WSET: Officially Advanced!!!

23 01 2012

Ten 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!!

 

 


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Wine Review: 2009 Laughing Stock Blind Trust (Red)

19 01 2012

With this seamless a marketing pitch, this wine should always be in demand.

“Assets of the Blind Trust are kept under wrap and seal”, says the neck of Laughing Stock Vineyards’ “just trust us” bottle.  And so they are:  while at first glance you will not find any mention of what grape varieties make up this wine, and while the bottle tells you that the grapes in the blend change every year and never remain consistent, if you make good use of your corkscrew and fully remove the foil covering the top of the bottle, the mystery blend is revealed.  Since this is absolute genius marketing (and most of the fun involved in buying this bottle), I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you, other than to say that (1) the grapes involved are three of the five that go into Bordeaux wines in France (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Petit Verdot) and (2) the ’09 Blind Trust mix is heavily weighted in favour of one of the five.  And it ain’t Petit Verdot.

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Wine Review: 2009 Gramercy Cellars Syrah

16 01 2012

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’d think this would be a no-brainer for me.  I pump the tires of Washington wine so hard that you’d think I was born in Tacoma.  (I wasn’t.)  In particular, I love what Washington State does to my favourite red grape of all:  Syrah.  Add in a top notch critically-acclaimed producer and it’s a recipe for a killer review, right?  At the end of the day, that’s definitely where it ended up, but it took a little while for it to get there.

Still just a baby, but clearly on the road to BIG things. Cellar if you can resist.

But let’s back up.  This is another bottle from the wine lineup of Washington’s Gramercy Cellars brought into the province by Highlander Wine & Spirits, cousin to the Third Man GSM blend that I glowingly reviewed back in mid-December.  In case you don’t feel like clicking on the link, here’s the Gramercy story in a nutshell:  young NYC Master Sommelier phenom with high-powered resto-job leaves it all behind to pursue his passion and grow Syrah in Walla Walla.  Gramercy makes other wines too (I still have a Cab and a Tempranillo downstairs waiting to be opened, and the Third Man is mainly Grenache), but Syrah is their heart and their focus.  Did I mention that tonight’s bottle is a Syrah?  And did I mention that Syrah’s my favourite?

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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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Wine Review: 2008 Kenneth Volk Enz Vineyard Mourvedre

11 01 2012

The bottle looks exactly like it tastes: black label, black wine.

How many old-vine, single-vineyard, 100% Mourvedre wines have you ever heard of coming out of North America?  Before last month, my number stood at zero.  Then my best friend Marc, a burgeoning wine lover himself (I’m working on it), got me this bottle for Christmas; it was one that he had tried at a party and couldn’t get out of his head, leading him to hunt it down and grab one for each of us.  It was about the most intriguing Christmas gift that I got this year — obviously I do good work in picking friends.

While most California winemakers would shy away from grapes like Mourvedre in favour of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and other varietals more recognizable to the general public (and therefore more sellable), Kenneth Volk seems to immerse himself in them.  While his company Kenneth Volk Vineyards also makes the classics, it produces a special series of “Heirloom Varietals” wines that examines and honours “underappreciated rarities” that don’t often get their day in the sun in the US.  Mourvedre certainly qualifies — while I’ve seen it in a GSM (Grenache/Syrah/Mourvedre) or two from my home continent, I’ve never seen it get the spotlight to itself domestically until now.  This particular Mourvedre is from the Enz Vineyard located in the tiny Lime Kiln Valley AVA in central California:  it can be found just southeast of San Jose, about 1/3 of the way south from San Francisco to LA.  Interestingly (or crazily), Lime Kiln Valley finds itself immediately beside the San Andreas Fault, one of the more tectonically unstable places in the world (you want interesting soils as a winemaker?  Plant in an earthquake zone!).  Even cooler, this bottle comes from one of the oldest grapevine plantings in all of California:  almost 90 years old, the Mourvedre vines in Enz Vineyard were planted in 1922.  Think of all the wines that come out of California.  Now think that, pre-dating almost all of them, before “California wine” meant anything to anyone, there was this lone patch of Mourvedre planted in this obscure valley close to the coast.  Who would plant Mourvedre in California in 1922?  Who knows?  But that decision let me, almost a century later, crack open this mysterious and alluring bottle, because it had previously worked its magic on a great friend.  Wine rocks.

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Wine Review: 2009 Evening Land “Blue Label” Pinot Noir

9 01 2012

 

One of my favourite labels in recent memory, and a great bottle to boot.

As I mentioned last post, although buying and drinking Burgundy is my top mission for (at least the first half of) 2012, in order to go about it the right way and actually learn something, I’m going to be deferring much of my Burgundy tasting/writing for a few weeks while I source wines and firm up a drinking plan.  Since I tasted a 2009 Bourgogne Rouge last week, I thought it would be an interesting contrast to follow it up with what is effectively its New World equivalent:  a 2009 Pinot Noir from Oregon, from the Burgundy-inspired rising stars at Evening Land Vineyards.  Even though Evening Land’s first vintage was in 2007, less than five years ago, it has quickly gained attention and critical acclaim for its lineup of true-to-the-land wines from the classic Burgundian varieties of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.  I had known them as an Oregon producer (I tried two of their Oregon Pinots in WSET class) and was quite surprised to discover that they actually make wine in 4 different Pinot/Chard heartlands around the world:  Oregon’s Willamette Valley, California’s Sonoma Coast and Santa Rita Hills, and Burgundy itself.  While I’m sure that other wineries must do this too, I can’t think of another one off the top of my head that produces wine from different countries under the same name and label.  Colour me intrigued.

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Wine Review: 2009 Alex Gambal “Cuvee Les Deux Papis” Bourgogne Rouge

4 01 2012

Burgundy: It begins.

Well, I couldn’t very well write a New Year’s manifesto geared around a promise to drink more Burgundy and then not follow it up with a bottle of Burgundy, so here we are.  However, this might paradoxically be my last bottle from my 2012 classic wine region of choice for a little while.  With some (much-needed) professional help, I am currently formulating a buying and drinking plan for Burgundy that will hopefully maximize my drinking and learning experience within the budget and time window that I have, but since I need to source (and pay for) the wines before this francophilic journey gets underway, you may not hear more about it for a couple weeks.  Even so, rest assured that I have not abandoned my resolution that quickly, and take tonight’s bottle as a symbol of my new Burgundian spirit of adventure.  Or something.

One issue that I and other Burgundy neophytes have to deal with when we’re in that section of the wine shop are the bottle labels:  they’re almost all uniformly boring, and unless you’ve read a few dozen wine books, they almost all contain words that on their surface don’t appear to offer any assistance in telling you what the wine inside is all about.  The key thing to remember when trying to decipher a Burgundian label is that they are first and foremost all about the land:  exactly where the grapes come from and (possibly) how that location has been historically ranked for quality.  The sub-regions of Burgundy are set up as a series of concentric circles, with the smallest ones (top quality single vineyards given the esteemed Premier Cru [very good] or Grand Cru [best] classifications) falling within larger ones (village appellations that include all of the vineyards located by one of the towns in Burgundy like Nuits-St-Georges, Gevrey-Chambertin or Meursault) falling within the general regional appellation of Bourgogne.  Any wines simply labelled “Bourgogne” are made with grapes that can come from anywhere in Burgundy.  Think of it like a dartboard, with Grand Cru/Premier Cru in the middle, village wines the next ring out and Bourgogne the outer border.  Even though the smaller appellations are nested within the larger ones, a wine will always take the narrowest regional name possible (and its prestige and selling price will increase the smaller the sub-region is).  A wine made from grapes from the Grand Cru vineyard of La Tache near the village of Vosne-Romanee in north-central Burgundy will be labelled “La Tache Grand Cru” (and will likely also contain the phrase “Appellation La Tache Controlée” somewhere on the label, confirming that “La Tache” is the name of the appellation in question) instead of “Vosne-Romanee” or “Bourgogne”, even though the grapes are technically from both that village area and that general region.  Make sense?  I almost lost myself in that paragraph, so fingers crossed. Read the rest of this entry »


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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.

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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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(Foiled) Wine Review: 2008 M. Chapoutier Gigondas

19 12 2011

Cool thing about this bottle: there's Braille translation on the label! Less cool: it's probably corked. Jerk.

I’m not great at detecting cork taint.  I know what the telltale aromas of a corked wine are supposed to be (damp basement, wet newspaper, mildew), but I’ve only come across a couple of bottles in my life that were indisputably corked; who knows how many other bacteria-riddled bottles I’ve downed without knowing any better.  I’ve met people, including my WSET instructor, Marnie, who could instantly detect even the slightest whiff of taint, and I wish somebody like that was over at my house for dinner tonight, because I’m about 70% sure that I opened a corked bottle.  Due to this suspicion, I won’t be giving the Chapoutier Gigondas a score or saying bad things about it, but I figured I’d post the review regardless so that if you ever find yourself in my situation you’ll know what to look for…or at least you’ll be able to self-commiserate and know you’re not alone.

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Wine Review: 2009 Gramercy Cellars “The Third Man” GSM

17 12 2011

I’ve wanted to try a bottle of Gramercy for over a year.  Last fall I bought Wine & Spirits Magazine’s annual Top 100 issue listing their hundred best wineries in the world for 2010, and there for the first time I read about a Washington producer called Gramercy Cellars, started by Greg Harrington, a Master Sommelier (the youngest to earn the title in the US) who quit his prestigious position as wine director for a group of NYC restaurants in order to move to Washington State and start making Syrah, despite no prior winemaking experience and no connection to the Pacific Northwest.  He was inspired by a chance tasting of Walla Walla wines that he attended, moved by their balance and sense of place to such a degree that he was motivated to drop everything and start a new life.  Gramercy Cellars was born in 2005, and within five years it was officially considered a force on the American wine scene; in addition to the top 100 honour in Wine & Spirits in 2010 (a distinction repeated in 2011) and other awards, Gramercy was named Best New Winery by Food & Wine Magazine in 2010 and promptly celebrated, uh, well, like this:

Since all you have to say to get my vinous attention is “Washington” and “Syrah” in the same sentence, I’ve been waiting and hoping to see a bottle of Gramercy around Calgary somewhere, but until very recently it simply wasn’t available.  So imagine my surprise when one of my go-to wine shops, Highlander Wine & Spirits, announced last month that they had arranged the provincial exclusive to carry Gramercy wines and were making a number of them available for immediate sale…it felt like some kind of strange karmic reward.  This particular bottle was an XMas gift from my friend Elliot (thank you!!), but needless to say I also stocked up on some of Gramercy’s varietal Syrah to enjoy at a later date.

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Wine Review: 2010 13th Street June’s Vineyard Riesling

14 12 2011

Try to ignore the obvious Chap Stick stains on the glass...who proofs these photos anyway??

Since my last Canadian Riesling experience was an earth-shattering one, I figured I would go back to the well tonight and see if I could keep the streak going.  While the previous Riesling I had from my home and native land (the 2010 Tantalus) came from British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, this one comes from over 4,000 km eastward, from the Creek Shores sub-region of Niagara, Ontario.  My friend Corey recently toured the vineyards of Niagara and scooped this bottle for me during a visit to 13th Street Winery (social tip:  good friends remember your favourite grape), which is based in St. Catharines, Ontario and has been around for almost 15 years.  The fruit for this single-vineyard Riesling comes from Lincoln, Ontario, which is halfway between St. Catharines and Hamilton and seems like a really strange wine centre until you realize that it’s bordered on the North AND South by heat-reflecting, temperature-moderating Great Lakes.  Since I see way less Niagara wine around in Calgary than Okanagan wine, I was quite eager to see what the other half of the country had to offer in terms of quality Riesling.  Firmly suppressing my Western Alienation, I de-Stelvined the bottle and got to work.

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Calgary Wine Life: Vin Room with @TylerOnWine

11 12 2011

My real life, my wine life and my Twitter life collided awesomely this weekend, as I was lucky enough to spend Saturday afternoon tasting and discussing various wines with fellow vino blogger Tyler Philp over meat, cheese and tapas at Vin Room, located just south of downtown Calgary.  Tyler is the founder of North of 9 Fine Wine and its corresponding wine blog, an official Sommelier, and a prior PnP collaborator:  he’s the other half of the Tasting In Stereo simul-review posting that appeared on both our sites back in August, something that will hopefully be a semi-recurring PnP/North of 9 joint feature.  Outside of his vinous pursuits, Tyler is an Airbus pilot, and it was thanks to his day job that he had 24 hours or so to kill in YYC.  Given the chance to put a face to a Twitter handle, I jumped at the opportunity to meet for lunch.  But where to take a wine-obsessed visitor to my fine city?

Foreshadowing Cork Rating: 8/10 (The cork for our dessert wine below - love the horizontal writing, love the lion, love the cork.)

I opted for Vin Room on 4th Street and 23rd Avenue SW, partly because I’d never been before and wanted to try it, and partly because they’re probably the best bet in the city for getting a wide range of wines by the glass.  Even better, as we discovered, is that all the by-the-glass wines are also available in tasting-sized portions, which meant that instead of having 1 or 2 glasses over the course of lunch, I got to have 5 or 6 (without having to stumble home).  This “small glasses” approach worked amazingly with the small plates that made up Vin Room’s food menu:  you don’t normally expect to get to pair every dish of a tapas meal with a proper wine match, but believe me, it’s a treat.

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Wine Review: 2010 Dirty Laundry “Hush” Rosé

7 12 2011

Maybe it's season-suitable after all -- it looks like a Christmas light. That's turned on.

I don’t drink as much rosé as I should.  Even though I know that most of it isn’t the sweet and insipid stuff of stereotype, whenever I’m in wine-buying mode there always seems to be something else on the shelf that pulls me in more.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that this, Wine Review #82, is Pop & Pour’s first rosé write-up.  Yikes.  I promise to do better in the future.

While this is PnP’s inaugural rosé feature, it’s the second wine from the Dirty Laundry winery in Summerland, BC that I’ve reviewed, and (thankfully) the first I haven’t been horribly disappointed in.  For those of you who missed the tale of my September visit to Dirty Laundry and my lack of admiration for their Madam’s Vines Gewürztraminer, click here for the full scoop.  This rosé was the only other wine I grabbed from DL, and the wine in their cellar-door tasting lineup that I liked the most, so I popped and poured tonight hoping for bigger and better things.

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XMas 2011: Top Secret Santa Wines

5 12 2011

Yep, that time again.

Over the last week I have somehow found myself volunteered to be a part of not one but TWO Secret Santa gift swaps at work.  I’m not really sure how I feel about this.  The office Secret Santa pool is always fraught with dangers because (1) you often don’t know your co-workers well enough to get them anything truly personal that you know they’ll like, and (2) there is usually a spending limit imposed on your shopping (in my case, $15 for one pool and $25 for the other) that prevents you from buying most types of gifts that would be winners with just about anyone.  Since I feel that Secret Santa-ing chocolates is basically an admission of defeat, this year I’ve done the logical thing and decided to stick with booze.  I may not know if my office-mates read Malcolm Gladwell fan or listen to Johnny Cash or could get any use out of tree ornaments or candle holders or plants or winter gloves, but I do know that if they’re remotely sane and not prohibited by religious or medical reasons, they will enjoy a good bottle of wine, so I’m going to get them one.  Or two.  And since you might be in the same situation I am (hell, you might even work in my office; there’s 2,000 of us in there), I thought it might be useful to run down a few can’t-miss bottles that will have everyone hoping you pull their name out of the hat next year.  Without further ado, here are PnP’s Top Secret Santa Wines for 2011 in the $15-and-under, $20-and-under and $25-and-under categories:

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