This was not in the plans. I had intended to take a week or so off from blogging at the start of the holiday season and then get right back into posting after Christmas; I was mulling over year-end reviews, 2013 wine resolutions and other chronologically appropriate pieces, and I have a sample wine waiting in the wings that I was really excited about delving into. Then the black cloud of sickness settled over my household, afflicting every member of my family (even the dog) one by one. I’m the only person who has managed to avoid coming down with the cold and flu that all of Calgary seems to have at the moment, but my attentions have been steered away from the computer for a couple of weeks now. I’m also going out of town next week for work (anyone have any recommendations for a cool place to have a great glass of wine in Pasadena?), which means it will likely be a calendar month between Pop & Pour articles. Sorry about that. Rest assured that I am still alive and kicking and have not given up blogging forever, and check back mid-month for actual new content. Happy New Year everyone!
Posting Delays (a.k.a. Infirmary Report)
5 01 2013Comments : 2 Comments »
Categories : Miscellaneous
The Mission Hill Pinot Olympics
17 07 2012[The bottles below were provided as samples for review purposes.]
As tactfully mentioned by the disclaimer above, I recently received a mixed six-pack of sampler bottles from the good folks at Mission Hill Family Estate winery in the Okanagan Valley. Two of these bottles, the 2011 Reserve Riesling and the 2011 Five Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc, have received separate PnP review treatment over the past couple of weeks: see here and here for the full write-ups. But I couldn’t bring myself to split up the other four bottles and rate them separately, because it was clear that they belonged together, bound as they were by a common provenance: the family name Pinot. Pinot Grigio, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Noir all sat side by side in the MH sample box like a monochromatic grape rainbow, their shared forename a reminder of their common genetic ancestor (Pinots Grigio and Gris are the same grape, and both PG and Pinot Blanc are mutations of Pinot Noir, which is well-known for being genetically unstable). Since the fortunes of these bottles were clearly tied together, and since it’s July 2012 and our athletes are preparing to head off to London for the Summer Games, I did the only thing I could do and hosted the inaugural Mission Hill Pinot Olympiad at my house over the weekend.
In order: Grigio, Gris, Blanc, Noir. Let the Games begin.
Here’s how our game was played: I invited over a couple of fellow wine enthusiasts, opened all four bottles of MH Pinot, and we tasted through the lineup and separately ranked each of the wines as against its peers, individually coming up with our gold, silver, bronze, and, um, whatever’s below bronze (lead? aluminum? tungsten?) medal choices. I then added all of the placements together to come up with a cumulative judges’ score (for example, a wine ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd by the three different judges would get a total score of 1 + 2 + 3 = 6); the lower the score, the better. The lowest total score won the overall prize, which basically meant that the bottle was emptied the fastest. We tasted the wines from whites to red, lightest to heaviest, and my notes below are in the same order. Who emerged victorious? Read on! Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: 2010, 2011, estate winery, five vineyards, mission hill, okanagan, pinot blanc, pinot grigio, pinot gris, pinot noir, pinot olympics, reserve, value wine, wine blog, wine review
Categories : Miscellaneous, Wine Reviews
“The Wine Is Sound”
21 05 2012
A great bottle, particularly on a restaurant list for $85!
I’ve been travelling quite a bit for work lately (hence the limited and sporadic nature of my posting in May). This past week I was in southern Ontario for a couple days and had the chance to eat dinner with some colleagues at a fantastic modern and wine-centric restaurant in downtown Toronto. The place was built around wine, with a massive temperature-controlled cellar, multiple sommeliers on staff and a huge list of hundreds of bottles covering all points of the vinous spectrum. Even better, instead of marking up their wines to 2 or 3 times retail price as per restaurant standards, this place took a unique approach to their pricing, tacking a fixed $25 markup onto their cost for each wine on their list and charging only that nominally-increased price to diners. They basically offered their entire wine cellar to consumers at corkage prices, which is a phenomenal selling feature and an idea that I hope gains greater traction across the fine dining industry in the near future. As I will describe below, the actual service of the wine was also a thing to behold, with every step from cellar to table carefully handled by a trained sommelier. It was the epitome of restaurant wine experience…but as I left the place, the only thing I kept coming back to was one little thing the sommelier said as he handed me my glass. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 2006, barolo, cannubi, paolo scavino, restaurant wine, sommelier, wine list, wine service
Categories : Miscellaneous
Burgundy: White Tasting, Part IV
26 04 2012OK, time to bring this long and winding road of a tasting review to a close. I had set this up so that we’d end on a high note with the most prestigious bottles in the tasting, the illustrious Grand Crus, but for reasons outside their control, the drinking experience ended up being somewhat anticlimactic. And no, it wasn’t because we were 10 bottles in by this point. That’s what made the next morning anticlimactic.
FOURTH FLIGHT
A.k.a. over $300 worth of wine that really shouldn't be open yet.
Grand Cru vineyards are the rarest, best-positioned, most historic, highest-quality growing areas in all of Burgundy…or at least their classification is meant to reflect as much. As you might expect, Grand Crus come in very limited numbers (only 32 in the Cote d’Or, according to my friend the Internet) and they produce minute quantities of wine each year with prices to match their prestige and scarcity. I didn’t have the overflowing bank account to go too crazy and delve into the elite of white Burgundian GCs — the series of adjoining Grand Crus bearing the “Montrachet” name, including Le Montrachet, Batard-Montrachet, Bienvenues-Batard-Montrachet, etc. are almost certainly the creme de la creme of white Burgundy, but they’re also a hilarious pipe dream in my current circumstances — so instead I turned my focus to two wines from the well-regarded but much cheaper Grand Cru of Corton-Charlemagne. Unfortunately, both bottles were from relatively recent vintages, and we quickly discovered that, with great white Burgundy, time is your ally. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 2008, 2009, alex gambal, bonneau du martray, burgundy, corton-charlemagne, grand cru, white burgundy, wine blog, wine review
Categories : Miscellaneous
Burgundy: White Tasting, Part III
23 04 2012When you spend hundreds of dollars over multiple months to build a tasting, you stretch out the write-up as much as possible. To read the introductory entry in this Chardonnay-fuelled marathon, click here. To read about the jump from basic Bourgogne Blanc to village-level bottlings, click here. To read about the exciting ascent into the mystical and expensive world of Premier Cru white Burgundy, well, keep reading.
THIRD FLIGHT
Time to hit up the big leagues.
Now we officially move from the wines that you might pop open on a Friday or Saturday if you feel deserving after a hard week to the wines that you agonize over opening until just the right spot in their drinking window and just the right occasion because you know your budget won’t easily permit a replacement. The combined retail cost of the flight of 3 village-level white Burgundies was about $180; the combined retail cost of the 3 Premier Crus below is almost double that, $340. This is why I didn’t buy any other wine from January until April. In the third flight of the evening we continued to highlight the top white Burgundy villages of Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet, and instead of village bottlings made from grapes that could be sourced from anywhere in the adjoining area, we narrowed our focus and opened a bottle from each sub-region made from grapes grown in a particular highly-regarded Premier Cru vineyard near the village in question. Every inch of land in Burgundy’s famed Cote d’Or region has been analyzed and classified over centuries, and those areas with the best soils, slopes, exposure to sunlight, drainage and growing conditions were isolated as Premier Cru or Grand Cru. That’s what we’re getting into: hundreds of years of liquid history. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 1er cru, blagny, chardonnay, domaine leflaive, les caillerets, les pucelles, marc colin, pascal marchand, premier cru, white burgundy, wine blog, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
Burgundy: White Tasting, Part II
19 04 2012If you missed the inaugural entry about my dozen-bottle, Bourgogne-Blanc-to-Grand Cru, no-holds-barred white Burgundy tasting, check out my write up of four 2009 Bourgogne Blancs of varying levels of quality and corked-ness here. Tonight we’re jumping right into Flight #2.
SECOND FLIGHT
Slightly out of order: from left to right, Wines 1, 3, 2.
From the basic Bourgognes, we move up one quality level and correspondingly narrow our regional focus with three village-level wines, so called because the village closest to the vineyards where each wine’s grapes were grown is the prominent identifying feature of the classification. Even though Burgundy is a relatively small wine region (the Cote d’Or, the key quality area in the heart of the region, is only around 40 km long and in most spots less than 2 km wide), each of the main wine villages rests on slightly different soils and lies on slightly different aspects, which result in wines with clearly identifiable local identities. I’ve read about the flavour differences among the various villages, but this was my first chance to experience them myself. The plan was to open a bottle each from the three most well-known white wine villages in Burgundy: Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet. However, after checking in with at least half a dozen prominent Calgary wine stores and being unable to locate a village-level Chassagne anywhere, I had to sub it out for Plan B: a village wine from the nearby town of Saint-Aubin, which certainly doesn’t have the reputation of its more illustrious neighbour but which has been known to produce solid whites at (relative) value prices. Would it stand up with the best Chardonnay spots in Burgundy? Um, not so much. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: bourgogne, burgundy, jean-philippe fichet, leflaive, meursault, philippe-le-hardi, puligny-montrachet, saint-aubin, white burgundy, wine blog, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
Burgundy: White Tasting, Part I
12 04 2012
It begins: the first 4 of a dozen hopefully-representative white Burgundies.
I acknowledge that it’s definitely been awhile. I spent my evenings last week cleaning out my basement, then took the Easter weekend off, then faced a total loss of home Internet for a few days, all of which added up to a blog-less streak of epic proportions…sorry about that. To make it up to you, instead of posting a lonely wine review tonight, I’m diving back into action with the first instalment of a multi-part writeup showcasing the results of the long-planned white Burgundy tasting that I’ve had in the works since January and that fulfills a 2012 New Year’s Resolution of mine. More on the planning behind the tasting and the rationale for the various wines selected here.
To summarize for those of you who don’t feel like clicking on the link above, the goal of the tasting was to open bottles from the four main Burgundy quality classifications (Bourgogne Blanc, village level, Premier Cru, Grand Cru), spanning some of the key sub-regions for Burgundian whites (Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, Meursault, Corton-Charlemagne), to see how the wines from each of the sub-areas differed from those from others and how the wines from the same sub-areas varied from producer to producer and between quality levels. I will vouch from experience that delving to the bottom of these analytical quandaries required a lot of drinking. Such is life.
Cork Ratings for wines 1-3: 2.5/10, 6.5/10, 5/10. Meh.
There were 12 bottles open for the tasting and an esteemed panel of four judges with glasses at the ready; we tried the wines in four flights grouped by quality classification, going in ascending order from the base Bourgogne Blancs to the Grand Crus. My actual tasting notes from the first flight are below, and the write-ups of the other three flights will be coming soon to an Internet near you. At the end of the day, while the tasting didn’t instantly reveal the inner mysteries of Burgundy to me, it was a useful (and highly entertaining) crash course on a region that I haven’t spent nearly enough time getting to know. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 2009, alex gambal, burgundy, burgundy tasting, domaine leflaive, pierre morey, roche de bellene, white burgundy, wine blog, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
Coming on Monday: Tasting In Stereo, Part II!
17 03 2012It’s been a few months since the inaugural edition of Tasting In Stereo, a multi-blog collaboration with online wine writer extraordinaire Tyler Philp, founder of North of 9 Fine Wine, that saw us each separately drink a pre-selected bottle, write up our own thoughts independently of each other, and then simultaneously publish our reviews at a set time to give our loyal readers two perspectives on the wine for the price of one. Our first crack at this blogs-colliding concept back in August proved what a valuable tool it was: we reviewed the 2008 Sister’s Run Shiraz from Australia’s Barossa Valley and had fairly contrary impressions of the bottle, but discovered after the fact the context that explained and justified our disparate points of view. Tyler wasn’t a fan of the Shiraz and thought it was overly jammy and alcoholic…because he drank it outside on a hot, sunny evening on his patio. I thought the Sister’s Run was a remarkable bargain that offered great fruit without going overboard…because I drink my reds colder than most people and had this one after it sat for about 30 minutes in my fridge. The whole simul-review turned out to be a cautionary tale about the impact that service temperature can have on any given wine, which was a pretty unexpectedly cool result.
Tyler's site -- click the pic to visit. Well worth the trip!
And now, 6 months or so later, we’re doing it again. Join us on Monday, March 19th at 9:00 p.m. Mountain time, when we will simultaneously unveil on our respective sites our write-ups of the latest lucky bottle we’ve chosen for double scrutiny. I won’t tell you what the bottle is, but I’ll say that it’s German, which means I’m almost guaranteed to be very happy with it. Hopefully Tyler isn’t as biased by Teutonic wine-love and can act as everyone’s voice of reason…you’ll just have to check back Monday to find out!
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Tags: barossa valley, north of 9, north of 9 fine wine, sisters run shiraz, tasting in stereo, tyler philp, wine blogs, wine reviews, wine writer
Categories : Miscellaneous
Burgundy: The Drinking Plan
14 03 2012
Burgundy, I haven't forgotten about you.
At the start of 2012 I waxed poetic about my newfound commitment to drink more Burgundy this year. Two days later, I followed that up with a momentum-sustaining red Burgundy review of the 2009 Alex Gambal “Cuvee Les Deux Papis” Bourgogne Rouge. I have since gone over two months without drinking or mentioning Burgundy at all. What gives? Am I like one of those New Year’s Resolution fitness disciples who goes to one workout on January 2nd and then gets back on the couch? Not exactly. Have I been turned off of the Burgundy quest since early January? Nope. Am I quietly getting the pieces put together on a massive mind-blowing Burgundian wine journey of epic proportions? Oh yes.
My original idea about how to start drinking more Burgundy was to, well, start drinking more Burgundy: head to the France section of various wine shops, buy a few bottles, crack them, write about them. But when I asked Highlander Wine & Spirits’ Matt Browman for advice on how to approach his favourite wine region, he got me thinking in a more structured fashion. His Burgundy drinking plan contemplated village-by-village comparisons of wines from high-quality producers across the entire hierarchy of the area’s wine classification system…but more importantly, it called for all of the all of the test subject wines to be opened AT THE SAME TIME. Faster than you could say “Burgundy tasting party”, I was on board. It’s taken me until now to source (and pay for) the various bottles going into the tasting, but next weekend I’ll have a dozen bottles of top-notch Burgundy open and the wait will definitely be worth it. Here are the official details of the Matt Browman Burgundy Drinking Plan in case you ever feel like trying this yourself: Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: bourgogne blanc, burgundy, burgundy tasting, chassagne-montrachet, corton-charlemagne, drinking plan, puligny-montrachet, white burgundy, wine blog, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
Happy Anniversary, PnP
12 03 2012
I'm reasonably sure that both birthday and anniversary pics are applicable.
I guess it’s sort of trite to wish yourself a happy anniversary, and borderline creepy to do so to a non-sentient website that you’ve created, but here we are. This past Friday, March 9th, was exactly one year from the date of my very first post on Pop & Pour. The brevity of that piece (something that got lost along the way) didn’t conceal my evident ignorance about what I was getting myself into and my indecision about what I wanted this site to be. 152 posts, 730 tags and 181 comments later, it’s turned into more than I ever could have hoped. By big-game Internet standards it’s still a tiny operation, a blip on the search engine radar, but I initially didn’t know if I’d keep up my posting beyond the first couple of weeks, and I especially didn’t know if what I put out there would be picked up by anybody. Twelve months later, I’m psyched that there are people who actually read this blog (I was at a very good friend’s wedding this past weekend, and when I was introduced to the groom’s mom, the first thing she said to me was that she was a regular PnP reader! Thanks Chris!) and humbled by the opportunities that have come my way because of it (my monthly calgaryisawesome.com column, as well as a sweet new gig that will be announced shortly). Here are a few insider Pop & Pour stats, accurate as of today thanks to the crack team at the WordPress Analytics Department, detailing some of the numbers behind PnP’s first year: Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: abstract, anniversary, fiole du pape, germans should read pop and pour, Germany, happy anniversary, kung fu girl, pop and pour, search engine radar, wine blog, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
PnP Ratings Database Update — March 2012
7 03 2012
This has nothing to do with the ratings DB...but it is cool.
I decided to hold off on this update until I had accumulated enough new reviews to make a revised spreadsheet worthwhile, and that time has come with PnP poised to reach a couple of major milestones. First, I’m 4 wine reviews away from 100, a mark I should attain sometime this month. Second, this Friday, March 9th, is the one-year anniversary of Pop & Pour (so yes, if you do the math, I’ve drunk almost a hundred bottles of wine in a calendar year…but at least my vinous consumption has made some contribution to online society). Holy crap. I’m excited (and amazed) about both events…but I need some filler material until they get here and can’t drink wine this week (lead-in to a new diet), so in the meantime I’ll aim to be equally excited about this routine ratings database update. The March 2012 instalment of the ratings spreadsheet reveals a new member of my top ten QPR wines (my rendition of the Quality/Price Ratio score shows you how many dollars you have to spend on a bottle for every PnP ratings point about 75), the Beso de Vino Seleccion…a.k.a. the bull testicle wine. This bottle makes the cut not because of its impressive score (84+), but because of its bargain-basement price ($12), though the argument can be made that generally-acceptable wine for $12 is still a bargain. Download the updated ratings database here (new Excel file first, then old Excel file):
Pop & Pour Ratings Database Mar 2012
Pop & Pour Ratings DB Mar 2012 Old Excel
New wine reviews coming next week once I can drink again!
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Tags: bargain wines, QPR, wine blog, wine ratings, wine review database, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
WSET: Officially Advanced!!!
23 01 2012Ten weeks and a day (but who’s counting) after I tasted and wrote my way through the Wine & Spirits Education Trust’s Advanced Exam, I officially got my results from WSET headquarters in London. Thankfully, they were worth waiting for, on both the theory side and the tasting side:
Woooooooooo!!!!
I now have a fancy certificate (which I’m not allowed to reproduce in any form, hence the substitute pic of the boring accompanying letter above) to hang in my not-yet-built wine cellar, a somewhat-less-fancy green pin and a heck of a load off my mind…I think I was more nervous about this exam than I was when I wrote the LSAT.
An anticlimactic but hard-fought pin.
According to the WSET website, I can now work “in the drinks and hospitality industries in a supervisory capacity” (who’s hiring? :) ) and, more importantly, apply to the WSET to use the “WSET Certified Advanced” logo on my letterhead and business cards! I am totally doing this. This has completely made my week. I will crack and write about a suitable celebration bottle shortly, but for now I’m just going to sit back, savour the moment and thank my lucky stars that my tuition money didn’t go to waste. Cheers!!
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: certified advanced, wine & spirits education trust, wine blog, wine course, wine education, WSET, WSET advanced
Categories : Miscellaneous
PnP Joins The CIA
14 01 2012
calgaryisawesome.com -- now with wine content!
Well, sort of. I’m happy to announce that I’ve been given the opportunity by the folks at local interest webpage extraordinaire Calgary Is Awesome (http://calgaryisawesome.com/) to write a monthly wine column for the site highlighting the various facets of Calgary’s vibrant wine scene. The CIA column will be cross-posted here on Pop & Pour, so it won’t affect my regular PnP posting schedule, but it will be a way for me to maintain a local focus with some of my posts and do my part to spread the love of wine to a wider municipal audience. Some of the topics that I hope to cover in this PnP/CIA collaboration are write-ups of local shops and personalities, thoughts about wine tastings and events held around town and wine service at various YYC restaurants, among other things. If you have a killer idea for a topic that involves wine and Calgary in some capacity, or if you’re in the Calgary wine biz and would have any interest in some online exposure, drop me a line at let me know. Keep an eye out for my first Calgary Is Awesome column around the end of the month!
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Tags: calgary is awesome, CIA, wine blog, wine events, yyc
Categories : Miscellaneous
2012 Wine Resolutions
2 01 2012
Nothing says "New Year's celebration" like ClipArt!
Happy New Year!! Long time no speak!
2011 was a monumental, life-changing year for me. On New Year’s Day, 366 days ago, my wife and I welcomed our first child, our son Felix, into the world, and the entire rest of the year was charted almost exclusively based on his development. It was fitting to start a blank-slate new calendar year with a way of life and set of priorities that was previously totally foreign to us; turning the page on 2010 quite literally ushered in a whole new era for my family. Felix celebrated his first birthday yesterday surrounded by family and friends, and watching him climb the stairs by himself and tell me “up!” when he was tired of sitting on the floor truly brought into focus just how much change a year can bring. Last year was one of the most challenging years of my life, but I look back on it now and would immediately do it again if it meant I could have the little guy currently sleeping upstairs.
Much less momentous but still of import to me, 2011 marked the beginning of this online experiment that has blossomed into Pop & Pour. I was hesitant to start a wine blog due to my other infant-related time commitments, my lack of formal expertise in wine, and the number of other high-quality sites out there on the same topic, but at the same time it felt like an avenue that would let me follow my passion, advance my own knowledge and hopefully bring some people along for the ride. Since my first PnP post in March, I have taken two levels of the WSET wine & spirits course (passing one, still nervously awaiting results on the second), met dozens if not hundreds of incredible like-minded wine folk both online and in person, and started to become an active, present taster with every wine that I try; investing the time and energy in focusing on each bottle’s unique flavours and characteristics has only made me that much more head over heels for wine, but that’s what I wanted for this blog when I started it. It was initially meant to help me document my own travels through the world of wine, and while its focus has expanded somewhat since then, it is still an intensely personal creation for me, which is something that I hope comes across in my writings.
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: 2012, burgundy, rajat parr, secrets of the sommeliers, wine blog, wine resolutions, wine reviews
Categories : Miscellaneous
PnP Ratings Database Update — December 2011
21 12 2011
My plan is to find a different picture for the DB update post every month. On month 2, it's already hard.
Merry Christmas (or non-denominational secular equivalent) everyone!! With the big day fast approaching, I hope this finds you gearing up for some well-deserved time off with friends and family. That’s certainly the case for me: after tonight I will be taking a brief blogging break for a week or so, if only to avoid annoying people by whipping out my tasting notepad in the middle of Christmas dinner (not to say that that won’t happen anyway…). However, I thought I would leave you with December’s update to the Pop & Pour Ratings Database spreadsheet, which now includes all of the wines I’ve ever tasted and reviewed on this site up to this week. If you’re looking for a last-minute XMas gift that delivers bang for the buck, just download the Excel spreadsheet by clicking on the links below and look for a wine with a high (0.65 and above) QPR rating, which is a rough guide to sniffing out bargains: it tells you how many PnP ratings points above a baseline of 75 each wine-buying dollar gets you with respect to a particular bottle. The top 10 highest-scoring QPR wines all cost $22 or less, so find them if you can! Download the spreadsheets here (new Excel file first, then old Excel):
Pop & Pour Ratings Database Dec 2011
Pop & Pour Ratings DB Dec 2011 Old Excel
Have a safe a happy holiday season — may your glasses never be empty and your wine never be corked!
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Tags: archive, bargain wines, database, pop and pour, QPR, wine blog, wine ratings
Categories : Miscellaneous
