21 May 2007
Hints of 2005 Bordeaux
Wine fans everywhere by now have heard of the “hoopla” surrounding 2005 Bordeaux! Buyers and critics alike agree that this could be the best vintage since 1982 or even beyond! Visiting one of my local retailers, I was surprised to see a few bottles already available of this high-hoped vintage since my 2005 futures have an expected arrival between January and July 2008. I picked up the 2005 Chateau Graves du Privera, Medoc, Cru Artisan.
The text “Cru Artisan” caught my eye, a designation I had not seen before with Bordeaux. After some quick research, I learned the following tidbits.
13 May 2007
"AMICI WINE CLUB" Founded!
Named after one of our first wines and in the spirit of good friends, the “Amici Wine Club” met for the first time this weekend and it was a complete success. For a while I have been wanting to start a wine tasting group with friends in an effort to simply learn more about wine and share the fun that is wine with friends!
SCORES AND NOTES ON ALL AMICI WINE CLUB BOTTLES
The club has…
15 April 2007
A vertical tasting (of course, done blindly)
A recent offering from wine.woot.com (good site, check out the weekly deals) for a vertical trio of wines spawned its purchase and an eventual adventure toward 2 firsts for me…
Comment [2]
31 January 2007
Double-blind red wine tasting
The idea of tasting wines blindly always intrigued me, and the quickest way to participate in one was to host one, something that my fiancee and I happily did recently for some friends and family. I brainstormed many ways to give our tasting a fun twist and came up with an “old world” vs “new world” theme. I would purchase 6 wines…
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21 January 2007
Objective vs Subjective
I pay a lot of attention to the scores wine critics place on bottles. Being very new to wine, these ratings provide adequate guidance to purchasing those valued prize bottles, especially when on a budget. I find it very helpful when retailers offer categories such as “90+ under $20”, this allows the enthusiast to make a purchase less blindly.
A high score, however, does not guarantee you’ll enjoy the bottle. I’ve had plenty of 90+ Wine Spectator rated wines that I found tough on my palate. The same goes to critics like Robert Parker and Stephen Tanzer. The truth is that these ratings are the result of one person’s opinion, and you don’t have to be told again, “everybody is different.”
Comment [1]
3 January 2007
Fun and entertaining!
I truly believe, observe, and often say that life is taken too seriously. While we may have many legit reasons to stress, I don’t think wine should be one of them. After all, it is just juice! Wine is FUN! Wine is SOCIAL! Wine UNITES!!!! Ask the generations of families centered around their vineyards in Europe!
Comment [2]
18 December 2006
Educate your palate
Many times I find myself tasting a wine and lacking the ability to accurately depict or even vaguely describe the various flavors within the tinto. Even worse, I will read the professional blurb about a wine I am drinking only to fail to spot any of the flavors when the wine reaches my nose and palate. This usually results either from my personal shortage of relevant descriptive vocabulary or from my simple relative “rookiness” to the wine world. The latter problem has a simple solution: drink more wine; but, for the former issue, my friend Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library TV demonstrated within an amazing episode an excellent solution for educating your palate.
Comment [3]
1 December 2006
Wine is land and life
“I like to think about the life of wine… How it’s a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks, like your ’61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.” -Maya, Sideways (2004)
The quote above I think summarizes very well my fascination with wine, my constant desire to learn about it, explore it, taste it, and share it…
Comment [3]