3 Reasons Puech-Haut Prestige 2009 Is Top Holiday Wine

Tweet Imagine the convenience of someone delivering two cases of one very perfect red wine to your front door every year at the start of the holiday season.  Not 100 point and $6,000 a case perfect, just perfectly versatile, delicious, and affordable red wine for all the usual and familiar holiday situations. Something to serve at [...]

Grace Connects Wine & Winemaker

Tweet I do not know Angela Osborne personally but we have had a few email exchanges and I have tried her A Tribute to Grace Grenache from the Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard. The wine literally shook my senses and turns out to be unlike any other US made Grenache I have ever tasted.  The 2008 vintage example [...]

Palate Press Uncorks Swartland Revolution

Tweet Earlier this summer (winter in South Africa’s Swartland wine growing subregion) I had the chance to mix it up with the drivers of the Swartland Revolution; the winemakers.  Ever since I began to comprehend the unusually high authenticity and quality levels of the upstart region’s wines, I started sharing information about individual pieces of [...]

Top Three Wines of July: Swartland, Minervois, Santa Barbara

Tweet This month’s top wine wrap up spans three continents including Africa, Europe, and North America.  These are all remarkably compelling wines pushing farming and élevage to the edge of their regions’ traditional boundaries.  While they are all urgently recommended, securing a bottle or two of Testalonga El Bandito or A Tribute to Grace will require intense investigation [...]

A Tribute To Grace Tops Wine Blogger Conference Wines

Tweet On a weekend in Charlottesville, VA with scores of  domestic and international wine pouring sponsors, ballroom wine fests, fleets of buses covering area wineries, half a dozen restaurant wine lists, and countless treasured bottles transported by wine bloggers from their personal cellars, I had the prettiest and most compelling wine poured for me by [...]

Loomis Vineyards Achieves Early Statement of Style

Tweet I like discovering young wineries working their own infant vineyards as wine makers unveil unique styling and a reliance on their own maturing vines that are not yet naturally producing lower yields with more intense and concentrated fruit.  While it can take years to release the untold treasures embodied in newly planted land, it [...]

Three Sparkling Wines Upstaged By Patricia Boyer-Domergue’s Profound Minervois

Tweet We rightfully anchored our post graduation ceremony celebration with a potpourri of sparklers including two that previously received favorable reviews here, NV Chidaine Montlouis Methode Traditionelle Brut Loire and NV Aubry Brut Premier Cru, Champagne plus a really interesting and exotic sparkling Malvasia Dell’Emilia value that you will read about at WineZag soon. But on this late [...]

Languedoc Tasting: Expressive Wines and Multiple Styles

Tweet Some things about the Languedoc just don’t seem very French at all.  Frontier lands, Spanish culinary influence, Gypsy lore, uncontrolled wine production, and more.  In a recent visit to the edge of the region’s northwest Mediterannean shoreline, Camargue, we reveled in almost unlimited sightings of wild white horse and pink flamingo from the comfort [...]

Two Styles of Cotes du Rhone for Now and Later

Tweet I can’t have enough transforming wine in my cellar; tannins melting and fruit evolving creating advanced and sensually pleasing characteristics to be enjoyed down the line.  I am hooked on it.  But inventory and time is money and it makes sense to seek out efficient cellaring strategies.  Buoyed by just enough concurrence from fellow Rhone fans [...]