VINEgeek

Finally catching up on some old tasting notes. Here are a couple of wines from Alex Elman Wines, an importer who decided to create her own label, featuring wines from Argentina made from organic grapes. You may notice braille on the labels; that’s because Alex Elman lost her sight in her 20s. Read the full [...]

Here’s an inexpensive, widely-available wine that hits the sweet spot for my palate: It’s worth noting that I found the 2006 a few weeks after tasting this 2007 and didn’t like it nearly as much. Look for the 2007. _________ Image credit: Illuminaut via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/illuminaut/3996050349 An offering to the SEO gods: PLANETA La Segreta Rosso [...]

Here’s Randall Grahm talking about the wine I’m drinking tonight: the 2009 Contra, an old-vines blend of 55% carignane, 16% grenache, 14% mourvèdre, 7% petite sirah 5% zinfandel and 3% syrah that finds that nice balance between drinkable and thinkable. A good value at around $14.00. Worth a search.

Welcome to the first tetra-pak edition of #MourvedreMonday. Yellow+Blue (Y+B) sells wine from organically grown grapes in environmentally-friendly 1-liter tetra-paks. (Yellow + Blue = Green. Get it?) They source wine from a number of locales, including Malbec and Torrontes from Argentina, Sauvignon Blanc from Chile, and this Monastrell from Spain. This is the first varietally-labeled [...]

—————– Yes, that’s Wonder Woman’s invisible plane. Fat lot of good it does her. A woman flying through the air in seated position is pretty conspicuous, don’t you think? —————– Price: $13.50 Tasting notes: Nearly invisible color. Grassy, citrusy nose, but not in-yo-face about it. Light-bodied on the palate with more citrus fruit flavors and [...]

Way back in October, Wines of Chile held a twitter tasting of red blends from Chile (hashtag: #ChileBlends). I had signed up for the tasting and received the wine, but a family emergency kept me from being able to participate on the night of the event. That also coincided with this blog going into a [...]

Back to Spain for Mourvèdre Monday. This one’s from Bodegas Castaño, one of the biggest producers of Monastrell in Yecla, in southeastern Spain. This wine got 90+ points from Parker for 5 straight vintages, including this one. Let’s see what’s up. Producer: Bodegas Castaño Grapes: 100% Monastrell Appellation: Yecla Vineyards: From 30+ year old vines [...]

I’ve never really gotten in the habit of drinking much German wine. Partly because I’ve always drunk more red than white. And partly because of all the uncertainty around sweetness, especially in my early wine-drinking days when I turned my nose up at any hint of sweetness, thinking that made me more sophisticated. More than [...]

Here’s another Slovenian wine for the Oddball series. This one blends Welshriesling with Sauvignon Blanc. Welshriesling is not Rielsing with a funny accent. It’s an unrelated (and inferior) grape grown in places like Austria, northern Italy, and a bunch of old Iron Curtain countries: Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania and Czech Republic. According to Oz Clarke’s Grapes [...]

A few days before the big #SauvBlanc twitter tasting a few weeks back, I found myself without any Sauv Blanc in the house (a pretty rare occurrence). I didn’t have time to make a run to one a proper wine shop, so I picked up something on my weekly grocery shopping trip. I don’t recall [...]