This coming February, I’ll be representing Team USA in the 2013 Argentina Wine Awards. No, I won’t be performing on the parallel bars – I’ll be the sole U.S. judge on an international panel that includes writers, sommeliers, and other geeky wine folk from China, Brazil, Australia, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, Switzerland and the UK (who somehow managed to get two representatives), all of whom will convene in Argentina to taste through something like 750 wines over the course of a few days.

To the tape:

“Designed to benchmark and reward the quality and advancement of the Argentine wine industry, the Argentina Wine Awards have established themselves as the most important event in the local calendar as well as being increasingly followed with interest by those in the wider world of wine. Over 740 wine samples participated in the 2012 edition.”

I’m stoked – and not a little intimidated (representing the country? no pressure!) – to get back down to Argentina, a place I haven’t visited in nearly two years (and where I ate well, drank well, and was unbelievable sick… there will be a Z-pack in the travel bag this time).

The reason I‘m telling you all of this? I need your help!…

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Welcome to the Weekly Wine Quiz, fresh off a Thanksgiving turkey-gorging binge. Roll yourself out of your easy chair and take a stab at this week’s wine mind-bender, so you can feel as though you accomplished something after your run-in with stuffing and pumpkin pie.

Standard disclaimer: I supply the quiz question, but *not* quiz answer right away. You supply your best guess as to that answer in the comments, and then tune back in later in the comments section for the official answer. You are of course encouraged to have courage and not cheat via the magic of Google, but we don’t judge!

The grape Tinta Cao represents what percentage of plantings in Portugal’s Port-producing regions?

• A. 20%
• B. 15%
• C. 3%
• D. 1%

Cheers, and good luck!

[ Editor’s note: following is a guest post from the 1WD intern: the young, unpaid Shelby Vittek. While Shelby may be young, she’s got better creds than a lot of would-be wine media folks out there: she’s been writing about wine for the millennial set for the better part of a year, is already working on her first book (a guide to wine for college students), and has been published in the Washington Post's travel section.  Her current writing gig is for the newly re-launched TableMatters.com. To give Shelby a break from having to catalog the small ocean of samples in my basement, we’re going to let her flex her writing muscles with guest posts centering on how young wine buyers view the wine world. We often talk about the Millennial wine buying generation here on 1WD, but this is a chance for you to get the scoop on Millennial wine habits directly from the source. You can follow Shelby on twitter at @BigBoldReds. Let us know what you think (but keep things civil, you opinionated b*stards!). Enjoy! ]

My usual cutoff price for a bottle of wine is ten dollars.

Yes, you read that correctly: $10 or less.

My problem isn’t that I don’t enjoy drinking higher-end wines, ones that are older or more intriguing – it’s just that frankly, I can’t afford them.

I’m part of the younger generation of wine-curious Millennials – the ones who have entered into the world of legal wine-buying and consumption age in the past few years. We are supposedly the generation of wine drinkers believed to be the almighty saviors of the wine industry. But finding an interesting, relatively delicious bottle of wine that doesn’t give me anxiety when I think about making rent at the end of the month is a never-ending challenge.

While I don’t anticipate these wines will blow me away the same way an older Barolo or an aged Riesling does, I want to be able to take pleasure in a glass alone after work (or rather, hours of organizing the mass amounts of wine samples in Joe’s basement). I want to share a bottle with friends without being embarrassed or horrified by the quality of my selection. (I have been deemed the know-it-all-wine-friend, after all.) And when I go home to visit my mother, I want to bring a bottle with me that impresses both her and her more sophisticated palate, without my budget-savvy ways being given away.

You may be shaking your head, or rolling your eyes at how frugal I am with my wine purchases. Maybe you think I’m crazy for expecting a ten-dollar bill to be traded for a beautifully perfumed wine that also delivers rich flavors. But I assure you, I am not insane, and I am definitely not alone. Many other younger Millennials are in the same boat as I am…

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Today, I could be writing any number of travel-related wine pieces from the large number of jaunts I took in the first three quarters of 2012 (how large is that number? let’s just say I’ve had to visit the doctor to treat complications from my ass having spent so much time sitting in airplane seats).

But I’m not going to do that. Not today. Those stories can wait.

Instead, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, and give some long-overdue attention back to a long-time friend of 1WD. Of course, if his wine sucked he wouldn’t be getting the attention here; but it doesn’t, so he will.

Gabe Jagle is a long-time commenter on these virtual pages, often adding insightful points and taking the conversation in the comments field into fascinating wine geek territory, areas that we might not otherwise have explored even on posts that see dozens of interesting comments. Gabe doesn’t just do that here – he also does it on several other wine blogs, and he generally seems to enjoy the geeky discourse. In fact, he’s prolific enough and so imbued with the power wine-geeky that it was several months in to our blogger/commenter relationship before I even knew that he was an assistant winemaker to Brad Ford at a small Oregon producer, Illahe Vineyards in the Willamette Valley.

That genuine love for the grape and for its discourse is what lead me to finally meet Gabe in “real” life earlier this year, after the 2012 Wine Bloggers Conference in Portland. Gabe is a likeable guy, mild-mannered and with a lanky appearance that to city-slickers like me just screams “Pacific NW Farmer” – kind of Shaggy meets lumberjack (he’s probably going to hate that, but it’s the best I could come up with between writing interruptions from my toddler daughter).

I was interested enough in Illahe’s wines after tasting one of the Pinots during my Portland visit that Gabe and I loosely agreed to try to get me samples, which arrived recently. And while they’re not going to set any concentration-loving palates on their ears, those Illahe wines are in possession of a quality that seems to come along rarely in wines these days: authenticity…

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