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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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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Wine Review: 2004 Pago del Vicario “Agios”

30 11 2011

It may be from a DO farm team, but it can still bring it. Cool bottle too.

It’s 9:30, I’m back from my first Christmas party of the year, I’ve walked the dog, I have the hockey game on TV and I’d like to go to bed within the hour…sounds like the perfect time for a condensed review!  Tonight’s wine is the classic buy-low no-expectations bottle:  although its regular retail price approaches $40CDN, I got it on sale in unusual circumstances for only $15, so I popped the cork not particularly caring whether or not it was a worldbeater.  The producer, Pago del Vicario, is based in the sprawling Castilla region of central Spain, just southeast of Madrid; the official appellation name, Vino de la Tierra de Castilla, signifies that Castilla is kind of a higher-grade appellation in waiting, a second or third division region awaiting promotion to the top tier of the Spanish wine area hierarchy, DO (Denominacion de Origen).  With apologies to those non-hockey fans out there, Vino de la Tierra wines are like the ECHL of the Spanish wine world.  However, that’s not to say that quality wines can’t be found in Castilla — this is one example of a lower-yield artisan wine that has clearly been made with care.

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Wine Review: 2007 Freemark Abbey Cabernet Sauvignon

28 11 2011

Can a flower vase be an appropriate decanter? I say yes.

If the name of this wine sounds familiar, it should:  the ’07 Freemark Abbey Cab from the Napa Valley was my ultimate victor in the modern-day Judgment of Paris blind tasting I took part in at Co-op Wine & Spirits a month ago.  Matched up against 9 other top Cabernets including a couple of First Growth Bordeaux (2002 Chateau Haut Brion and 2007 Chateau Mouton Rothschild) and some iconic Napa Cabs (2007 Ridge Monte Bello and 2002 Heitz “Martha’s Vineyard”), by far the cheapest wine of the bunch (average bottle price of the 10 reds:  $277), this $47 little wine that could knocked both my tasting companion and I over and emerged the clear cut JoP winner for each of us.  As soon as the identities of the various wines were unveiled, I knew I had to get my hands on some — a reaction that probably would have been more subdued had the $928 Mouton Rothschild taken the title.  Thankfully for me (and all of you), the Freemark Abbey Cab is currently on sale at Highlander Wine & Spirits for just over $40, which is absolute robbery for a bottle of this quality from a premium region.  If you’re a Cali Cabernet fan, or if you’re not yet done your Christmas shopping, this is your winner.  Thank me later.

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Introducing the PnP All-Time Ratings Archive Spreadsheet

25 11 2011

PnP's complied Ratings Database spreadsheet: like this, but for wine.

Now that I’ve pounded out nearly 80 reviews over 9 months on this site, I thought it was about time to try and make the content on Pop & Pour a little more accessible.  The Search box at the top right of the page can help you if you’re looking for something specific, but until now there was no easy way to find out at a glance which wines have had the (mis)fortune of being featured on PnP over the course of the year.  Thankfully, my friend Microsoft Excel has helped me solve that problem; I have now compiled all of the names, vintages, scores, prices and review links for each of the wines I’ve written up and put them into a sortable spreadsheet that’s available for download by clicking on one these links (new Excel first, then older Excel):

Pop & Pour Ratings Database Nov 2011

Pop & Pour Ratings DB Nov 2011 Old Excel

My plan is to update this Ratings Archive spreadsheet once a month so that you will always have a fairly current list of PnP’s wines, and so that any particular review that interests you will only be a click away.  The spreadsheet also has one new piece of info for each reviewed wine that isn’t found anywhere on the blog:  a (very) rudimentary calculation of QPR (Quality Price Ratio) that gives you a general idea at a glance how much bang you get for your buck with every bottle. Read the rest of this entry »


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Wine Review: 2010 Tantalus Riesling

23 11 2011

I feel like I’ve been remiss in not writing this review until now, seeing as how my visit to Tantalus might have been the highlight of my trip to the Okanagan in September.  I’ve been a fan of the winery (one of the few in Canada about which I can honestly make that claim) for awhile, and actually getting to go there and meet some of the people behind the eye-catching mask-labelled bottles only heightened my respect for who they are and what they do.  I was lucky enough to get a guided tour of both the vineyards and the winery from winemaker David Paterson — which is probably the only reason I was able to answer WSET Advanced exam questions about vertical shoot positioning and replacement cane pruning — and I left there as excited about wine as I’ve ever been.

Believe it or not, this is in a city. Did I mention I'm moving to Kelowna?

Unlike many Okanagan wineries which are based in the hotter, drier southern portion of the valley, Tantalus is located right within Kelowna’s city limits, in as pastoral a setting as possible given that the closest Starbucks is less than 10 minutes away.  All of their wines come from grapes grown directly on their estate, and on the rolling slopes of their vineyards they have planted Pinot Noir and a growing amount of Chardonnay; however, to me at least, they are synonymous with brilliant, high-quality Riesling.  They have some of the oldest Riesling vines in Canada (40+ years) on location, where Kelowna’s relatively cooler but lake-moderated climate is ideal for this hardy, late-ripening Germanic grape.  The winemaker has a clear vision about what he’s trying to achieve with this privileged source material, letting the fruit speak for itself and preserving natural acids, and consistently delivers on the site’s potential.  Although Tantalus also makes a reserve Old Vines Riesling from their decades-old vines (and is starting to experiment with sparkling Riesling as well), tonight’s wine is the producer’s base Riesling bottling, which packs more of a punch than anyone has a right to expect for the sub-$25 price.

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Wine Review: 2009 Conundrum

18 11 2011

I don't think even 2006 Me would have been overly thrilled by this.

True story:  back in 2006, when I was JUST starting to get interested in wine, I went to a long-standing Calgary wine boutique over the holiday season looking for a special celebratory bottle of wine to help ring in the New Year.  I barely bought any wine at all back then, and when I did it rarely exceeded $20 a bottle, but since this was to be a wine for an occasion, I decided to splurge and upped my max budget to $50.  I was directed to a proprietary white wine blend from an iconic Napa Valley producer, Caymus, who was mainly known for making some of California’s best Cabernet Sauvignon; however, as a side project, they had started putting together this fruity, floral, dynamic white that had quickly made a name for itself.  On the shop’s recommendation, I bought and enjoyed a bottle of Caymus’ Conundrum.  It cost me $45.

Fast forward five years.  I bought tonight’s bottle of Conundrum a couple of weeks ago.  It cost $18.

What happened?

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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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Goals & Milestones

27 10 2011

Once more into the breach!

One of the things I wanted to do in 2011 (other than making sure I muddled through figuring out how to keep our first child alive — so far so good!) is get some formal wine education.  I had read a ton of books and articles, gone to tastings, talked to shop owners and, of course, drank a lot of vino, but I wanted to take things a step farther and actually get into the classroom, which prompted me to enrol in the WSET Intermediate program a few months ago.  Thankfully, I successfully completed and passed the course, coming out of the summer with my Intermediate Certificate, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I immediately signed up for the WSET Advanced class later in the year.  Well, “later in the year” is now two days away — for the next three weekends I will be shut away in a conference room downtown with other like-minded wine die-hards, trying desperately to absorb reams of technical and geographical information while simultaneously tasting 20-30 wines a day.  If my course materials are any indication, the Advanced course will be WAY more, well, advanced than the Intermediate, so if you don’t see as many PnP posts as normal until mid-November, you can assume it’s because I’m studying.  The blog will be back up to full throttle once my exam (which includes a blind tasting this time) is blissfully behind me.

Thankfully, this blog continues to get amazing support even when I’m a bit lax about regular posting.  Sometime in the next two days Pop & Pour will clock over the 10,000 (!!!) hit mark, which is both gratifying and astonishing to me.  In each month of its operation, PnP has attracted more views than the month before, and I have all of you to thank for your interest in this site.  Once the WSET is done I’ll crack and review a suitable tribute bottle to celebrate both this latest round-number hit target and the fact that school’s officially out for winter.  Cheers!


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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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