The Wine Curmudgeon

Mini-reviews 13: Domaine Guion, Maison Bertrand, King Estate, Bonny Doon

Reviews of wines that don’t need their own post, but are worth noting for one reason or another. Look for it on the final Friday of each month.

• Domaine Guion Bourgueil Cuvée Prestige 2006 ($20, sample): Cabernet franc from the Loire Valley in France, and everything I hoped it would be -- and then some. More fruit (cherry?) than I expected, but it had the French nose and a long, mineral finish.

• Maison Bertrand Ambroise St. Romain 2003 ($30, purchased): This white Burgundy was a steal when I bought it 3 1/2 years ago, and it's apparently the same price today (if you can find it). Took about 90 minutes to open up, but when it did it went from herbal and anise to green apple and oak. Very, very nice.

• King Estate Pinot Gris Domaine 2008 ($25, sample): Classic Oregon pinot gris -- exactly what it is supposed to be and a value at this price. It's fresh and crisp, with pear/green apple fruit and a longish finish.

• Bonny Doon Syrah Le Pousseur 2006 ($18, sample): A little more fruit than the previous vintage, but still complicated, interesting, and balanced. This is what California syrah should taste like.

wine reviews, Domaine Guion, Maison Bertrand, King Estate, Bonny Doon, syrah, pinot gris, white Burgundy, cabernet franc

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Wine terms: Sulfites

Sulfites are the great urban myth of the wine business. Supposedly, evil American winemakers, chanting and swaying over bubbling cauldrons of crushed grapes, dump tons and tons sulfites into the wine. The result? Wine drinkers with really bad headaches.

"I'm convinced most of this is auto-suggestion,” says Tom Mansell, a PhD candidate in chemical engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., whose research has looked at the relationship between sulfites and wine headaches and writes well on the subject. "Wine labels have to list whether sulfites are added to wine, so when consumers see that, they assume it causes the problems."

More, after the jump:

Wine of the week: La Mano Mencía Roble 2007

One of the most difficult things to do when writing about wine is to resist the temptation to criticize what others like. Yes, it's easy to write witty lines and to bask in the glow of self-snarkiness. But what does that accomplish? The goal should be education, always.

Which brings us to the Mencia ($10, purchased), a Spanish red wine that many people apparently don't like. "Bitter." "Innocuous." "Not memorable." Another tasting note I saw compared it to a wine that cost three times as much and, not surprisingly, found it lacking. To which the Wine Curmudgeon asks: Are you judging the wine on its merits, or are you judging it based on what you want the wine to taste like?

Why am I getting so philosophical in a review for yet another $10 wine? Because I keep seeing this crop up in how people view both cheap and regional wine -- the attitude that if the wine doesn't fit the perception of what the drinker wants it to taste like, then it's not any good. Which is doing it backwards. One must taste the wine, and then judge it.

The point is not that the Mencia is bitter, innocuous or unmemorable. The point is that the grape used, the mencia, should not be judged as if it was tempranillo or merlot. Because, compared to either, it will seem bitter. And compared to a $20 or $30 wine, it will seem innocuous and it won't be memorable. So judge it against itself. You'll find a cranberry aroma, some juiciness (though it isn't especially fruity), a bit of tannin, and enough acid to balance the fruit. It's a burger and barbecue wine, and it does what Spanish wine is supposed to do. Which, to me, is memorable.

Mencia Roble, Spanish wine, red wine, cheap wine, inexpensive wine, wine reviews, wine of the week, $10 wine

Winebits 127: State laws, direct shipping, rose advice

• Alabama OKs "stronger wine:" You can't sell wine in Alabama with a woman riding a bicycle on the label, but you can sell wine with as much as 24 percent alcohol. No, I don't understand it, either. I just hope that the lawmakers who pushed for the bill make sure the higher alcohol wine they want to buy has had its label approved.

• Perspective on direct shipping bill: The great Paul Franson offers a reasoned, sensible look at the outcry over the infamous HR 5034, which has so many people in the wine world in an uproar -- even though they have no idea what is going on. Writes Franson: "But is passage of the bill even possible? Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena, Calif.) says, 'The bill isn’t going anywhere. Speaker Pelosi is on board (the opposition).' Thompson is co-chair of the Wine Caucus in Congress. Pelosi, like Thompson, owns a vineyard in wine country, and surely is aware of the bill’s potential consequences."

• Dan Berger on rose: "Winery personnel who work the wine tasting rooms and public-event tastings almost all say the same thing: 'When I say to people, "We have a dry rosé," people usually say, "No thanks, I don’t drink sweet wine." What part of 'dry' are they missing?” Dan's recommendation? Waterbrook from Washington state, about $13.

wine laws, direct shipping, rose

DrinkLocalWine.com 2010: The day after

That was fun. Let's do it again.

DrinkLocalWine.com 2010, which focused on Virginia wine and ended Sunday, taught me two things. First, that there is an incredible enthusiasm for information about regional wine in the state. Second, that social media, regardless of what cranks like I think, is here to stay. These two bits tied into each other during our Twitter Taste-off, which saw an unprecedented amount of information about Virginia wine flood the cyber ether.

We don't have official statistics on the number of tweets and retweets and various other social media things yet, but I'm told we're in five figures and working up from there. That means thousands and thousands of people learned about Virginia wine, and they didn't need the Winetream Media to do it. The wine world is changing, and the Wine Curmudgeon is glad to be here to watch it.

One thing I didn't learn? That Virginia produces quality wine. I already knew that. Petite manseng, anyone?

Two decades of regional wine

The Wine Curmudgeon was not always a supporter of regional wine. When I started doing this almost 25 years ago, I assumed -- as almost everyone else did then, and as too many people still do -- that if North American wine didn't come from California, it wasn't worth anything.

My education was a gradual process, starting with Washington and Oregon, and then moving to the rest of the country. But I learned something, and I'm glad I did. One of the first wine stories I sold as a freelancer, when I was still working in the newspaper business, was about regional wine. Travelers on American Airlines in 1989 read a story by a novice wine writer named Jeff Siegel that said -- lo and behold -- that wine was made in odd and strange places like Missouri, Virginia, Michigan and Texas. I still remember the thrill of selling that story, and wherever the editor is who bought it (my memory for names has never been good), thank you.

Which brings us to this weekend, when DrinkLocalWine.com holds it second annual conference. We're in Loudoun County, Va., where we're focusing on Virginia wine. The details are here; we still have some spots available for people in the Washington, D.C. area who want to attend. The Twitter Taste-off, with 25 wineries, should be worth the price of admission alone.

These days, regional wine is thriving, and it has become something more than wine made in odd places. There are top-notch wines being made by top-notch winemakers using top-notch grapes. The catch? That not enough people know about the quality of regional wine. But that's changing, and I like to think that my efforts. along with Dave McIntyre, for DrinkLocalWine.com are part of that change.

All wine doesn't have to taste like it came from California. The sooner the wine world realizes that, the better off we'll all be. It's not that life is too short to drink bad wine; it's that life is too short to drink the same kind of wine..

Expensive wine 13: Freemark Abbey Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

From one of the CellarTracker notes for the Freemark Abbey cabernet sauvignon: "A good value for a pleasant, but relatively simple, every day wine."

The list price for this wine is $35. The Wine Curmudgeon wishes he lived in a world where he could afford to spend $35 for an everyday bottle of wine. That works out to $175 a week (assuming we're drinking more expensive wine on the weekend, of course) and $9,100 a year. Maybe it's me, but spending almost $10,000 a year on wine seems like a lot of money. I write about wine, and I don't spend $10,000 a year.

This is not to knock the Freemark Abbey (sample), which is a very well done Napa Valley cabernet with quality fruit (lots of cherry), soft tannins, and all more or less in proportion. I'd buy it for myself for a special occasion, or give it as gift (Father's Day, perhaps). As such, it's far from simple and it's not an everyday wine.

Which points to one of the problems with the wine business in this country and why more people don't drink wine. Until we can get rid of those attitudes, wine will never be accepted by most Americans as something to drink everyday. It will be seen as something for the rich or the snobbish or the geeky -- and wine is much better than that.

expensive wine, wine reviews, Freemark Abbey, cabernet sauvignon