Wine Review: 2009 Beso de Vino Seleccion

22 02 2012

How many of you really needed to see full frontal bull nudity?

I’m sure the first thing the folks at Beso de Vino wanted me to see on this bottle was the 90-point score it received from Jay Miller of The Wine Advocate (which is likely why that number was posted front and centre on the neck in bigger font than the wine’s name).  Instead, the first thing I saw was:  testicles.  Yes, for reasons only known to a marketing department that should be immediately fired, BdV’s loveable mascot Antonio the Bull is drawn on the main label of the wine as a blatantly anatomically-correct stick figure.  Is it really necessary to showcase the animated gonads of a cartoon bull?  It has horns; I can already tell it’s a bull without any more explicit gender identification.  I don’t think the testicles add anything in particular to the artist’s rendition, and it’s not like the bull is really central to the wine or its faux back story (that Antonio kissed the wine and fell in love…not exactly deep stuff).  I am at a loss to explain this, but it’s hard to think of anything else when I look at the bottle.  Most unnecessarily X-rated critter wine ever. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2008 Fog Crest Vineyard “Laguna West” Chardonnay

15 02 2012

I had to use the promo pic from the website instead of my actual pic, for obvious reasons. Sure is foggy.

I just finished reading the book Judgment of Paris by George Taber, which is primarily a recounting of the now-legendary 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting where California Cabernets and Chardonnays shockingly upset top French Bordeaux and Burgundies in a blind tasting evaluated by renowned French judges, but which also tangentially describes the birth and rapid growth of the California wine industry.  The truly amazing thing about the J of P tasting wasn’t that the California wines upset the French; it was that the California wineries represented in the competition didn’t even exist a decade earlier.  Many of them entered their first, second or third vintages EVER in a tasting contest against historic French bottlings that dated back centuries, which in the world of wine should have been a recipe for embarrassment.  I now think about this every time I open a Cali Cab or Chard because, as a recent disciple of wine, I’ve only ever known California as a world vinous powerhouse; it’s remarkable to think that 40 years ago it would have been laughable to describe it that way.

To coincide with my finishing the book, I felt it only appropriate to open a California wine in commemoration, and the Fog Crest has been a bottle I’ve been very interested in trying, largely because the producer brings in ultra-famous Cali winemaker David Ramey as a consultant to help craft its Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs.  Fog Crest is based out of the Russian River Valley sub-region of Sonoma County, an area known for having a notably cooler climate than the surrounding area, helped in part by cold morning fogs (hence the winery name).  These climatic conditions make RRV an ideal spot for growing grapes like Chardonnay that show their best in cooler sites.  My favourite thing about this wine has to be its thematically-accurate, dry-ice-induced foggy promo pic from its website (see above left), the set up for which almost inevitably involved some marketing guru saying:  “See, FOG Crest?  Get it?”  (I get it.)   Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2007 Chateau de la Gardine Chateauneuf-de-Pape

9 02 2012

Try to fit THAT in your wine rack -- I dare you.

Tonight’s review was supposed to be posted last night, but some insomniac infant adventures from the night before made me more or less comatose by dinnertime, so I had to take a PnP rain check.  However, all is quiet in the house now, so fresh off a better night’s rest and a ton of caffeine, it’s go time…although I’m still tired, so I’d better write quick.  This blatantly asymmetrical bottle of Chateauneuf-de-Pape was a generous Christmas gift from a good friend of mine (thanks Josh!) and a wine that I couldn’t bring myself to wait to open.  Considering the last time I opened a weirdly-shaped bottle of CNDP, it was a wholly depressing experience, I was fervently hoping for better luck this time…I’d hate to be permanently pulled out of the sway of a good marketing gimmick.  Fingers crossed!

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WSET Celebratory Wine Review: 2007 Cayuse Cailloux Vineyard Syrah

6 02 2012

When people ask me what kind of wine I like, I'm going to pull out this pic.

Ever since I found out that I passed my WSET Advanced course last week, I’ve been wanting to break open something truly special to celebrate.  However, sickness intervened, so rather than crack a $100+ bottle and write stuff like “smells like nothing” and “my throat hurts” in a review, I decided to wait until the congestion clouds had cleared.  This weekend I pronounced myself fit to taste and rummaged through my cellar to find a suitable victory bottle, and as soon as I came to this one, I stopped thinking about any other.  However, it’s a bottle built for the long haul, so I was faced with the quandary that every wine lover about to pull the cork on an expensive bottle has had to face:  should I open the wine now so I can try it, or will I be undercutting its long-term potential by having it too early?  After getting some savvy advice from the amazingly-informed wine community on Twitter (thanks, @peterzachar and @nwtomlee!), I turned to Cayuse’s website for the final verdict.  On their FAQ page, there was a question that said:  “How soon can I open my wines?”  Cayuse’s answer?  “A Latin saying insists, ‘There are four reasons for drinking wine: the arrival of a friend; one’s present or future thirst; the excellence of the wine; or any other reason.'”  I opened the wine.

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Wine Review: 2010 Painted Rock Chardonnay

3 02 2012

Although a newer vintage than the 2009, it's still like going back in time.

The coolest thing about this blog having been around awhile, other than the fact that I’ve miraculously managed to regularly publish an Internet wine blog for the better part of a year, is that I’m starting to come across second vintages in the bottles I open:  current vintage wines whose predecessors I have previously featured on PnP.  Case in point:  the 2010 Painted Rock Chardonnay from the Okanagan Valley, which is probably already facing an uphill battle in this review due to monstrously high expectations because I totally loved the 2009 PR Chard back in September.  I think Painted Rock is a producer on the forefront of the Canadian wine scene, one that is starting to show that we don’t have to settle for local wines that only measure up as against their neighbours, but that can also stand tall on the international market.  While PR focuses primarily on red wine, their lone white is a testament to the wonders of cool-climate Chardonnay, and I thought enough about the ’09 vintage that I absolutely loaded up on the 2010 as soon as it became available.

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Wine Review: 2010 Dona Paula “Los Cardos” Malbec

1 02 2012

Marketing note: maybe don't name your wine after a weed.

Many apologies for the blog radio silence over the past few days:  after weeks of avoiding it, I finally ended up catching the sinus/chest cold that every single person in Calgary currently has, so I had to shut down my wine consumption until I was more or less healthy.  The worst has now passed, but I still have a bit of residual congestion, so be warned in advance that the following review could be completely inaccurate…but it’s free, so what do you care?

Malbec!  I have no idea how this is possible, but this is the very first Malbec that has been the feature of its own PnP review.  The grape that has been a part of the blend in red Bordeaux wines for centuries but that has taken the drinking world by storm in the last decade with its single-varietal Argentinian incarnation is definitely the Shiraz of the 2000s, the new red wine that offers such an inexpensive and enjoyable experience that it has put a previously-ignored winemaking country on the vinous map.  I haven’t been avoiding it on purpose — like everyone, I’m a fan of a good Malbec — but after a couple sips of this wine, I knew I was going to regret making it my initial foray into the grape.

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Calgary Wine Life: Meet Matt Browman @ Highlander Marda Loop

27 01 2012

[Cross-posted at www.calgaryisawesome.com]

I am truly excited to kick into gear what I hope will be a long and, well, awesome collaboration with site-around-town extraordinaire Calgary Is Awesome.  For those regular CIA visitors who don’t know me, I’ve been writing local wine blog popandpour.ca for almost a year now, a site that contains reviews of a number of bottles available in town and other thoughts and musings aimed at demystifying (and glorifying) the incredible world of wine.  One of the things that I’ve wanted to do with Pop & Pour, but that I couldn’t really figure out how to approach, was to highlight the remarkable people and places that illuminate Calgary’s local wine scene, which remains almost criminally underrated.  Well, CIA has given me that chance.  My monthly posts for Calgary Is Awesome will focus on YYC wine shops, events, personalities and other home-based vinous topics of interest that will hopefully showcase the amazing depth of talent and energy that our fair city has directed towards my favourite beverage.  If you want to know how lucky you are to be a Calgarian who likes wine, read on.

Tasting, anyone?

I used to live in Altadore three places and five years ago, and even back then I thought that the area needed a specialty wine store…Liquor Depot wasn’t quite cutting it.  Now that land in my old neighbourhood costs more than my soul and Marda has become THE inner-city-but-not living destination for many Calgarians, this need has only amplified, and in December 2010 it was finally addressed when Highlander Wine & Spirits opened a massive new store in the heart of the Loop (2112 – 33rd Avenue SW).  As soon as you walk in, you can immediately tell that the shop was designed to be a temple of wine.  The large, open-profile modern space is lined with dark-wood-rack after dark-wood-rack of bottles, organized by country and region; there’s a huge tasting table in the back of the store, right beside cupboards full of wine glasses and an Enomatic machine that keeps a dozen or so open sample bottles free of invading air; it’s an oenophile’s dream.  Of course, there’s still plenty of beer and spirits available for sale, but if you were to walk in the front door and take a look around, you would definitely say:  “This is a wine store.”  This focus on fine wine is completely intentional.

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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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