With Thanksgiving only a few days away, many of you may be wondering: “What wine should I drink with the turkey this year?”  Enter the French: Georges DuBoeuf  vs. Louis Latour in a Beaujolais-Villages showdown.  While this may not be the battle of the century, or even that hard-hitting of a fight (I haven’t met the pinot that was able to take me out), many would agree that a pinot noir is decent pairing for one of the largest turkey slayings of the year.  And with good reason.  The lighter style of the pinot is agreeable with most people’s palettes and pairs well with many of this holiday’s traditional dishes.

(I should note that both wines have been training since 2006 for this fight, and were allowed to breathe for one hour before consumption.)

Georges DuBoeuf: 2006 Beaujolais-Villages

While Georges’ offering appears to be the underdog of this battle with a floral-themed label, he has weighed in at a healthy $12 and has a nose that arguably smells of fresh-cut flowers, possibly even dandelions.  It’s a very light wine, with a quick finish that’s chased by a faint jab of citrus.

While I will openly admit that I tend to enjoy the heavyweight matches a little more, it’s always fun to see what the lightweights can bring to the table.

Louis Latour: 2006 Beaujolais-Villages

Also weighing in at a spry $12 is Latour’s offering, which has a wicked cranberry-right cross.  With a short, soft finish, this wine would also be a good choice for Thanksgiving dinner.  And this may be a ridiculous critique, but I would feel much better about bringing a bottle of Louis Latour’s Beaujolais-Villages to a gathering of friends and family, the bottle just screams old school French style.

The decision:

Latour by a knockout.  DuBoeuf simply lacked the refinement and experience that Latour brought to this match.  While both wines fell safely within the pinot style, Latour was a slightly heavier, more refined wine than the DuBoeuf.  And the DuBoeuf just felt young and unprepared for this battle.

Post-fight analysis:

At the end of the day, pairing wine with anything (especially Thanksgiving) just comes down to what you enjoy.  If you would enjoy a gin and tonic with your Thanksgiving dinner, then by all means, please enjoy a tumbler of your favorite.  And if you really worked at it, you could probably even convince me that it would be a reasonable pairing, as wild turkeys are often found roosting in pine trees.  While this may or may not be utter nonsense, I hope that it serves to prove my point - drink what you like and enjoy the company.  The holiday season is one of the few times a year that I get to raid my father’s cellar, and get away with it.

Happy Holidays!
-Ryan

Guest Review:

Armed with an exciting new recipe in hand, my wife and I tromped off to the grocery store to gather up the yummy ingredients in preparation for a hopefully nice meal. As is usually the case when we food shop together, I become impatient so I get my little assignments and scurry off to find items, only to return for a new assignment. My first stop was to get the wine! The meal actually called for a white, but my eye fixed on a wine produced, as it turns out, by one of the oldest wineries in the states, Concannon. I had never tasted any of their wines and for that matter never really heard about them. I’ll get to the wine itself later but I thought it interesting to share some info about the winery first. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, and of course the web site on the bottle, I found the winery and read thru the site to see what was what. Turns out, Concannon is celebrating 125 years of operation this year, the vines being planted by an Irish immigrant in 1883. Located in Livermore Valley , which is west of the San Francisco area, James Concannon figured that the grapes would flourish with warm days and cool nights, given winds moving inland from the adjacent bay. In life’s unending quest for knowledge, it is always refreshing to learn something interesting and somewhat obscure for strategic use later on. So I have neatly tucked away the fact that the Concannon Vineyard produced the worlds first Petit Syrah from its 1961 harvest, a wine they still produce today. So enough background info and, onto the wine. So I picked up a 2006 Pinot Noir, Limited Release, price $16. Packaged in a cool bottle with a trademark gate embossed on the bottle, I decanted it before sitting down to eat. While the professional tasting notes sport a long list of adjectives (as always), I caught dark fruit right away and a solid earthy aroma. The first glass was good but not great. We finished dinner and then sat on the couch to finish the bottle. The second glass was much better with a smoother finish and was far less biting than the first, indicating that maybe the wine is still a bit young and could be aged a bit longer. This wine would serve better paired with some nice grilled lamb chops and that will be the plan when I go back to cop a few more bottles.

-Scott

Concannon - 2006 Pinot Noir

I was looking for a decent bottle of wine that I wouldn’t have to feel bad about breaking out for no occasion at all, and I think I found it in this old vine zin.  Pepperwood Grove has always been recognized as an excellent value wine.  While I am more familiar with their pinots, merlots and cabs,  I was very excited to stumble across this zin.

Pepperwood Grove has vineyards across California, into South America, in Europe and even out as far as Australia.  And to be honest, when looking for a value wine, I don’t really care where it’s from.  I just want to have a bottle that’s inexpensive, that I can open whenever I want (even on a Sunday morning) and not have to worry whether or not I should have waited.  I just want to drink it. Now.

Moving on to the tasting: My silly father in law thought that he caught some black pepper in his first snort of this old vine zin.  He even went as far as to say that “…it was like opening a jar of peppercorns.”  After ridiculing him mercilessly for several minutes, I did agree with his secondary assessment of dark raisins and plums.  And maybe a hint of pepper, but I’m pretty sure that he just said that because it was all he could read on the label without putting on his glasses.

While there isn’t much that is really striking about this wine, it’s a very safe bet for your $7-$8.

Enjoy!
Ryan

New York wines are back in the game.

Everytime I drink a bottle of old vine zin from California, I tell myself that I am going to hate the wines that I grew up with from New York.  And everytime I drink a bottle from Seneca Shore, my faith is restored.  In a totally no-nonsense review, this is an excellent red from Seneca Lake in upstate NY.

Composition: 50% Cabernet Franc, 46% Cabernet Sauvignon, 4% Merlot

This is a big red from NY that simply defies reason…I’m just not sure how they do it.  It has an old, refined taste that is not typical of many of the reds from NY.  While at first, the Medieval Red tastes like a well-cellared cab sauvignon, it comes alive on the finish with hints of cinnamon and cherries.

Cabernet Franc tends to grow quite well in the Finger Lakes, and happens to be one of my favorite NY varietals.  While NY state is hustling to unify the region as a being a producer of premium riesling, I have a really hard time getting on board.  From what I can tell, the Riesling in NY tends to be quite good.  However, is a good Riesling really enough to establish a reason?  Oregon has Pinot Noir, California seems to have everything, why can’t NY have Cabernet Franc?  If anyone else has any thoughts on this subject, please post a comment - I’d like some validation either way.

Moving on…

What is truly most bizarre about this winery is that they have seahorses on their label and signage, which to be honest, was a reason that I had put off visiting this winery.

As the saying goes, don’t judge a winery by its seahorses.  They have really good wine at Seneca Shore, if you can find it (which is tough outside of the Finger Lakes), please do give it a shot.  Behind the seahorses lie a really excellent wine.  And in front of the seahorses are pirate ships.

-Ryan

Visited: October 2008

Cline wines have always been a standby for me.  They are relatively inexpensive, of decent quality and are widely distributed.  All of these factors led me to believe that Cline Cellars would be a fairly commercial facility with a big parking lot and crowded tasting facility. This couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

Driving down the long entrance at Cline, between row upon row of zinfandel, I was excited to find a smallish, older house that was the tasting facility.  Inside the house there was a small bar that wrapped around one corner of the room.  There were six or seven people around the bar when we walked in.  We were quickly acknowledged and handed a tasting sheet, only having to wait a minute or two to pony up to the bar.  Not at all what I had expected!  While Cline does not have a large selection of wines, they do have a niche that they manage quite well.  We enjoyed an old vine zin, an ancient vine zin and an ancient vine mourvedre.  The zins were pretty standard and an awesome value, but the mourvedre was a different animal altogether.  On the nose it had odors of mold or rotten fruit, but it was very different (in a good way) on the palette.  The tasting room staff informed us that this was a fairly rare bottle and not widely distributed, but I have been able to find them in the Cincinnati area.  I would say that it’s definitely worth trying if you haven’t had it….you only live once and I hear that your liver likes mourvedre.  We didn’t end up walking with any wine from Cline, but it was cool stop on the trip.

Another fun Napa and Sonoma winery fact is that all of the wineries close at 5 or 6 PM.  I was hoping to get a couple more wineries in on day one, but as it turns out, five or six is about all that I can handle.

If you haven’t tried the Cline Syrah, do it.  You won’t be disapointed.  At a $12 price point, it’s an excellent wine and a very decent value - we ended up having one with lunch a day later.

-Ryan

Visited: October 2008

I should probably preface this review with the fact that this was the very first winery that we visited in the Napa/Sonoma area over the course of a five day period. Package this with a healthy ignorance of California wineries and a quick drink in San Francisco, and you have the recipe for a good time.

The approach to Viansa is truly picturesque.  While this was not to be the largest or grandest winery that we were to visit, its hillside setting, with old school-looking cellar and tasting facility was an acceptable way to start the trip.  My wife and I found the tasting room staff to be friendly and accommodating, and totally unwilling to let us taste any of their wines that were not ready. Our server totally shot me down on my first two selections from the tasting sheet, saying “I wouldn’t waste your time on that one. Or that one.”  After a couple of bust choices, I deferred totally to the server. I let her pick the entire tasting, and she didn’t disapoint.  The tasting fee was a ten-spot, and five healthy pours later, I was in an excellent mood.  Viansa’s array of reds was truly expansive at over 20 wines; however, only a few were impressive.

What was not impressive at Viansa was their “Italian Marketplace”, which was supposed to boast “…hundreds of delicious foods to complement their wines.”  Also not impressive was the origin of the name, Viansa.

I had assumed that the name belonged to some Italian immigrant, who had crossed the Atlantic in the mid-1400s on a medieval yacht; probably a pirate ship loaded with cannons and treasure. I had hoped that Guiseppe Viansa had planted some vines from clippings stolen from a monastery in Tuscany after nearly dying from scurvy and cannibalism during his voyage.  Unfortunately, that was not the case.  The name “Viansa” is derived from “Vicki and Sam”.  I like mine better.

Needless to say, after being so impressed with the view, the servers, and the need to buy something; my wife and I ended up rolling with a bottle of 2005 Sempre Avanti @ $32 (a “Super Tuscan”) and a 2005 Freisa  @ $25.

2005 Sempre Avanti - or “Always Forward” is a damn good blended red.  It must have been, or I wouldn’t have bought it.

2005 Freisa - According to Viansa, Freisa is an Italian varietal that is rarely grown in California.  It was actually the only freisa that I recall seeing throughout our 19 winery trip.  This wine was done in French oak for 18 months, and I recall that it had a little bite and lacked the refinement of the Sempre Avanti.  What the hell, I was intrigued.

Ciao!
Ryan

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-Ryan