Tag Archives: Rose

Price: Over 20 bucks, Tasting Notes

Mourvèdre Monday #30, Double-Feature: Vinavanti Mourvèdre & Rosé

Leave a comment

Vinavanti is an urban winery in San Diego whose Black Label wines emphasize a natural winemaking approach. Knowing my interest in Mourvèdre-based wines, Eric Van Drunen was kind enough to provide two bottles as samples for review. Both the 2011 Mourvèdre and Clara Rosé, sourced from nearby Temecula Valley,  are hand-picked, native-fermentation, unfined/unfiltered, no sulfite wines. Au naturel, mes amis.

Let’s see what’s up.

Vinavanti 2011 Mourvèdre Temecula Valley (Summit Vineyard)

Nearly 100% Mourvèdre, with a little Grenache and Syrah

Dried fruit character — cherries and plums — infused with sweet tobacco. The flavors are rich and full, if a bit murky. Plump and weighty in the mouth with an impressively long finish, leaving a pleasant sense of coffee.

…

Vinavanti 2011 Clara Rosé Temecula Valley

50% Mourvèdre / 50% Grenache

An intriguingly smoky nose leads to a lively palate that manages to hint at berries, melon and citrus all at once. It all rides atop a lovely combed-cotton-textured mouthfeel, finishing dry and reasonably long. Very nice.

…

I enjoyed getting to try these Temecula wines, my first Mourvèdre wines from this appellation as far as I can remember. I especially dug the Clara Rosé, a wine I’d happily enjoy through our long Texas summers.

…

Check out the Vinavanti website to see their full range of wines (which includes one other Mourvèdre-based wine, a GSM) as well as house wines available in refillable one liter bottles.

…

Note: These wines were provided as samples for review. 

 

Price: 16-20 bucks, Tasting Notes

Mourvèdre Monday #28: Bandol Rosé

Leave a comment

With spring just around the corner, my pick for this Mourvèdre Monday is a lovely little Bandol rosé. Bandol, located within Provence, is France’s only wine region where Mourvèdre is the dominant grape. In other words, heaven. I couldn’t find the exact varietal composition of this bottle, but the Bandol AOC regulations require at least 50% Mourvèdre in its red and rosé wines (the rest most often Grenache and/or Cinsault).

Château des Baumelles 2010 Bandol Rosé

The gorgeous coral pink color of this wine entices before the first sniff. Citrus and red fruit drive the nose and palate, with a nice mineral core and plenty of twangy, bright acidity. In fact, one might just call it lip-smackingly good. I wish I had more of this for the Austin spring/summer ahead. If you see some, grab it. Around $18-20. VINEgeek Approved.

 

Price: 10 bucks or less, Tasting Notes

Mourvedre Monday #8: Castaño Monastrell 2007 Rosado

6 Comments

A recent post over at Benito’s Wine Reviews got me thinking about rosé. I need a reminder every once in a while. Almost every time I drink one, I think, “Why don’t I drink this more often?” Then I go back to my reds and whites. So, as I was contemplating what to pull from the cellar for this week’s Mourvedre Monday post, I thought of this rosé (or, more properly, rosado – though they use the term rosé on the back label). I’ve been on the hunt for the red Monastrell from Castaño, which has been recommended to me by several folks following Mourvedre Mondays. I haven’t found it yet in my local shops, but I did come across their rosé, which is how this ended up in my cellar to begin with. I haven’t done a rosé yet in this series, so it seemed like good timing. Let’s check it out.

Producer: Bodegas Castaño – a major producer in Yecla, owning about 10% of the vineyard land in the DO

Grapes: 90% Monastrell, 10% Garnacha

Appellation: Yecla (DO, Spain)

Vineyards: Limestone soils. 25-30 year old vines.

Vintage: 2007

Winemaking: Stainless steel aging (based on 08 info; no info on website about 07)

Alcohol: 13%

Price: Around $10

My tasting notes: The color is quite red for a nominally pink wine. Kinda like the color of red wine in TV sitcoms. (You ever notice that?) It smells like it’s going to be a sweet wine — kind of a burnt sugary thing — but with some good juicy strawberry and raspberry aromas. Also some Slim Jim on the nose (Oh Yeeeeah!). Good weight in the mouth and some strawberry and apple skin notes, but some slightly oxidized flavors as well. Pretty awkward overall.

Overall impression: Not an especially pleasurable beverage. You can do way better than this. C-

Free association: The kind of rosé an undiscerning Stormtrooper might order.

Photo credit: Greg Easton Photography (via Flickr). Be sure to check out the whole Adventures in Stormtrooping series and his other toy collections (prepare to lose an hour or two of your life!).

More info:

Imported by Eric Solomon.

Reviews at CellarTracker (avg: 81) and another at Chicago Vines Society, who liked it more than me.

Price: 16-20 bucks, Tasting Notes

Oddball Wine of the Week: German Pinot Noir Rosé

4 Comments

KesselerRose07_snapshotMost people, myself included, think of white wines almost exclusively when they think of Germany. But they do make wine from red grapes – in particular Pinot Noir, known there as Spätburgunder. In fact, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine (3rd edition, 2006), Spätburgunder is Germany’s third most planted variety and totals over half of the acreage of Riesling. This bottle is a rosé of Spatburgunder.

Producer: August Kesseler

Grapes: 100% Spätburgunder (aka Pinot Noir)

Appellation: Rheingau (Germany)

Vineyards: Assmanshäuser Höllenberg – The vineyards are on south- and southwest-facing slopes with soils of “heat-storing slate-phyllite.” The vineyards includes vines that are up to 100 years old.

Winemaking: This rosé wine is produced via the saigné method. During the production of the winery’s normal Spätburgunder, some of the juice is drained off during skin contact to improve the quality of the red wine. That drained-off juice becomes a rose – a lovely byproduct.

Alcohol: 12.5%

Price: $16.78 at Spec’s in Austin

My tasting notes: The unusual color is one of the things that drew me to this bottle on the shelf. It’s very pale and I wouldn’t describe the color as pink so much as ‘light brown’ – okay maybe copper is nicer way of saying it (sorry no pics before the bottle was empty!).  The nose was rather closed, I had trouble picking up much beyond a general sweetish-wine smell and maybe some strawberry. On the palate, it offers up a pleasant candied apricot flavors and a bit of lime, with an undercurrent of stony minerality. It has 24.4 g/l of residual sugar, so it is sweet, but for me the acidity balances it well and it finishes clean.

Overall impression: A perfectly nice medium sweet rose. Definitely worth a try if you want to experience a different side of Germany, though I’d be more enthusiastic if it were $5 cheaper. B-

KesselerCork_snapshot_cropped

Free association:

Kramer's ASSMAN plates from the Seinfeld episode "The Fusilli Jerry"
Kramer's ASSMAN plates from the Seinfeld episode "The Fusilli Jerry"

More info:

The importer’s tech sheet.

Price: 11-15 bucks, Tasting Notes

Drink Pink, Take 2: Routas Rouviere 2007

Leave a comment

After recently enjoying a rosé, the Bonny Doon Vin Gris de  Cigare 2007, and asking myself why I don’t drink pink more often, I picked up another — this time from France.

routas2007roseProducer: Chateau Routas

Grapes: 40% Grenache, 30% Syrah, 30% Cinsault

Appellation: Coteaux Varois en Provence (AOC, France).

Vinification/Aging: [from the producer’s website] The grapes are cooled and kept on their skins for 12 to 24 hours immediately following harvest, then gently pressed. All the Syrah and half of the Grenache go straight to neutral oak barrels after being pressed where they go through their primary and malolactic fermentation. The remaining Grenache and Cinsault are fermented in stainless steel tanks and blocked from malolactic fermentation. The two different lots are aged separately for five months and blended prior bottling.

Alcohol: 13%

Price: I paid $11 at Spec’s in Austin.

My tasting notes:  Very nice salmon/apricot color.  On the nose, I’m struck first by soapy aromas, like a heavily-scented hand soap — Wild SugarBerry Blossom, or something like that. There’s a bit of crayon box, too. And slightly oxidized aroma like sherry. Maybe I have an off bottle. Mrs. VINEgeek adds that there is a “creek water” element to it. In the mouth, it comes across somewhat sugary on the initial attack, like sugar-coated strawberries and raspberries, followed by bit of that oxidation I smelled (though not so much as to make it unpalatable). It has good acid and finishes dry.

Overall assessment/score: I hesitate to give this a score since there’s a chance I got an off bottle. Even without the possible oxidation, I think it was a bit out of balance. For my palate, this is not nearly as nice as the Vin Gris de Cigare. Here are some other people’s thoughts.  Also, Wine Spectator gave it an 87.

Free association:

who_owns_bath_and_body_works-741300

Price: 11-15 bucks, Tasting Notes

Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare 2007 California

Leave a comment

VinGrisCigare07_bottle_600pxh_300dpiMaybe because I had just posted about the Bonny Doon Mourvedre, I picked up this bottle on a recent replenish-the-stock-of-everyday-wine trip to the wine shop. I don’t drink much of the pink stuff, generally. It has a top-of-mind awareness problem with me. I just don’t think about it very often. When I go to the wine shop or grab a few bottles at the grocery store, I tend to think of value reds from Spain or Portugal or the Rhone, Argentine Malbec, Sonoma Zins. Or whites like New Zealand SBs, Albarino, Vinho Verde, various Alsace whites. Rosé as a category just doesn’t cross my mind.

I opened this one for one of our “grazing dinners” as my wife like to call them: prosciutto and melon, caprese salad, olives, some cheese, etc. Let’s see how it did.

Producer: Bonny Doon Vineyards

Grapes: 47% Grenache, 27% Cinsault, 14% Syrah, 7% Grenache Blanc, 5% Roussanne

Appellation: California (though it’s hard to tell from the label — it just says “Pink Wine of the Earth”)

Vineyards: unknown

Aging: unknown

Alcohol: 13.5%

Price: I don’t remember exactly what I paid, but it’s in the $12-14 range.

My tasting notes: Beautiful color. Strawberries and a distinct balloon aroma on the nose. On the palate, it has nice fruit leaning toward strawberry and cherry and possibly peach. Hints of earth and herbs. There is a really great texture to this wine; good weight. Am I imagining a little bit of an oily quality? Finishes dry and delicious.

Assessment/grade: I really like this. Beautiful color, nice aromatics, great mouthfeel and flavor. What’s not to like? Why don’t I drink this more often? B

Free association:

credit: D Sharon Pruitt (flickr account: Pink Sherbet Photography)
credit: D Sharon Pruitt (flickr account: Pink Sherbet Photography)

More details on Bonny Doon’s sell sheet for this wine here.