Why, oh, why didn’t I buy two bottles? I took a 2003 Sesti Brunello di Montalcino for a test run (in preparation for our all-sangiovese tasting tonight at the Ladies Tasting Society), loved every drop, and then didn’t have enough time to zip back to Berkeley to get another. If I had one to bring tonight to the LTS, I think my bottle would have come out on top — or maybe not, since the 2003 Sesti is not a bruiser of a Brunello, and more delicate vintages tend to get muscled out of blind tastings by the big guys.

Too bad, because the Sesti is a beautiful example of a Brunello. For my complete reaction, click here for (more…)

Our latest assignment at the Ladies Tasting Society is to blind-taste a selection of wines from Italy that are pure sangiovese — that is, 100 percent, virgin sangiovese, the native (and woefully underappreciated) grape variety of Tuscany. It’s as if sangiovese were the first love and first wife of Tuscan winemakers, to whom she bore scads of beautiful children, including molti Chianti. But then this productive, if sometimes cranky, grape found herself neglected when her feckless lover started looking around for something sexier, more multilingual, and more marketable — namely cabernet sauvignon and merlot.

The end result is the “Super-Tuscan,” the celebrated, if sometimes not particularly Italian, red wine that makes a big thing out of using every grape but sangiovese. Worse, a side effect of the invasion of cabernet and merlot into Tuscany is the recent — and so quintessentially European — brouhaha over local winemakers who are allegedly blending non-native grapes into wines that are, according to the laws that still regulate most Old World wine production, supposed to be pure sangiovese.

The most famous flash-point in this controversy is a town called Montalcino, about an hour’s drive south of Florence, which has been making a wine called Brunello that’s 100 percent sangiovese since forever. Stay tuned for more on “Brunellogate,” plus my tasting notes on a great Brunello and the results of the Ladies’ blind tasting.

Here’s a Greek wine that makes me want to hold my glass out for more, rather than throw it in the fire: Manousakis Nostos 2003, a red blend from a mountainside vineyard on Crete, rocked a recent dinner we enjoyed at the San Francisco Hellenic institution Kokkari Estiatorio.

For the story behind our encounter with this wine, including a discouraging footnote about its markup, click here: (more…)

I just got back from vacation on the Riviera Maya in Mexico and although it’s pretty hard to find fault with 10 days of snorkeling, sunbathing, and shooting tequila, I did miss drinking good wine. When we were on Isla Mujeres and our only source was the local Supermini (now there’s an oxymoron for you), we subsisted on a cabernet franc from Monte Xanic — which we renamed Mount Xanax because it was both tranquilizing and tasteless — and a blowsy off-dry white from a Spanish house called Don Simon. When we moved south to Playa del Carmen, though, our hotel restaurant had a wine list with selections from all over the world, a rarity in Mexico. The markups were ugly, but the Mariachis were lively, so we bypassed the margaritas and went for wine with dinner.

Turns out our favorite from this international list was a homegrown surprise. For my notes, proving good Mexican wine isn’t another contradiction in terms, click here: (more…)

I ordered this fine, underrated wine to go with steak tartare at the upscale bistro-style Resto in San Francisco. Its enticing aromas of ripe plum fruit and loamy earthiness got everyone excited, but the real treat lay in the mouth: huge, focused flavors of plum, licorice, and black cherry fruit belied its medium-bodied weight and sound structure. A lush mouthfeel, for sure, but some grip. Its endless finish was edged with Asian spices, white pepper, and loads more of that ripe cherry richness. I was surprised at how pure this particular example tasted, since wines from this area are known for their brambly, peppery notes. Many grape varieties are allowed in the blend here, but we detected a dominance of one, probably from older vines, that gave this example its sweet palate and depth.

Can you guess what it is? Write me, or click here for the answer: (more…)

By Emmanuel Bridonneau, guest writer and founder of Vins Voyages

I recently took the step to only have Crémant de Loire available at all times in my fridge. It’s an extraordinary alternative to Champagne for three reasons that I see:

1. It is made the same way as Champagne (méthode traditionnelle) but with the local varietals (chenin blanc, chardonnay, and cabernet franc)
2. Major Champagne brands make it too
3. It is roughly half the price of Champagne

Granted, it doesn’t have the same spiciness or volume of real Champagne, but it really conveys the “terroir,” that is, the specificity of the location it comes from, in this case the Loire river valley in France.

My take? Keep the fine Champagne for special occasions and have Crémant for the other opportunities. No room for in between.

Santé et meilleurs voeux!

Dear Wine Girl:
I am not a big Champagne fan but your post did get the tastebuds tingling. Can’t wait to try the new Champagne if it ever makes its way over to the UK.
Glasgow Sally

Thanks for visiting Wine Girl, all the way from Glasgow.
I have never before met a British person, even via email, who said she is not a big Champagne fan! Originally in fact it was the British craze over this strange, fizzy wine from France that made the Champagne market. The wonderful English wine critic Hugh Johnson talks about grower-champagnes a bit (not highly, interestingly enough, but this was a while ago) in “A Life Uncorked” and I’m sure there are plenty representatives of the category in the UK, even in your Scottish neck of the woods. Here’s a tip: look for RM or SR on the label. That stands for “Recoltant-Manipulant” or “Societé de Recoltants,” which means the wine was farmed and bottled by the same guy or gal (rather than purchased as grapes by a big producer).
Click here for a very informative story about grower champagnes (which I was delighted to find are sometimes dismissed by their critics as “farmer fizz”).
Cheers,
Heather

It was a perfect choice for a chilly January evening and a plateful of handmade hamburgers: zinfandel. Rich, round, and spicy, this varietal remains so popular because of its easy-to-drink, belly-warming, affordable profile. It’s not a wine to get too serious about; in fact, our least favorite zinfandel in a recent blind tasting held by the Ladies Tasting Society, Gary Farrell’s “Bradford Mountain Vineyards” ($45), was also the most expensive, evidence perhaps that when winemakers try to coax class and complexity out of zinfandel, they end up taking away the very characteristics that make it so pleasurable.

Our take-away message? Now is a good time to buy and enjoy zinfandel. We thought every example was tasty, well-made, and satisfying. We’d say too: get a recent vintage (2006, 2007) and don’t be afraid to spend under $20, since our best value wine, a $19 peppery raspberry fruit bomb by Barber Cellars, came in a very close second to the evening’s fave, Joel Gott’s “Dillian Ranch” from the Sierra Foothills.

For the complete tasting report, click here for more: (more…)

The Ladies Tasting Society met the other night to do a blind tasting of zinfandel wines and it was the most fun we’d had since that poolside rosé taste-off in Palm Springs. Not just because of the sage and jalapeño burgers that paired so perfectly with the wines. Not just because of the debate that ensued over the Internet and whether it’s the Mephistopheles to one member’s Faustian 13-year-old. And certainly not because of the zinfandel’s average alcohol level of 14-15 percent. Oh, no.

For the entertaining story of our encounters with the thieves and beasts of zinfandel, click here for more: (more…)

For those of you who’ve resolved to continue drinking bubbly beyond New Year’s, my tasting group has five special Champagnes we’d recommend. No need to print out our list and use it as a buying guide; as the Ladies Tasting Society blind-tasted our way through these wines, we were struck by how consistently delicious they were, indicating to us that as a category, if you’re in the market these days for a good bottle of real French champers, you can be confident that you’ll score something satisfying. Also, with our average bottle costing around $40–even though we’d set ourselves a $75 limit–we’d definitely bust out with something we’re not used to saying: that, considering this level of quality, today’s Champagne can present a real value.

Perhaps, we theorized, this may be because of the rise of the so-called “grower’s Champagne,” a new type of bubbly coming from a band of intrepid farmers in Champagne who used to sell all their grapes to the big producers like Moet or Tattinger, but have since begun to bottle their own. Grower’s Champagnes are well-represented on our list. They tend to be unique wines, especially expressive of the small plots of land they hail from, and fairly well-priced since they have to compete with the big boys. (Interestingly, a Veuve Clicquot yellow label retails for about $40 these days, the same as our per-bottle average, and four bucks more than the ladies’ fave, Voirin-Jumel’s Blanc de Blancs.)

Click here for our list, in order of our preference: (more…)