinction Between Wine Bloggers and Consumers 

Cheers!