Tonight it’s time for a double-header review from one of my favorite new small winery discoveries, SPELLwine. Both wines are red blends from Napa Valley, both are super tasty and both have crazy-fun labels. The woman behind this wine, Kristen Spelletich, told me that she only sells her wine through retail and direct. She said […]
Last week I reviewed the SPELLwine sangiovese and this week we’re checking out their syrah. I admit it. I have a prejudice against Californian syrah. I’ve had far too much of it that is over-extracted, syrupy sweet and too overpowering to pair with anything I eat. It’s not the grape’s fault. I’ve had plenty of […]
While I love a bargain on wines, I get bored with factory-made wines that while not offensive just have no excitement to them. So many wines on the market today are manipulated in an attempt to “standardize” the flavor. And it’s not just the cheap ones. A lot of this is done in order to […]
I can’t help but wonder how meaningful the “Meritage” name is to wine consumers. I mean, I don’t hear many people saying, “I’d like a glass of Meritage.” I suspect a lot of consumers don’t even know what it is. In essence, Meritage is a name for Bordeaux-style wine that’s made somewhere other than Bordeaux. […]
I’m a big fan of sangiovese, but most of the time if I’m drinking a sangiovese it’s one from Italy. I just don’t come across a lot of domestic sangiovese, but I’m always curious about it when I do. Perhaps I don’t come across much of it because the market is just too small for […]
The Jacob’s Creek wine brand started back in 1976 and was named after a creek in the Barossa Valley, on the banks of which the first commercial vineyard in the region was planted. The grapes in this wine, however, don’t come from the Barossa Valley. Rather, they come from the Coonawarra region, which is south […]
We’ve been reviewing a number of cabernet sauvignons lately, but one wine we’ve come across that we really like is not quite a cabernet sauvignon, but rather is a red blend that is dominant in cabernet sauvignon. Anka is a blend of 57% cabernet sauvignon, 16% merlot, 15% cabernet franc, 7% carmemere, 4% syrah, and 1 % […]
While packaging really doesn’t tell you much about the wine inside the bottle, it’s a critically important element for wine producers. The truth is as consumers we often will buy the bottle that we think looks the best. But what do the looks of a bottle really tell us? Regardless of whether the label design […]
Continuing with the cabernet sauvignon theme, today we’re checking out another Chilean cabernet from the Colchagua Valley region in Chile. We’ve reviewed a few other Calcu wines, such as their malbec and their red blend, and we’ve found them to be generally decent. They’ve not necessarily knocked our socks off, but they’re still good. And […]
A lot of the wines that I review seem to have a similar story. A family owns a vineyard for generations and recently renovated their winery, blah, blah, blah. Well, the story behind Maquis has a slightly different twist. Yes, it’s a vineyard that has been owned by the same family for over 100 years. […]
