pop & pour

I don’t even know what to say. Oh wait, yes I do.

Yes, I intentionally waited until it was completely seasonally inappropriate to open this bottle.  I bought it back in December (no surprise) mainly because I couldn’t believe someone had done this to a bottle of wine:  pull a back-vintage bottle from a producer’s library (or an importer’s warehouse), replace the original label with a horribly tacky dollar-store-worthy holiday one, and re-release it in time for the Christmas retail rush.  The most amazing thing is that this isn’t some hack wine:  Brancaia is a well-regarded Tuscan producer, and the 2007 vintage of Brancaia Tre (the year immediately after this bottle) was so acclaimed that it cracked the top 10 in Wine Spectator magazine’s Top 100 Wines of the Year.  Meanwhile, the 2006 was stripped of all its dignity, festooned with a cheesy red label and thrown into the hyper-commercialized Christmas arena alongside Justin Bieber’s holiday album and boxes of red and green M&Ms.  My reaction on first seeing this bottle on the shelves probably echoed that of many wine lovers:  “You’ve got to be f______ kidding me.” Read the rest of this entry »