Category Archives: USA

Lowden Hills Merlot 2003

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Having spent four years of my life in Washington state – and three months of that getting a Wine Trade Professional certificate at Central Washington University – I believe that I was finally able to get a sense of what Washington wines are like.Although the terroir of the place is dodgy – the Missoula floods pretty much guaranteed that there isn’t very much of interest going on there, at least in terms of soils – there’s something about the climate that seems to determine a very specific style. Washington is a far bigger state than Seattle and the Puget Sound; yes, Seattle is cold and rainy much of the time (heck, even Dan Savage is starting to complain about the lack of a summer so far this year), but once you cross the Cascades towards Yakima, Red Mountain, and Walla Walla, things change dramatically. Although the winters are cold enough to cause serious damage to grapevines every decade or so, the summers are plenty warm – and balanced out by some seriously cool nighttime temperatures.There’s a certain treble-ness to a lot of Washington wines; the cool nights seem to imbue them with a nervy, electric energy that is a wonderful complement to the dark, ripe character of the fruit. Thanks to the economic boom of the 1990s – and, in Washington at least, the continued good times of the early 2000s (due in large part to corporations such as Starbucks, Amazon.com, and Microsoft), there’s been a massive explosion in the number of wineries up there, many of them family farms trying to cash in on the huge upturn in Washington’s wine quality by making their own wine instead of selling to huge corporations such as Chateau Ste. Michelle.I ventured out to Walla Walla for their annual barrel tasting weekend twice: both times, I marveled at ad hoc helicopter landing pads set up for wealthy tourists from the Puget Sound, just-opened wineries done up in a fake Tuscan style, complete with $75 syrah from two-year old vines. I also basked in the hospitality of some old-time Walla Wallans (thanks again, Brian!) who took pride in the simple fact that some of the local wineries had been there for some time and didn’t charge ridiculous sums of money for some very impressive wines (the Glen Fiona syrahs from the late 1990s come to mind).Anyhow: the first thing that sprang to mind upon smelling this wine was whoa, this couldn’t be from anywhere other than Washington – and it smells like a small family operation on one of their first vintages. There’s a certain smell here that gives it away – it smells like immaculately grown fruit combined with good quality barrels and perhaps a certain amount of what, for a lack of a better word, I’ll call manipulation. Mind you, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s just that some wines smell as if they were effortlessly made directly from the soil of the vineyard (cf. Clonakilla, Ridge, Vieux-Telegraphe, others). This doesn’t.Instead, it’s got a kind of bacon bits aroma to it, combined with sweet oak of some kind; it also has the same, high-toned note to it you’d expect from a quality Washington wine. It also has a very ripe, jammy, Red Vines-esque heft to it that is rather more appealing than I’m describing it, I assure you.It’s agreeably balanced in the mouth, with steely acidity, good, ripe fruit, and a surprising hint of mintiness or eucalyptus there as well. Oddly enough, it seems like it could also work as a chewing gum flavor for adults – something in the clove gum mold of the 1940s. Tannins are moderate and unintrusive, the finish is pleasant if a touch short, and overall it’s, alas, nothing special, really. Still, that isn’t to say it’s a bad bottle of wine – far from it. What you’re getting here is – in my opinion at least – typicité, Walla Walla style, and at a much fairer price than most of ’em.Lowden HillsPrice: US $24Closure: CorkDate tasted: June 2008

Ridge Monte Bello 2005 + Quixote Petite Sirah 2004

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You’ll have to excuse me, but last night was the last night my parents were in town – they live in London and were visiting San Diego, so I had to whip out some of the awesome ‘cuz my Dad likes a good bottle of wine every bit as much as Julian and I do. Given that I was concentrating more on the company than the wine, I decided not to write about these two wines right away: as a result, what you’re getting isn’t a proper tasting note, but rather further musing on the difference between these two wines.

We began the evening by opening the Monte Bello. This is arguably one of the finest wines produced in California; every once in a while, usually when I’m feeling flush with cash and slightly inebriated, I’ll cave to Ridge’s offer of Monte Bello futures (sadly, they aren’t really doing that any longer; instead, you have to sign up for a subscription program). $400 or so gets you a six pack, or 12 half bottles; then, you have to wait a couple of years until they deliver the bottles to your door. At this point, I’ve got some of the 2000 and 2001… and the 2005 was delivered to my office last week.

Within a few minutes of opening the Monte Bello, I flew off onto one of my usual spiels about how truly excellent wines can almost be diagrammed on staff paper – there should be different things going on in different registers. Perhaps there’s some floral perfume in the treble, and some deep, heavy bass in the sense of wood or roasted coffee; at the very least, there should be a common thread in the midrange that holds the entire wine together.

The 2005 Monte Bello was… very difficult to accurately describe. There was definitely a vanilla perfume above the entire construction, with some classic cabernet sauvignon fruit, with an underpinning of dirty violet perfume (presumably the petit verdot). No matter how many times we smelled that wine, all of its components drifted in and out of focus, perfectly balanced, perfectly harmonious. You had the rich, mulberry (and very, very young!) notes some times; other times, you mostly smelled vanilla, sandalwood, and eventually camphor. It was incredible.

My Dad and I decided it would be interesting to set our glasses aside for a while – we wanted to see what would happen with an hour or two of air – so we did, and went for the other bottle I’d grabbed from the cellar: a Quixote petite sirah. Both of these wines are roughly in the same price range: $33 for a tenth of the Monte Bello, and $60 for the Quixote. Both of these wines are hugely enjoyable. Both of these wines will probably send shivers down your spine with sheer physical delight. And yet, only one of these wines is a great wine.

The Quixote was huge. Heck, my Dad’s teeth went dark purple in a few minutes. It’s a massive, hulking wine: very rich, obviously very expensive, and with an overwhelming sense of espresso towards the finish. It screams California: this isn’t a Rutherglen durif, not even close. It’s ripe – not hyperripe in the Barossa sense – and it’s obviously been raised in the best French barrels money can buy. The tannins are fine, sweet, and delicious.

What’s missing is of course a sense of place. Just as a wine like the Mollydooker Carnival of Points (er, Love) can be huge, intense, delicious, and all of those good things, the Quixote petite sirah is huge, intense, delicious, and a visceral thrill. I kept thinking of Robert Musil, though: this is a wine without qualities. That is, it doesn’t appear to come from anywhere: this is what happens when you take a plant, apply the most awesome growing technology (canopy management, microirrigation, whatever) imaginable, stick it in the most expensive barrels you can find, and then bottle it in bottles with exquisite labels. By the time we finished the bottle, we had gotten over the initial thrill of it, and began to wonder… is that all there is?

We then went back to the Monte Bello. Two hours’ time had caused the wine to soften appreciably; my Dad described it as “sensuous,” and I wouldn’t disagree. Unusually for so-called New World wines, the Ridge seemed carefully designed and constructed to express beauty, not power: more importantly, it tastes like itself and not like any other wine out there. The 2000 and 2001 both had the same, impossible to describe feeling to them… a feeling that what you’re drinking couldn’t possibly be duplicated anywhere else on Earth. Just as with a Hunter semillon or a good Burgundy, you just knew that you were drinking an incredible wine from a place like no other on Earth.

This is the difference between the excellent and the great: complexity, harmony, balance, and fidelity to place.

Ridge + Quixote
Price: US $33 (375 mL; futures price) + US $60
Closure: Cork + Stelvin
Date tasted: March 2008

Ridge Vineyards Carmichael Zinfandel 2005

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For the first time in several months, I experienced a brief shiver of pleasure just smelling this wine. That doesn’t happen often, and the list of wines that have had that sort of visceral effect on me is still fairly short (even after a decade’s worth of sporadically heavy drinking).Ahem. Where was I? It smells like… baked goods? Tarte tatin? Some sort of flower, not rose, but heavier? And would you believe it, finally a wine that actually smells like delicious freshly cooked bacon? I swear I’ve had dozens of French syrahs and Aussie shirazes that claimed to smell like bacon, but none have… until now. Wow. It’s like Farmer John pitched in at the winery. Whoa. On the next sniff, it’s gone again, and this time it smells like Zwetschgenkuchen – freshly baked German plum tart. Oh man. This is amazing. It moves on again, this time to Czech morello cherries fresh from the jar (!), or maybe even baker’s chocolate – the kind you only eat once as a child before discovering it tastes nothing like it smells. It just keeps going and going, changing every few minutes.And I haven’t even tasted this stuff yet.It’s not as heavy as I would have suspected – in the mouth it’s almost more like velvety, silky soft raspberry cordial, hugely surprising. There are no rough edges… but the finish hangs in there for quite a while before resolving itself in an almost woody note of cloves and burnt sugar. There’s almost a coconut shaving note there as well… definitely American oak in play here, no doubt about it. (I cheated before writing that down: yes, there is.) Coming back to it again, the next time it’s almost like cinnamon-specked candy I remember from faux pioneer mercantiles in the Gold Rush country of California: sugar with what would taste like imperfections in modern candy, but subtly delicious in a historic context. Blackstrap molasses, nutmeg, cherries, sweetness, and gentle acidity weaving around it all. There are tannins here as well, but you wouldn’t notice them unless you paid careful attention; they’re beautifully integrated and lend a fascinating sense of traditionality to what, I suppose, is hardly a traditional wine… unless you’re a Californian like myself, in which case you wish you could hand deliver a bottle of this to any European who pooh-poohs the very idea of California wine – or to anyone who thinks that a great Zinfandel can’t hold its own with the traditional great wines of the world.Amazing stuff. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like in five years, but I’m going to try and hold on to my other bottle in hopes of finding out for myself.


Price: US $30
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: January 2008

Bonny Doon Vineyard Pinot Noir Gimelli Vineyard 2005

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Pouring this into the glass, it sure does look like a young wine: bright, purplish red in the glass, there’s almost a cloudiness to it as well. At first smell, it smells kind of stalky or stemmy – it doesn’t smell like straightforward pinot noir by any stretch of the imagination. There’s also a distinct sweet sappiness there, almost like an imaginary pancake syrup you think you remember from your childhood visit to IHOP: and then there’s some sulfur dioxide there as well. Hrm.In the mouth, it’s medium bodied, distinctly fuller than most French pinot, and there’s a sort of sourness there, just a bit, that balances it oddly. And still, sulfur dioxide or something else unpleasant – some kind of reductive note, perhaps? Did I open this one too soon? Or not? There’s also a meatiness here, something like landjäger almost… perhaps that’s what I’m mistaking for sulfur dioxide? It could also be a nearly nitrate sort of feel… Odd.Going back to it again, there’s now a distinct tannic underpinning to the entire adventure, and again a sort of sweet, smoky, meaty goodness there as well. Over the course of an hour, the wine funked out just a bit, and started to get an almost menthol edge to the nose, as well as something approximating Japanese plums. The finish is fairly long, weaving back and forth between somewhat unruly tannins and a (dare I say it) minerally edge to it.I know the winemaker’s been trying to making something that exhibits terroir for years… and I think he may have done it. This isn’t “good” wine if what you’re used to is straight-ahead, jammy sweet California pinot noir, but it’s exceptionally good wine if you believe that grapes can transmit something about the site where they were grown. I’d be very, very curious about where this wine will go over the next decade, but I couldn’t find it in me to wait that long – I’ve already shared my entire stash with friends.

Price: US $30
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: January 2008

Cameron Hughes Lot 44 Rutherford Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

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On the nose, this smells more like fresh, rich cream than anything else, somehow – it’s not what I would have expected from a red wine. There’s also a sharp, dark strawberry note along with black pepper – nearly a balsamic vinegar note, or perhaps shoyu. There seems to be blackberry there as well, and definitely some super smooth French oak. It smells fantastic.In the mouth, what you get is smooth fruit with gently supporting acidity, and then, suddenly, a surprisingly elegant, fairly high toned blackcurrant and damson plum note, something like Guatemalan coffee towards the finish, and then it slinks off to the corner to regroup for the next mouthful. It’s not easy finding a Californian wine this elegant; I imagine it would work incredibly well with pork loin roast or a mushroom ragout.Cameron Hughes

Price: US $15
Closure: Diam
Date tasted: January 2008

Silverado Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon 2003

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My partner saw me dragging this bottle into the kitchen and said “whoa, what is that, forty bucks?” I don’t know how much it cost – I’ll have to look at that up at the end of the review – but yes, the bottle does look fairly impressive in a conservative Napa Cab kind of way, right down to its twenty-fifth anniversary capsule.In the glass, my first thought was nah, maybe thirty bucks? It smells like good, clean, lovely Napa cabernet. More specifically, it smells heavy, dense, mostly fruity, with a fair bit of French oak coming through as well. The color is, however, not as dense as I’ve come to expect, which bodes well. On the palate, it’s brighter than I would have expected, with good supporting acidity and a lovely, fresh taste of ripe fruit (not overripe!), cassis, blackcurrant, and butterscotch, with minimal tannins on the finish… no, wait, there they are; they just take a minute or so to assert themselves. It’s all very California by way of Bordeaux and frankly pretty damned good.Silverado Vineyards

Price: US $35
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: January 2008

Bears' Lair California Merlot 2005

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Sure, the packaging isn’t gonna win any awards – the label looks like it was done in Microsoft Word 97 complete with early dot com era clip art, the capsule is cheap and flimsy, and the cork looks like someone scrounged it from a county fair, but the first whiff ain’t half bad – at first, generic industrial red wine, but then, suddenly, fresh red raspberries appear. There’s also a bit of dusty oak there – I’m assuming chips, shavings, something cheap – but it works just fine. There’s also a hint of sourness as well as something that’s either Mint or Murphy’s oil soap. All in all, surprisingly complex.Color-wise, it’s medium ruby red in the glass, bright and sparkling, pretty enough to look at it. The big surprise is when you take a taste of it: it’s full, round, not half bad. It seems kinda bit flabby – a bit too much residual sugar without supporting acidity, and it’s kind of dumb on the finish; it sticks around longer than you’d probably want it to, which I suppose makes it perfect for holiday gatherings (Kidding! Hi Dad!). It may be nothing special, but it’s better than most wines at this price point.Bears’ Lair (but really Bronco Wine Company)Price: US $3.99Closure: CorkDate tasted: December 2007

Beringer Chardonnay, Napa Valley 2004

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Opening the bottle is about the same as opening that giant can of Libby’s fruit cocktail they’d serve when you were back in elementary school: it smells like pears and cheap corn syrup… not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. There’s also a whiff of something like sulfur dioxide, and some sort of generic oak note (barrel fermentation?), but not a particularly strong one: it smells clean and nonoffensive, like it should be served in a Tokyo pâtisserie.Medium-weight in the mouth, there’s a not particularly appealing woodiness about it (low level TCA taint?), a slight sweetness, and very little interest. The finish is short and perfunctory.Overall, this wine is probably best bought for the tasteful label – just not for the wine itself.BeringerPrice: US $11.99Closure: CorkDate tasted: December 2007

Kent Rasmussen Esoterica Petit Verdot 2004

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There’s a strange peppery note on the nose of this wine – almost like a low quality mixed peppercorn grinder you bought on clearance at Ross Dress for Less last January and promptly forgot about. There’s sort of a soft quality about it too; it’s very hard to describe, but it’s almost like an overstuffed velour couch you passed out on in your parents’ rumpus room back in the 70s. With air, there’s also a decidedly feral funky there as well: fairly meaty, and possibly Brett (enough to provide interest, not enough to really turn you off).It’s fairly full in the mouth, with drying tannins on the finish; the flavor’s very hard to describe, so all I’ll say is that (surprise) it’s no wonder that this grape seldom is vinified and bottled all by itself. It’s not that it’s unpleasant; it’s just that it feels somehow incomplete on its won. There’s kind of medicinal, almost horehound fruitiness, but other than that? I have to admit that I don’t get it.Kent Rasmussen WineryPrice: US $20Closure: CorkDate tasted: December 2007—After I wrote this post, I spent a few hours with this wine… and grew to appreciate it much more. It may not be the most forgiving or enjoyable wine, but at least it seemed to be very much of itself. I suspect that the winemaker did a very good job indeed at allowing the grape to express itself; the naturalness and honesty of the wine was very impressive.

The Sonoma Trail™ Sonoma County Pinot Noir 2006

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I laughed a bit as I poured this wine into the glass: I’d just opened two bottles of Ridge petite sirah and, well, this wine is pretty much at the exact opposite end of the color spectrum of red wines. If the Ridge was coagulating bull’s blood, then this is more like an overbrewed cup of Red Zinger. No, scratch that, it looks like agua de jamaica – a Mexican drink made from hibiscus flowers. This would be the perfect thing to serve to secretly alcoholic Mormons in a Salt Lake City Mexican restaurant, but I digress. I laughed again as I smelled the wine: whoa, this actually smells like Pinot! Score! Most of the time, your ten bucks gets you a grim joke of a clunky red wine as you remind yourself that yeah, this is probably the hardest grape to grow. There’s a lot of rich, fresh red cherries complemented by a very faint hint of clove and spice. It may not be the most complex thing in the world, but at least it smells recognizably like Pinot and has a cheerful, friendly fruitiness about it.In the mouth, it’s ever so slightly thin (which, oddly enough, makes it even more convincing). It’s got a kind of Red Vines-iness to it, but it’s by no means truly sweet, and it ends on a pleasant enough down note, with decent acidity and a finish that does persist for a bit.As my partner just said: hey, this shit ain’t bad. What more could you want for ten bucks?The Sonoma Trail™ [but really fresh&easy]

Price: US $9.95
Closure: Diam
Date tasted: December 2007