VINEgeek

Producer: CAP Vistalba
Grapes: 90% Malbec, 10% Merlot
Appellation: Mendoza (Argentina)
Vineyard: Finca Los Álamos, Upper Uco Valley. The soils are sandy loam and limestone. These vineyards are at serious altitude – 3500 feet above sea level – with only 4 inches of rainfall per year (Árido means arid. Presumably they irrigate.) Wineries like to talk about the “diurnal [...]

Producer: Helfrich
Grapes: 100% Riesling
Appellation: Alsace (AOC, France). This region of France has been handed back and forth between France & Germany numerous times depending on who won the last war. So many of the names don’t sound very French. If you generally avoid Riesling because you’ve tried German ones and found them too sweet or [...]

I received a raft of wine- or blog-related gifts this year. Here’s a rundown:
A Crushpad Fusebox
I’ll be planning a blending party soon!

You can order one here.
A bottle of Da Vinci Petite Sirah
A few weeks ago, I tweeted a link to a post at Bigger Than Your Head about this wine, commenting that I’d been out-Oddballed [...]

Okay, so this may be the least odd of my Oddball series to date. (So far, I’ve done Lagrein, Prieto Picudo, and rosé of Spatburgunder.) I bet many of you have heard of Bonarda from Argentina, and some of you may have tried it. What makes it an oddball to me is no one seems to [...]

This is a benchmark producer of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc in the under $15 category. I haven’t been drinking as much NZ SB as I used to, but I thought I’d check this one out again.
Producer: Kim Crawford
Grapes: 100% Sauvignon Blanc
Appellation: Marlborough (New Zealand)
Vineyards: A blend from vineyards across the Marlborough region.
Winemaking: Night-harvested and cold-fermented, [...]

A few weeks ago, I did a post on the Kung Fu Girl Riesling from Charles Smith and it reminded me of the old-school arcade game Kung Fu Master, which I used to play at the arcade in my local bowling alley back in middle school. This got me thinking what other classic arcade and [...]

Pardevalles ‘Gamonal’ Prieto Picudo 2006
Producer: Vinedos y Bodega Pardevalles
Grapes: 100% Prieto Picudo – Google Translate converts this to both ‘acacia weevil’ and ‘billfish’. However, the importer’s website says it means “bunched and peaked” for the way the grapes grow in a very tight cluster and the bunches taper sharply at the bottom. I prefer acacia [...]

This wine is #71 in Wine Spectator’s Top 100 for 2009, making it one of the most exciting wines of the year in their view. They rated it 90 points.
This winery is trying very hard to make this wine seem young/hip/sexy/cool/rebellious. The bottle and website are stylish black, red and white. On the website they [...]

I finally made it back to Costco to pick up a few more bottles of the Galévan ‘Paroles de femme’ 2007 Côtes du Rhône, which I gushed about in a post last week. My recollection was that it was $10-12 and that to me was a terrific value. So imagine my excitement when I arrived [...]

Last week, in a post on the 7 Deadly Zins 2007 Lodi Zinfandel, I included the poem that was on the back label of the bottle. It reminded me of this poem that used to appear on the back label of Cline’s always reliable California appellation Zins:
Know me, stranger, for I am thy
blood and thy [...]