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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!

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 Sequoia Grove Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Juggling lean-&-green with rich-&-toasty; isn't quite ready to show its best act. $38 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 08 Sequoia Grove Cambium (Napa Valley): Comfortably sexy & confident, probably has an awesome tattoo that it won't show you yet. $120 A- >>find this wine<<
• 11 Sequoia Grove Chardonnay (Napa Valley): Exercising enough restraint to put *just* the right amount of frosting on the cake. $26 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Domaines Paul Mas Single Vineyard Collection G.S.M. (Coteaux du Languedoc): Meat, meet berries; berries, met stones; U, meet tasty. $16 B >>find this wine<<
• 11 Domaines Paul Mas Single Vineyard Collection Picpoul de Pinet (Coteaux du Languedoc): A rush of citrus – & gravel – to the head. $14 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Casa Montes Alzamora Merlot (San Juan): Ok, so clay-stained blueberries, olives & plums drizzled in balsamic can, in fact, be sexy $24 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 09 Casa Montes Alzamora Syrah (San Juan): Lean beef, rich spiced plums on elegant dinner ware, for the price of Old Country Buffet. $24 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Don Balthazar Cabernet Franc (San Juan): Green herbs on the one hand, savory fruits on the other, & a little bit of soul in between $14 B >>find this wine<<
• 11 Ampakama Intenso Malbec (San Juan): Pulls you by leather leash leash right over next to the cooking happening on the hot BBQ pit. $12 B >>find this wine<<
• 12 Ampakama Syrah (San Juan): Juiciness that runs off your cheek, down the side of your arms, and eventually gets your sleeves dusty. $9 B- >>find this wine<<
• 12 Ampakama Malbec (San Juan): Comes in for smoked meat & red plums dinner, makes interesting conversation, leaves a bit too early. $9 B- >>find this wine<<
• 12 Ampakama Viognier (San Juan): High-end hotel lobby's complimentary lemon-water meets the hotel bar's best-selling party drink. $9 B- >>find this wine<<
• 11 Hestia Chenin Blanc (Columbia Valley): Friendly with the flowers; probably too friendly, actually, but makes for energetic company. $16 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Rocca GrigsbyVineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Dressed-up, spiced-up, pumped-up & amped-up intro to a deep & dark night. $75 A- >>find this wine<<
• 09 Rocca Collinetta Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Maybe a little too much of a chocolaty, toasty, decadent good thing. $85 B+ >>find this wine<<

One could go their entire blogging life and never be fortunate enough to use the phrase “toilet frog.” And yet… here I am, able to use the term from personal experience.

I need a moment to revel in this, people. Please, indulge me a moment, for I have met them, in person.

T-o-i-l-e-t   f-r-o-g-s…. As in, frogs that live in a toilet. Yes, seriously, and for realz, as the youngins say these days.

The toilet frogs moment comes courtesy of Alto de la Ballena (literally, “height of the whale [hills]”), a relatively small producer (about 55k bottles) with a relatively small vineyard area (about 20 hectares) in a relatively small country (Uruguay) who are making relatively excellent wines that are not yet available in the U.S. (though they are working on it; it’s a situation I sincerely hope changes after this, and not just because they showed me their toilet frogs).

The story begins in the Sierra de la Ballena, a stretch of hills that begin at a whale-watching peninsula near the seaside resort town of Punta de Este, a spot where the seafaring mammals stop during their August/September migration to Patagonia. Taking their name from the whales, the Sierra de la Ballena undulate to the north, about fifteen kilometers inland to the town of Maldonado, which is where Alvaro Lorenzo and his wife Paula Pivel decided to plant their vineyards in 2000/2001.

Lorenzo and Pivel were all alone on the steep, rocky, gravel, granite, limestone, and schist hills in Maldonado.

“At the time, no one was here,” Lorenzo told me when I visited the property as a guest of Wines of Uruguay; “we took the risk.”…

Read the rest of this stuff »

The time has come once again for you to give your digitus secundus (that’s your index finger, by the way… you creep!…) a momentary workout by using it to click on your favorite finalists in the Wine Blog Awards voting, this being the 2013 version thereof.

I’ve got a long (in Internet time) history with the WBAs: I’ve been a winner, a criticizer, a judge, and an improvement-committee-member (yeah, I know, that last one does not quite roll mellifluously off the tongue, does it?). This year, I’m a finalist in the Best Overall Wine Blog category (thanks to the judges, and most especially to you for that!).

Please consider voting, as the recognition of hard work and efforts well-spent probably means a great deal to those who are among the finalists. Also, it’s the easiest way to fill your good karma quotient fit the day. And if you don’t vote, then the fleas of one thousand camels might infest your armpits [ editor's note: this may not actually be true ].

You’re under no obligation to vote for me, of course, unless you want Ron Washam to lose a bet in which he will publicly sing classic Journey hits while wearing a baby costume – seriously, I swear that’s our bet! [ editor's note: this may not actually be true ]. Whatever… look, just drink up and vote, okay? Following are the finalists in the Best Overall Wine Blog category:

• Hosemaster of Wine
• 1 Wine Dude
• Terroirist
• The UK Wine Show
• Steve Heimoff

Along with those mentioned above, there are some very interesting picks in the finalists across all of the various categories this year, and many of them are passionate and relatively new voices in the wine blogging crowd. Personally, I’m particularly pleased to also see academicwino.com, The Wine Curmudgeon, Hawk Wakawaka, Bigger Than Your Head, On The Wine Trail in Italy, Washington Wine Report, Jameson Fink, The Drunken Cyclist (despite his terrible taste in NFL franchises), and my Portuguese brother-from-another-mother Andre Rib also being recognized as finalists in various categories this year (though Andre’s listing was subsequently removed, for reasons not yet explained to me as of the time of this writing). If you aren’t familiar with them, go check them out.

Voting remains open through this Friday, May 24th, so… prevent bad karma flea-infestations and GO VOTE!

As for some personal thoughts on all of this WBA stuff (hey, it’s my blog after all)…

Read the rest of this stuff »

A quick hit today to highlight a few of the Answers.com Wine articles I’ve posted for May. There’s a good chance that even the geekiest among you will find one of these in particular quite interesting, though I should warn you that you won’t be able to un-see it or un-read it, and so it should be totally avoided unless you want to start having nightmares about water (and not the kind where you’re abandoned at sea like in Open Water).

5 Producers to Watch in Lodi
I’ve been meaning to do something on this for well over a year now, so I’m happy to be able to give these winemakers some additional publicity as I really dig what they’re doing. I’m also hoping to make this a sort of regular series highlighting producers that I like but who haven’t received long-form features here on 1WD. Stay tuned…

Wine Recommendations for Beer Lovers
Beer (and wine) maven Ashley Routson and I worked on this one for *weeks*, and so I was really excited to be able to finally publish this wine-for-beer-lovers recommendation approach. I’m also really happy with the recommendations themselves, and the explanations that she chose, all of which show why Ashley kicks so much ass in the drinks world. If you don’t learn something new about beer, wine, and food pairings when reading this, then you probably aren’t paying enough attention (or you’re already a master sommelier… or both).

An Introduction to Uruguay wine
Because I did more than just eat and drink when I was down there… just not a whole lot more…; note that I would’ve liked to have included more stats on the country and its wine scene, but the Uruguayans, bless their hearts, didn’t get the additional material I’d requested back to me in time.

Book Review: Pairing with the Masters
My take on Master Chef Ken Arnone’s and MW Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan’s recent (and very technical) hardcover collaboration about food and wine pairing.

The Dos and Don’ts about Wine and Water
Look, just do yourself a favor and do NOT read this… Seriously, dude, you will never, ever look at a glass of water sitting on the same table as your vino the same way again without possibly going into an apoplectic fit about what type of water it is and from whence it came… you’ve been warned!

Cheers!