Tag Archives: California

Red Lion Cabernet Sauvignon 2006

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If there were ever a shining example of a vin d’effort, this wine is likely it.

Unfathomably black in the glass, this wine smells damn good in exactly the same way that breast implants look good: you can’t help but like it, even if you recognize that those tell-tale half-grapefruits aren’t even remotely, you know, human. The color of this wine is straight up sci-fi, the color reminiscent of an inky black, otherworldly, viscous ooze that looks like it’s about to do something nasty to Tasha Yar. The nose is moderately complex, with suggestions of Asian spices in a forgotten cedar box that someone’s stashed in amongst strawberries mixed with rising dough; yes, it’s very Cabernet after a fashion, but entirely without the green, leafy notes that so often add interest. At times, though, it reminds me of a shoeshine stand in a dusty Delta town not too far away from Napa; at other times, it tends towards stewed prunes and pencil shavings. You have to admit, though, that this wine is incredible value for what it is: with all of this going on, I’d expect the price tag to be twice as much.The progression of the wine is simultaneously surprising and trite. Wonderfully balanced the initial impression (fleeting, mind you!) is of a vapid California cabernet, quickly resolving into something much more interesting, with sneaky acidity firming up against a billowing cloud of smoky red fruit, which suddenly vaporizes into an entirely delicious, savory, dark expression of Cabernet that – although it doesn’t really seem particularly Californian, or particularly anywhere in particular at all – is admittedly entirely fabulous. It smooths out on the finish even further, transmogrifying into something that damn near approaches pure pleasure, going on for an age, suggesting nothing more than raspberry liqueur, baker’s chocolate, and perhaps star anise. Tannins make themselves known, yes – who snuck in and put socks on all my teeth? – but they’re fully ripe and in their right place here.

To sum up, this is for my money a home run, no questions asked. Sure, there’s no real sense of place or any strange, haunting beauty here, but honestly: do we always, always have to care? Surely it’s sometimes enough to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the contents of a shrink-wrapped magazine or bottle of well-crafted wine? Isn’t it?

R Wines
Price: $13
Closure: Stelvin
Source: Retail

Justin Cabernet Sauvignon 2006

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Lovely inky black in the glass, this wine promises to be a good one, if only by the winery’s reputation and the fact that nearly half of their entire production is this wine. Pouring it into the glass, I was a little bit surprised that it seemed a bit watery, but the label tells me that this is only 13.5% abv, which seems odd given the place it came from – I’ve had a lot of Paso Robles zinfandel that contains a guaranteed hangover in every bottle – but then again the Agent for Change cab I had from Paso was also held to these relatively low alcohol levels.Anyhow! There’s a very fresh, simple smell to this wine, tinged with an edge of coconut-fruity-banana that seems to promise a good time. (I ordered this through the mail, but I almost imagine this being packaged in a plain brown wrapper at a liquor store – there’s just something risqué about it.) The oak on the nose seems a bit raw; it’s more reminiscent of bourbon than Bordeaux.Somewhat voluptuously overwrought at first, my initial impression is of a blowsy, gone-to-seed wine – it’s all very louche in a Plato’s Retreat kind of way. Yes, there’s enough acidity here to stop the wine from being completely flabby, but it strikes me as a little bit harsh and not particularly well integrated. Flavors, such as they are, seem to be stuck in a high-pitched giggle more appropriately found in strawberry fruit leather; that being said, the wine does display some complexity after aeration, but it’s all a lot like listening to the Bee Gees: yes, the singing is good, but it’s all disconcertingly way high up there. I’d ordinarily prefer some bass to counterbalance all the treble, but I’m not getting it much here. Tannins are present, but they seem clunky and somehow flown in from another wine entirely; there’s almost a hard Loire edge to them, but only just.All in all, drinking this wine is rather like Cubist art: all very well and good if you’re in the mood for it, but sometimes you just want to look at something pretty. This is not a bad wine; there is quality here, but I’ll be damned if I can puzzle it all back together right now. Ultimately, this is probably best drunk with steak: it’s got a sort of sweetness that is initially pleasing, but on its own it just doesn’t work.Justin
Price: $25
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail

Qupé Marsanne 2007

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It looks like I have Jancis Robinson to thank for one more thing: the third edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine has turned out to be not only an invaluable reference but also heavy enough to serve as a flat surface to park my wine while lounging on the sofa, MacBook at hand, to blog.My first, fleeting impression was of dried sugared pineapple, but that quickly dissipated in favor of something not unlike popcorn flavored jellybeans. In short, it smells strangely buttery, salty, mineral, sweet, tropical, nutty, and flowery all at the same time – overwhelming, almost, but of course charming as well.The palate is much more restrained than the aromatics; it tastes much more French than Californian, with firm structure and a mouthfeel reminiscent of beeswax. The finish is lovely, with hints of wildflower and length to spare; acidity is present, not unsettling; color is elegantly pale (think Tilda Swinton, perhaps).If this wine were French, it’d cost a hundred bucks; this wine isn’t, and I’m thinking I should lay some down for a good, long time. Just as Tahbilk marsanne lasts decades, I suspect this one would as well.Qupé
Price: $14
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail

Ridge Zinfandel East Bench 2007

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There’s a state historic park here in California that covers an old town by the name of Columbia. It’s up in gold rush country a couple hours east of San Francisco, up in the foothills where prospectors first struck gold right around the middle of the 18th century. One of the things I most remember about Columbia – other than having first drunk sherry there long before it was legal for me to have done so – was Nelson’s Columbia Candy Kitchen, which was undeniably awesome when I was a wee pup. As I remember it – and this may well have nothing to do with the place as it actually exists – it was a large, cavernous place with wooden floors and a heavy smell in the air of sweet things: candy apples, candy buttons, horehound, taffy, oddball things you don’t see much these days. It smelled of grandmotherly hard candies, of cherries there only to hind the medicine hiding behind the surface. It smelled of abandoned paperboard suitcases, starched shirt collars, and residue scraped off of antimacassars. In short, it smelled… adult.Similarly, this Ridge wine crosses over from simple cherry-candy over to liniment and unguents only to pause for a second and then head right back over to bright cherry-berry fruit. There’s just a hint of a fresh-coconut note there as well, injecting humor into it all; this could pass for a Trader Vic’s concoction even though I doubt it’d taste better in a Tiki mug.It’s a beautiful deep-black crimson; again, it looks like something of another time, less like wine than tonic. There’s also a mesmerizing note of Christmas pudding, of dates and brandy and spice. One sip, though, and you’re transported into something far more outré than imagined: this wine is frickin’ huge, simultaneously fruity, bracing, lush, and yet strangely well within balance, relatively high alcohol and extract notwithstanding. Definitely porty to an extent, the wine drinks relatively straightforwardly until the finish, which is something like prune salt-water taffy (think richly fruited and yet not as sweet as it smells) and lasts for what seems nearly an eternity. All the while, there’s enough tannin here to ground it ever so lightly; at times, it seems like the acidity’s just a wee bit out of balance but that’s a minor quibble. This wine succeeds where so many others fail: it’s rich, complex, affordable, and also very much typical of a place (in this case, the Dry Creek Valley). Yes, California is well known for Napa cabernet sauvignon, but it’s wines like this that I think are our real strength: there are plenty of places that grow good cabernet, but only a handful where Zinfandel shines so beautifully as it does here.Ridge
Price: $30
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail

Agent for Change Zinfandel 2006

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Lovely, sweet, fruit-cake rich, with warm cocoa notes and candied fruit peel on the nose, this smells very much like a good, standard quality Paso zin; somehow, however, the alcohol has gone missing alone the way, resulting in a hole in the nose where the painful alcohol hit should’ve been, replaced instead by a label declaring this is only 13.5% abv, making me wonder if someone’s hiding a spinning cone around here or what…Still, what a love nose. Very soft and plush, it reminds me of  cru Beaujolais mixed with Angostura bitters, with slight hard earthy edges pushed up against the sweet red fruits. The palate doesn’t disappoint either, with simple, cheery red fruits ‘n berries served up on a nicely toasty background. Still, though, it seems to lack some of the weight I’d normally associate with zinfandel – or, rather, with higher alcohol levels. It all finishes relatively simply, and it seems like there’s something missing there too – either acidity or alcohol – but still: it’s a minor complaint. On the whole, this is good stuff – especially if you’re not a fan of one-glass-and-you’re-blotto California monster zinfandel. Most of what makes them good is still here, but you could actually consider finishing the bottle with your partner on a school night without worrying about the morning after.Bonus marketing spin: a portion of the sales price of every bottle goes to non-profit organizations of some kind. I’m cynical enough not to particularly care about that – I mean, if I honestly cared, I’d just write a check to the Avon Foundation and go buy a cheap bottle of wine – but honestly, why not? You’re probably not going to find a better Zin for this money, so you might as well go for it.Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.Agent for Change
Price: $14
Closure: Cork
Source: Sample

Rodney Strong Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon 2006

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Continuing along the lines of yesterday’s wine, this is another ‘high-end’ wine that appears to be primarily stocked by supermarkets. Again, good friends brought this bottle over to share with a pizza, but we wound up drinking something else entirely, so here I am sitting at home enjoying this one on my own for a change.Optically less severe than the Gallo, this wine looks something like dark coffee with a reddish tint. It’s got very obvious legs as well, which (to me) promises a rockin’ good time; all I need to do is find some barbecue or pizza and I suspect I’d be set. The nose is vaguely woody but ultimately dumb; it’s like candy floss/cotton candy in a walk-in, wood paneled closet. Not bad, but again not really wine (at least not to me).The surprise comes when you actually drink some of this: it’s bright and acidic, with pretty firm tannins supporting it all. However, it does seem like something’s been kinda fucked with here: the acidity doesn’t seem right for a wine this sweet (acidification?), and the tannins seem flown in from somewhere else entirely; It’s all kind of disjointed and jarring, and after it all quiets down, you’re left with a sense of jammy sweetness and some lingering acidity at the back of your throat. Not really my idea of a good time: if you’re going to go for happy fun time party wines, might as well find yourself a Chris Ringland cheapie, I reckon. Over time, it all gets slightly better, but still: if you’re spending this much money, there have got to be better options. $8 Aussie cab is more fun, and $18 Loire reds are more interesting, to name a couple of other options at random.All in all, this reminds me of an interesting experience I had many years ago at a Bay Area winery. An old friend (and my then-current boss) was winemaker there, and he went through a lot of work to save some wines that hadn’t turned out quite right the first time around. Using every trick he learned at UC Davis, he was able to deliver something drinkable – but only if you didn’t think about it too much. If you did, you began to realize that Mother Nature could never have produce what you were drinking, which made for a surreal experience.This wine is the equivalent of bad techno.PS. As an aside, this has been a hell of week for cork taint: both a bottle of Dolium Malbec 2002 (which I brought back from the winery, even) and a bottle of the Olivier Guyot Marsannay Favieres Vielles Vignes 2005 were dead on arrival. Grrr. Thankfully, however, Ed at The Wine Exchange cheerfully refunded my $15 for the Marsannay – now that’s good customer service. 🙂Rodney Strong
Price: $18
Closure: Cork

Bonny Doon Old Telegram 2000

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I’ll be the first to say that this wine isn’t pretty. Holding up to the light, it’s murky – it looks like river dregs, Delta muck, sediment. It all looks either very unsettled or in the process of disintegrating. Still, can’t say that I remember what this wine was like when it was young, so who cares, right?Right off the bat, the first thing I notice about the nose is that oddball candy-coated playtime of a nose that I associated with Bonny Doon’s experiments with micro-oxygenation from ten or so years back. There’s a strange, fruity, children’s-candy effect that I never particularly cared for; I prefer my mataro earthier, not fruitier. Once you get past it, though, there’s a lightly roasted/smoked coffee effect that’s intriguing, parried by a sort-of wild strawberry ostrich jerky effect. Curious.Relatively light-bodied at first, the wine quickly turns spicy in the mouth, tasting of candied orange peel and slab smoked bacon. Even if it seems light at first, solid tannins make themselves known soon enough, grounding it all in a heavy-handed, gripping manner perhaps better suited to the Detroit police. There’s a rich sweetness to the fruit yet, though, which rides above it all, lending it an air of deeply unserious seriousness that really doesn’t help pull it all together.To me, this wine tastes like the sort of thing a middle-aged winemaker would make: they’ve had some career success, sure, and the cognoscenti are familiar with the brand, but instead of doubling down and recommitting to better wines, middle-aged boredom has set in and now you’re playing around with shiny new toys instead of soberly paying attention to what you’re doing. I’m not disappointed by this wine – I think it’s decidedly unique and I’m glad it exists – and yet it seems that it’s a failure of sorts – a failure to pay attention to what Nature gave you and making that wine instead of whipping our your lab kit and making a wine that could only have been made technologically. What you get is interesting, sure, but it seems alienated from itself (alas, my attention span for Marxist theory was woefully short at university, so I can’t spin this out into a class critique of a wine that was forced to be something it wasn’t, alienating it from its true nature in the process).With more air, there’s a dark smoky fatigue here that suggests the wine is reaching its end of life (later rather than soon, I suspect). I’m enjoying it with pasta and red sauce; the meat of the wine is amplified by the meatballs and vice versa. If you’ve got this, drink it up now.Bonny Doon Vineyard
Price: $30
Closure: Cork

Ridge Buchignani Ranch Carignane 2004

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“What is the point of Carignane?”That’s how I was originally going to begin this review. However, I then remembered that I’d already written about this wine a few months ago – and frankly, why revisit it? I said it was naff, right? A historical curiosity, nothing special, purple and childish?I am however in the habit of listening to my elders, to people that know far, far better than I; last week, I was reading through Randall Grahm’s tweets and noticed that he had this to say about carignane:Carignane is the quintessential Ugly Duckling grape, maybe the best thing grown in CA. [link]With that in mind, I’ll try to approach this wine differently this time around. So what does this wine smell like? Mineral? “Rocks and raspberries?” To me, yes, I suppose, but paying closer attention yields smells of expensively tanned leather. Leaning in further, it’s more suggestive of very mild beef jerky with something like lavender-infused caramelized sugar, a strange mix of the meaty and the floral, dusty leather bindings in a gentleman’s library with delicate French confections.Drinking some at last allows me to experience the full complexity of what’s on offer; yes, it can be drunk as a “quaffing” or “bistro” wine (as the back label suggests) – it’s rich, full, grapey, alcoholic, all of those good things you want with your steak frites on a Friday night – but is there more? Well, yes. It’s just speaking a language that doesn’t come naturally to me. There’s a softness that suggests the wine’s peaking in terms of its development; tannins are fully resolved and it’s an ethereal kiss, a sly glance from someone attractive who’s just walking out of the ballroom. Is there real minerality? Well, it’s not as in your face as a Loire red, but yes, listen carefully and you’ll sense it, speaking quietly as the Sonoma hills in Indian summer do. Although there’s that suggestion of sweetness on the nose, there isn’t really any in the wine; the roundness is from ripe fruit, yes, but it’s not porty, not overwrought. More than anything else, though, there’s a sense that it’s too easy to ignore this as something ordinary, something simple, something unexceptional… and much like that quiet girl in the back of the class who you didn’t notice at first, time spent with her, oblivious to questioning looks from your classmate, might just turn into something beautiful.Buy this, drink it, repeat until you get it. That’s the point of carignane.Ridge
Price: $24
Closure: Cork

DXG Yorkville Highlands Rosé of Syrah 2007

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Reading between the lines on the beautifully designed label, it would appear that this is another attempt at selling cleanskins (i.e. wines sold not by the wineries that made them, but by third parties that resell them under the own labels) in the USA. Although K&L have been doing this for years under the Kalinda label, and although the Cameron Hughes label has been around for a couple of years, I have yet to see anyone selling wines cheaply. Instead, what you generally get is relatively high end wines at relatively high prices – this, it seems to me, is a mite perverse in what’s generally acknowledged as pretty crappy economic times. After all, a California pink wine at $10 is still relatively expensive considering that this wine was displayed near $7.50 wines from Argentina, $5 wines from Australia, and of course our very own white zinfandels at $3.So how’s the wine?First off, the color is entrancing. It’s a wonderful, dark pink that’s similar to pomegranate juice.  It’s not quite so dark that it could be mistaken for a thin red Burgundy, but just barely. The nose is medicinal, shot through with camphor, cotton candy, roasted corn, and a fair whack of spicy black pepper.Tasting at first of nothing but fresh wild strawberries, it’s unsettlingly like a gourmand perfume aimed at teen-aged girls. That passes quickly, though, calming down into rhubarb-ridden cream shot through with subtle spicy notes; the texture is fairly serious for a pink wine, with a sort of supporting tannic note that gives it a certain gravitas. There’s a brief uptick in acidity on the finish, giving it a much needed freshness, and yet the finish does go on for a while, restating the themes of the wine – pepper, strawberry, rhubarb – with a steely repetition of serious, serious, serious. This could be the closest pink wine to a red wine that I’ve ever experienced; it’s an interesting style to say the least. Whether or not it’ll work for you isn’t something I can guess, but I can say that you’re getting a hell of a lot of wine for your money here. Yes, I still wish we had a cleanskins industry of Australia scale, but as long as we have wines like this available for not-outrageous prices, I’m more than satisfied with what we’ve got.Piaceri Wines
Price: $10
Closure: Synthetic cork

Toasted Head Chardonnay 2007

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I haven’t had a glass of this wine in a decade; it still has one of my favorite labels in the state (a fire-breathing bear), but I rarely shop at the places where you’d ordinarily see this (either Costco or dining-experience-style restaurants). Having a look at the bottle just now, it sure looks like the brand has gone walkabout over the last ten years: the address on the back is Woodbridge, which seems wrong; this was originally a R. H. Phillips wine, and the last time I remember researching them, they’d just completed an IPO and were (alongside Mondavi) one of the few California wineries that was publicly held.It looks like Constellation Brands now owns R. H. Phillips; strangely, Toasted Head seems to have been divorced from that brand entirely and is now a brand of its own. They own Mondavi now as well, and I’m guessing they’re now making this stuff in bulk out of the old Mondavi facilities in Woodbridge, hence the address change on the back of the bottle. So, finally, what we have here is a case of a small family winery having done well in the 90’s – and wound up as a virtual label with no real sense of place in the ’00s. Strange.So how is the wine? The nose is agreeably simple, smelling largely of cashew, white peach, and a little bit of banana. Fat and a little unwieldy in the mouth, it heads towards a bananas Foster finish with just a hint of oak propping it all up like a vinuous underwire bra. That being said, it isn’t really perceptibly sweet, which is good, and it does taste good enough to finish the bottle. I suppose what this is is your basic, standard-quality California chardonnay with buttery, oaky fruit and no distracting flavors (read: subtlety or nuance) to get in the way of your enjoyment. To be honest, this is strikes me as a cut-rate Kendall-Jackson Vintners Reserve chardonnay: if you like that, you’ll like this just as well – and not only is the bottle more beautiful, it’ll cost you a few dollars less. This really is exceptional value.Toasted Head
Price: $7
Closure: Cork