The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine of the week: Vinum Cellars CNW 2007

The Wine Curmudgeon has long been an advocate for chenin blanc. It's a welcome alternative to chardonnay, it grows almost anywhere that wine is produced, and it can be used to make exceptional cheap wine.

Which is one of the reasons for being for Vinum Cellars, which makes the CNW (about $10, purchased) – or Chard-No-Way (CNW, get it?). It's one of several quality, inexpensive wines the winery makes, using lesser known grapes from lesser known parts of California.

How much did I like this? After the first couple of sips, I knew it was $10 Hall of Fame quality and I was planning to buy more. It's everything that a $10 chenin should be – dry and crisp, but not overly fruity. Look for a bit of lemon and lime. Would that Texas winemakers did this sort of wine. Drink the CNW chilled on its own or with almost anything that isn't big red meat. Highly recommended.

cheap wine, $10 wine, Vinum Cellars, chenin blanc, inexpensive wine, CNW, California wine, white wine, wine of the week, wine reviews

Winebits 100: Consumption trends, Aussie woes, Twitter wine

· More wine and cheaper wine: We're on pace to drink more and cheaper wine in 2009 than ever before, but the recession has slowed wine-industry growth considerably, according to an upcoming report from Impact Databank. The biggest growth came in the 28 brands that sell more than 2 million cases a year, and which are priced 35 percent below the industry average.

· Australians abandoning vineyards: Industry observers expect Austrialian winegrowers to let more than 15,000 acres Australian vineyards to be left barren this year due to climatic and economic problems. And even that won't be enough, says one official, who estimates that the industry needs to reduce production by 50,000 acres -- or a bit less than the vineyard acreage in Napa Valley.

· Twitter has wine labels: The social media giant is selling Fledgling Wine, a pinot noir and a chardonnay. Each bottle costs $20. For each bottle sold, $5 is going towards the Room to Read charity, which provides children’s to underdeveloped countries.

wine trends, cheap wine, Australian wine, Twitter

Expensive wine of the month 7: Sandeman 10 Years Old Tawny

Port is little known in the U.S., and those who do know it figure it to be sweet, sticky wine preferred by old ladies with cats or harrumphing English gentlemen.

Port, in fact, is wine -- legitimate, drink it like anything else wine. That we don't drink more of it in the States is a function of its price, for most port is expensive, and that we don't know nearly enough about it. (A concise port primer is here; for our purposes, it's enough to know that port is made like wine, but that fermentation is stopped to retain the sweetness and brandy is added to raise the alcohol level.)

The Sandeman (about $30, sample) is a good place to start to deal with both of those dilemmas. At $30, it's not as expensive as its big brother, the 20-year-old, which runs about $45. In addition, it offers classic port flavors like raisins and vanilla, with a wonderfully long pecan finish and a fine balance between the sweetness and its other characteristics. It's not sweet for sweet's sake, like a soft drink, but sweet in the way that a well-made dessert is.

Which makes sense, because port is first and foremost a dessert wine. There are suggested dessert pairings, including cheeses, but port is almost better on its own, served slighty chilled.

Sandeman, port, dessert wine

Winecast 13: Bruce Anderson, Sunset Winery

Bruce and Birgit Anderson of Sunset Winery are typical of the second wave of Texas winemakers, the group that came into the business over the last decade. For many in this group, running a winery was not their first career -- Bruce was a sociology professor; Birgit was a tax preparer.

In addition, they are part of the group of the 60-plus wineries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which means they buy grapes from growers in west Texas. This adds another layer of complication to winemaking, especially if you're a former sociology professor. Bruce says he thought he  knew what he needed to know to be a winemaker, but learned quickly that that wasn't the case. "They were a lot of surprises," he says.

The podcast is about 6 1/2 minutes and 9 megabytes. Click here to listen to it.

Texas wine, regional wine, podcasts, Sunset Winery

Texas wine: What's right, what's wrong, and what still needs to be done

The quality of Texas wine is better than it has ever been. There are fewer flawed wines, the best wineries are more consistent from vintage to vintage, and there are more wineries that can be described as being among the best. In fact, there are probably a dozen or 15 wineries whose products you can buy without hesitation, in the same way you would buy California or French wines.

But just saying Texas wine is better is like saying that a company where sales went from one to two items saw a 100 percent increase. That's an impressive number, but the company wasn't starting from much of a base. And that's the case with Texas wine. Until this decade, Texas wines were uneven at best -- so to say that they're better now is almost damning with faint praise.

The difference this time, as we celebrate Regional Wine Week, is that Texas wines continue to get better, and that hasn't always been the case. What this means, and what remains to be done, is after the jump:

Wine of the week: Red Caboose Tempranillo-Syrah 2007

During our DrinkLocalWine.com conference in August, I had dinner with Gil Kulers, the wine columnist for the Journal Constitution newspaper in Atlanta. We wanted to try something new from Texas, and we ended up with this.

I'll be honest. I knew nothing about Red Caboose, which is one of Texas' newest wineries. It had won a couple of awards at this year's Lone Star International competition, but I didn't remember it. But the Wine Curmudgeon is nothing if not adventurous when it comes to wine lists, and Gil is a good enough guy that he would have kept the ribbing to a minimum if the wine had been poorly made.

But it wasn't poorly made. In fact, the red blend ($28, purchased) is a terrific example of what Texas winemakers can do with grapes that are better suited for this hot and dry climate than cabernet sauvignon and merlot. It's an excellent wine for DLW's regional wine week.

The Red Caboose was balanced, not overly fruity and paired well with our dinner, which was mostly red meat. It had a bit too much oak, which got in the way of the freshness of the fruit, and $28 is a lot of money for an unproven wine. But most wineries should have those problems with their first couple of vintages.

red wine, Red Caboose, Texas wine, regional wine, wine review, wine of the week

Winebits 99: Regional wine

· Oprah passes on Texas wine: We tried to get the talk show goddess to try Texas wine during her visit to the State Fair of Texas over the weekend, but no luck. Oprah ate a corny dog (at least) and sampled Deep Fried Peaches & Cream and Deep Fried Butter, but no wine. Frankly, the Wine Curmudgeon thinks she was scared to try it. No doubt she was afraid it was better than the California labels that she probably drinks.

· Virginia program escapes budget cuts: Virginia's wine board, which promotes the state's wineries, was spared from the extensive budget cuts that hit the state this year in the wake of the recession. Not every state program has been as fortunate. How did the wine programs survive? Virginia officials note that the wine board is self-funded from a tax on wine.

· Regional wine destinations: When North Americans visit wine country, where do they like to go? The obvious choices top the list in a survey conducted by the TripAdvisor Web site, but the second half of the top 10? They're all regional -- the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, New York's Finger Lakes and Long Island, the Traverse City area in Michigan and Oak Grove, Va.

Oprah Winfrey, Virgina wine, wine tourism, State Fair of Texas