WSET Completion Celebratory Wine Review: 2003 Terralsole Brunello di Montalcino

16 11 2011

(Wine) school's out for summer! W00t!

With the WSET Advanced course finally in my rear view mirror, it was time to celebrate:  whether I actually passed or not, I figured I’d earned a bottle from my “good fridge”, the one that houses my pricier, more ageworthy wines.  This one definitely qualifies.  I’ve been loving Brunello more and more lately, to the point where I think it’s become my favourite kind of Italian wine; it strikes that ideal balance between being approachable and enjoyable in youth while still reaping the benefits of aging.  It also deftly marries complexity with drinkability, something a surprising number of expensive wines can fail to do…bringing a wide spectrum of flavours to the table doesn’t mean much when you don’t want to have the resulting glass with dinner.  I don’t own that many bottles of Brunello currently, but that’s something I’ll be looking to fix in the near future (or once my salary doubles, anyway).

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Wine Review: 2009 Paolo Conterno Barbera d’Alba

9 11 2011

Not to reinforce any improper stereotypes, but I totally dig the Mafia lighting in this photo.

Well, another week, another lone post on Pop & Pour — there’s no doubt that my brief foray back into academics has taken its toll on my blogging productivity.  Thankfully, my WSET Advanced exam is this Sunday, after which my writing schedule will get back to normal (provided I haven’t given up on wine entirely by then, something I might just do if I have to read my textbook one more time).  After two weekends of boot-camp-esque Advanced training and 30+ hours of class time logged, we’ve tasted and evaluated close to 80 wines and covered off every major world wine region except Spain and Portugal (which are coming up this Saturday), as a result of which everyone’s brain is in varying degrees of pain.  My head is so WSET-laden that I have random wine words like Trincadeira (Portuguese grape variety) and bocksbeutel (odd-shaped wine bottle used in Franken, Germany) floating around the edges of my consciousness at night as I’m trying to go to sleep, and I can’t pour a straightforward glass of vino with dinner without mulling over whether it has a medium or medium-plus body or a ruby-with-some-garnet or garnet-with-some-ruby appearance.  Tonight I poured one of my favourite kinds of inexpensive wine, Barbera d’Alba from northwest Italy, and even though I was fairly familiar with the grape and the region, I still felt compelled to dive into my text to find out what my new vinous Bible had to say about them.

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Wine Review: 2008 Jim Barry “Cover Drive” Cabernet Sauvignon

2 11 2011

Oh right, did I mention this wine is cricket-themed? All the more reason to Costco it up.

Long time no speak!  I was shocked and appalled to discover that it’s been almost a full week since my last PnP post, but rest assured that I have not been wine-slacking:  after 17 hours spent in classroom for the WSET Advanced last weekend, I’ve been spending my weeknight evenings preparing for my exam next weekend by re-reading my textbook (which we were told we should do 4 times in the next 2 weeks.  The book is 300 pages long.).  The whole experience to date has been both more intense and more rewarding than the Intermediate course that I took in the summer; I walked in Saturday morning feeling intimidated and out of place and left on Sunday feeling like I actually belonged in the class, which was gratifying.  I also thanked my lucky stars for 8 months of doing Pop & Pour reviews, because we had to sample, evaluate and identify FORTY wines blind in two days using the WSET’s copyrighted Systematic Approach to Tasting, designed to allow someone to create a quick, consistent, (mostly) objective analysis of the main components of a wine and use that to formulate an opinion on the wine’s price, quality level and identity.  It’s fun for the first few times, but increasingly taxing as you hit wines #18 and 19 of the day.  To give you a sense of the WSET tasting method in action, I thought I would write up tonight’s wine using their proprietary method…just to ensure that I don’t get sued, let me clarify again that I did NOT invent this approach and am a mere student and user of the WSET’s brilliant taxonomy.

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Wine Review: 2009 Tanins Syrah Chardonnay

19 10 2011

Syrah. And Chardonnay. Just because. You know you secretly want to try it.

I’m sorry, what?

That wasn’t a typo.  Tonight’s wine is ACTUALLY a blend of Syrah and Chardonnay.  It may not surprise you to learn that this is the first time I’ve ever had that blatantly crazy combo of grapes together.  It would not surprise me to learn that LSD was involved in the producer’s blending decisions.  But here we are.  Obviously taking their cue from the long-standing Northern Rhone tradition of blending in a touch of white Viognier with red Syrah, French producer Tanins (sic?) has put together another red-white mashup, only casting the world’s most well-known white grape in the usual Viognier role.  It’s a strange choice:  Viognier is added to Rhone reds because it is intensely aromatic and thus adds pizzazz and complexity to the blend’s nose.  Chardonnay is the exact opposite, a generally neutral varietal without any strong aromas to call its own.  I have no idea what motivated its selection, and this bottle has turned out to be nearly impossible to research electronically, so I’ll just have to take the plunge in the dark.  Morbid curiosity, prepare to be satisfied. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2009 Eroica Riesling

17 10 2011

Named after the Beethoven song, not the Madonna song...get your head out of the gutter.

In the car on the way back to Calgary from Edmonton yesterday, we decided to have Chinese food for dinner.  The problem:  I didn’t have any off-dry everyday-drinking Riesling (my pairing of choice for basically any Asian/Indian cuisine) in my cellar.  The solution:  a quick side trip to Costco in Red Deer to stock up.  Avid readers of this blog with photographic memories may remember the luck I had at the Costco in Grande Prairie earlier this summer; I’m not sure if visiting small-city Alberta Costco liquor stores now qualifies as an official PnP theme, but I can guarantee anyone from Red Deer that they’re not finding better wine at better prices anywhere else.  I was fully ready to walk out with a $17 German Riesling when I was stopped in my tracks by this wine, which I’ve had before in prior vintages, but which I’d never seen on sale for less than $40.  At Costco, in Red Deer:  $27.  Sold. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2007 Peccatore Douro Reserva

6 10 2011

Can you see the difference? Price is the difference. Though the ultra-cheap faux foil on the neck was still a bit disappointing.

I’ll try to be (more) brief tonight than I have been recently — quite a few posts over the last couple weeks have eclipsed the 1000 word mark.  To cut to the chase, tonight’s wine costs $13 and doesn’t suck.  Thanks to my (sizeable) tuition bill for the WSET Advanced class starting at the end of the month, I’ve cut back my wine budget substantially over the past few months and as a result have been on the lookout for inexpensive wines that still deliver.  There may not be a better place in the world for these bargains than Portugal, which is cultivating a reputation for solid, easily drinkable dry reds at value prices.  You may have some initial reticence to delve into the Portuguese wine market, largely because it’s based around a large number of indigenous grapes that no one outside of Lisbon has ever heard of, but if you embrace your fear of the unknown, accept that your $15 Portuguese red won’t be made out of Cabernet and just drink it for what it is, you WILL be very pleasantly surprised. Read the rest of this entry »


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Roving Wine Review: 1998 Pieve Santa Restituta “Rennina” Brunello di Montalcino @ Centini

4 10 2011

Centini: great restaurant, absolutely horrible lighting for iPhone pictures. Note the difference between the old PSR label shown here and the way cooler one they use now...

I have awesome friends.  Shortly after I posted my poll-winning wine review of the 2006 Pieve Santa Restituta Brunello a few weeks back in celebration of Pop & Pour’s 100th post, I got a message from Brian at The Ferocious Grape telling me that he had a great idea for another PnP article.  He had in his massive collection of wine another Pieve Santa Restituta Brunello that was both older and higher-end than the one I had tried:  the 1998 Rennina Brunello from PSR (“Rennina” is PSR’s proprietary name for the wine, which comes from three top vineyard sites on the estate), the current vintage of which is more than 3 times as expensive as the base PSR Brunello ($200ish as compared to $60).  Did I have any interest in opening the ’98 Rennina with Brian, seeing how it fared against the ’06 basic Brunello and writing a post about it?  Um, yes?

If you’ll recall, my main excitement about Pieve Santa Restituta was that it’s owned by Angelo Gaja, the Barbaresco wine icon from Piedmont in northwest Italy whose Tuscan venture into Brunellos is worth some attention (for much more about Gaja and PSR and Brunello, see my last post about the 2006).  The 1998 vintage from PSR was of particular interest because Gaja only took full control over the winery in 1995, so Brian’s bottle was one of this landmark winemaker’s first efforts at making high-end Brunello.  A bottle this special required some proper special-occasion ambience, and I owed Brian some payback for a gesture this generous, so we booked a dinner reservation at Centini on 1st Street and 8th Avenue SE in downtown Calgary to toast one of Tuscany’s finest Italian-style. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2009 Laughing Stock Syrah

28 09 2011

View from the parking lot: I could get used to looking at this every day.

On my trip to the Okanagan earlier this month, one of the things I was most looking forward to was my visit to Laughing Stock Vineyards, producer of my favourite Canadian red wine of all time and restorer of my faith in (at least some of) my homeland’s wine industry.  We made the trek out to Naramata, located just northeast of Penticton along the shoreline of Lake Okanagan, on a gorgeous late summer day and I was lucky enough to meet LS owner/vineyard manager Cynthia Enns and get a guided tour of the property, which sits on a west-facing slope with an incredible view overlooking the Lake.  I was even luckier that the tasting room still had some of the 2009 Laughing Stock Syrah in stock, which I’d been dying to try, partly because LS had made me think that good Canadian reds were an actual possibility, partly because I generally just love Syrah, and partly because I had never seen this particular wine anywhere in Alberta, giving me (in my head, anyway) a chance at a provincial exclusive.  I bought a couple bottles to take home, and tonight was the first taste trial.  Since the last Canadian Syrah I had before this one smelled and tasted like tomato soup, this had nowhere to go but up. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: Cameron Hughes Lot 136 Cabernet Sauvignon (2007)

25 09 2011

Could've been a contender.

This is the second time that a Cameron Hughes wine has graced the electronic pages of this blog, and since the first time was a review of one of my all-time favourite value wines, I had both high hopes and high expectations going into this review.  If you don’t know the story about Cameron Hughes and how they source and create wines, it’s covered in some detail here; the Reader’s Digest version is that CH doesn’t grow any of its own grapes but instead buys either grapes, juice, finished wine or fully-bottled wine, usually from established wineries selling excess inventory, and repackages it under its own label at substantially discounted prices.  That’s how it should work, anyway…the price equation gets skewed somewhat once the wine leaves CH’s American home market.  On the Cameron Hughes website, this particular wine is described as being for sale at the CH online store for $15US.  It was also available at Costco in the US at a similar price point.  I bought this bottle last year from Aspen Wine & Spirits in Calgary for $33CDN — 2.2 times the price.  I feel like NAFTA should have something to say about this. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2009 Painted Rock Chardonnay

21 09 2011

In wine, as in life, discrimination is wrong.

I’m experiencing a sort of Chardonnay renaissance right now. Like so many people, I had soured on the grape after a couple of initial bad experiences with cheap, gloppy, steroidally-oaked monsters that led me to believe that Chard was overrated and undeservedly well-known, the sellout of the white grape family. This, it turns out, is a tragically limited worldview that illustrates the dangers of drawing conclusions based on a small sample size; the problem wasn’t actually that I didn’t like Chardonnay (which is responsible for some of the best, most acclaimed and most expensive white wines in the world), but that I didn’t like bad Chardonnay (which, thankfully, isn’t a problem at all). I have started to distance myself from this rough start with the grape, and despite my previously-ingrained bias, I’ve been noticing that almost every single Chardonnay I’ve had recently has been, well, good. The oak-and-alcohol-bomb style previously so rampant throughout the New World is starting to recede, and the current movement in the world of Chardonnay seems to be more geared toward balance and allowing the flavours of the actual grape (rather than only the barrel it was aged in) to express themselves. This is a positive development for the Canadian wine industry, as this grape probably does its best work in cooler climates, retaining the structure that can be so easily lost in warmer zones yet still ripening even in shorter, colder growing seasons. I was therefore quite surprised during my recent trip to the Okanagan when one winery owner told me that they would be reining back their production of Chardonnay in favour of other white varietals — they made a tremendous, restrained yet flavourful Chard, but they were turning away from it because they thought that Pinot Gris could outsell it 5 to 1. My newfound appreciation for the world’s best-known white grape must have hit me then, because my first immediate thought was: “Has everybody gone nuts?”

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Wine Review: 2010 Umani Ronchi Vellodoro Pecorino

19 09 2011

When drinking on a budget, many people go for cheap wine.  Me, I opt for sheep wine.

Baa.

You are forgiven for thinking that Pecorino is only a sheep’s milk cheese, because I was convinced of the same thing until I was presented with an opportunity to buy this neon green, livestock-labelled bottle.  For the first and possibly last time in my life, the back label of a wine I owned proudly trumpeted that it was made from “the grape of the sheeps” (bad grammar not mine) — the word “Pecorino” comes from the Italian “pecora”, meaning “sheep”.  Apart from being delicious with crackers on an appetizer platter, Pecorino is also a little-known white grape indigenous to the central-eastern Italian wine region of Abruzzo.  It almost became extinct over the past few decades because it is a fairly low-yielding varietal that doesn’t lend itself to big money crops (and because wineries weren’t lining up down the block to plant sheep grapes), but large-scale producer Umani Ronchi recently began a crusade to revive it in an effort to keep regional grape varieties alive, leading up to the first vintage of this Pecorino in 2007.  Thanks to the palate-broadening encouragement of Brian at The Ferocious Grape (who was also behind my foray into Malvar a couple months ago), and because I liked the cute cartoon sheep on the label, it ended up in my glass. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2010 Dirty Laundry “Madam’s Vines” Gewurztraminer

16 09 2011

The folks at Dirty Laundry are marketing geniuses.

I love the sign at the bottom right that says "Scenic Outlook: That Way". "Really?! Where?"

They have their own unique story — namely, that the current site of the winery used to be home to a laundromat that illicitly doubled as a brothel during the Gold Rush era — and they stick to it with rigorous discipline in absolutely everything they do, from their wine names to their label art, winery decor to gift shop souvenirs (yes, there’s a gift shop).  All of their production and sales efforts are relentlessly to brand, and the secretly naughty tale of the brand generates a lot of interest; before my recent trip to the Okanagan, DL was one of the places I was told I absolutely had to see.  So one day we ventured out to Summerland, a half hour southwest of Kelowna, and drove up (and up, and up) a series of winding backcountry roads until we found it, high up in the hills above the town overlooking the Lake.  We were treated to a thoroughly modern tasting room, with a brand new gorgeous outdoor patio (complete with giant clothespins and lingerie gently swaying in the breeze) and an amazing view of the surrounding area.  However, amidst all the winks to its shady past and seamless self-promotion, Dirty Laundry got slack about one thing:  the wine. Read the rest of this entry »


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100th Post Special Wine Review: 2006 Pieve Santa Restituta Brunello di Montalcino

14 09 2011

The name at the bottom of the label says it all: Gaja.

Back!

After a stellar trip to British Columbia that included visits to some excellent Okanagan wineries whose wares will be featured here soon, I am again at my computer in Calgary ready to bring PnP out of its brief hiatus.  A HUGE thank you to everyone who made sure this site didn’t lose any of its momentum while I was away — much to my surprise (and sincere gratitude), Pop & Pour actually set a record for daily views a few days after I left town!  Obviously I need to go on vacation more often.

The blog gets rebooted with a bang tonight, since my return post doubles as the 100th post I’ve written for PnP over the last six months.  The fact that I’ve found 100 occasions since the start of March where the baby was sleeping and the house was quiet and I was able to be at the computer for a consecutive hour is clearly cause for celebration, and your poll voting determined that PnP’s centennial would be feted by way of the 2006 Gaja Brunello, more formally known as the Brunello di Montalcino from Pieve Santa Restituta.  Even though I only got this wine three months ago, I’m very happy that it won the poll and that I get to open it, because it was my first ever Father’s Day present from my now-8-month-old son Felix (likely assisted in some substantial capacity by my lovely wife Heather).  Nothing like a proud milestone gift to celebrate a joyous event. Read the rest of this entry »


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Tasting In Stereo with North of 9 Fine Wine: 2008 Sister’s Run Shiraz

30 08 2011

My co-conspirator for Tasting In Stereo -- check him out!

Welcome to the inaugural version of Tasting In Stereo!  By far the most incredible thing that’s happened to me since I started up Pop & Pour back in March is that I’ve met or come in contact with a number of inspiring people from across the world of wine — producers, professional critics, retailers, restauranteurs, and especially other bloggers, who churn out quality content week after week fuelled only by their passion for this thing that connects us all.  The amount of well-researched, well-written free wine information available online is astounding, and it makes me want to keep writing to keep pace with the standard that’s been set before me.  One of the people who I’ve been fortunate enough to come to know is Tyler Philp of North of 9 Fine Wine in Ontario.  Tyler is a commercial pilot by day, flying an Airbus for Air Canada while gaining increasing familiarity with wine shops across AC’s route map.  By night he’s a family man and a burgeoning wine connoisseur, studying formally through The Court of Master Sommeliers and running both a formal tasting group based out of Alliston, Ontario and an insightful blog under the North of 9 banner.  He’s located just north of Highway 9 (hence the name) that divides the city of Toronto from the county immediately above it and can be found on Twitter at @TylerOnWine — give him a follow!  Whether you are a regular PnPer or have just stumbled on this post via some strange Google search and are wondering what the heck is going on, I invite you to click one of the links above and give North of 9 a visit.

As I described briefly yesterday, Tasting In Stereo is two wine reviews for the price of one:  Tyler and I have conspired together to pick an inexpensive bottle that’s widely available in both Ontario and Alberta, have popped and poured it separately, and have independently written up tasting notes which will be revealed to each other and to all of you in two posts that will be published simultaneously — this one, and its counterpart on northof9finewine.blogspot.com.  Once you’ve made your way through this review, you should definitely check and see if the North of 9 review is more or less flattering and then leave us a comment to let us know what you think about the format and the wine!  If all goes well and our mutual reviews don’t lead to some sort of virtual fistfight, hopefully this will become a semi-recurring PnP/Nof9 feature. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2009 Tiefenbrunner Pinot Grigio delle Venezie

27 08 2011

Time to quit you, Pinot Grigio. Tiefenbrunner, this isn't your fault.

Dear Pinot Grigio,

I’m sorry.  I try hard to keep an open mind, accept that wine comes in many forms, and expose myself to as many of the world’s different and unique grapes and regions as I can.  But I just can’t do it anymore.  You don’t need me anyway:  you’re enormously popular, synonymous with patios and summer, one of the most successful wine exports to North America of all time, an A-list (well, maybe B-list) grape.  But you’re just so…well, BORING.  When people try to describe you to PG newbies, they inevitably fall back on words like “neutral”, “crisp” and “refreshing”.  You know what else is neutral, crisp and refreshing?  Water.  And it doesn’t cost $20 a bottle.  I had held out hope that you had something of intrigue to offer, that I just hadn’t found the right bottle that would expose me to your inner wonders, but now I don’t think that bottle exists.  I think you are what you are, which is part of your allure — your devotees always know what they’re getting — but is also your greatest shortcoming.  When I can’t bring myself to get excited about opening a bottle of wine, there’s a problem, and in this case that problem is you.  I think I’m moving on. Read the rest of this entry »


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