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