VINEgeek

Through six weeks of the Mourvèdre Monday series, one would be pardoned for wondering why I didn’t name it Monastrell Monday, as four of the first six wines were from Spain, where Monastrell is the name for this grape. Finally, in week 7, we make it to Bandol. This is the most important region for [...]

Producer: Two Angels
Grapes: 100% Petite Sirah
Appellation: High Valley. This is an AVA within the Lake County AVA in California.
Vineyard: The grapes are sourced from Shannon Ridge Vineyards at nearly 2200 feet, which they claim are the highest in California. (It’s not called High Valley for nothing.)  Soils are volcanic and gravelly. A nice bit of [...]

It’s back to California for today’s Mourvèdre Monday post, specifically Paso Robles. Though I first fell in love with Mourvèdre via the old vines examples from Contra Costa County, Paso Robles is a hotbed of Rhône grape-growing in California. Edward Sellers is a Rhône-style specialist in Paso, with a focus on blends vs. varietal bottlings (though [...]

I received this bottle as a sample provided by the winery.
Producer: Story Winery (these guys own the www.zin.com domain, so they’re serious about Zin)
Grapes: 100% Zinfandel
Appellation: Shenandoah Valley, an AVA within the Sierra Foothills appellation. Officially called “California-Shenandoah Valley” to distinguish it from Virginia’s “Shenandoah Valley” AVA). Gold Rush country.
Vintage: 2006
Vineyard: The vines in the [...]

Just after the New Year, I decided to make 2010 ‘The Year of Mourvèdre‘ for VINEgeek and pledged to institute Mourvèdre Mondays. For this, the first installment, I didn’t want to begin with a top-dog wine (Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape, for example), mostly because I didn’t want the rest of the year to seem like a letdown. [...]

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 [...]

There is very little information about this wine online. It’s not even listed on the importer’s website and the winery’s blog doesn’t say much more than what’s on the label. But it got 90+ points from Jay Miller in the Wine Advocate so I guess that’s why it ended up at Costco. When I saw [...]

The theme of this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday #62 (hosted by Dale Cruse at Drinks Are On Me) is “A Grape By Any Other Name”. The idea is to taste a wine labeled with a lesser known name of an otherwise common grape. Now this is the sort of thing that I’d normally stew over [...]

As sales of Port have been trending downward, many Port houses are using a portion of their grapes to produce red table wines. I like Port, but I drink it maybe a couple times a year and almost always at a restaurant by the glass. So I love this trend. I love that they [...]