The Wine Curmudgeon

Mother's Day wine 2010

A few thoughts for wine-loving Mom on your list: 

• Charles Krug Sauvignon Blanc 2008($18): Always quality California-style sauvignon blanc. This year's vintage is more French in style, with lots of minerality and muted fruit.

• Prazo de Roriz 2007 ($16): Lots of black fruit and quite rich, which makes it a nice food wine for everything from barbecue to fancy dinners. A step up from most $10 Portugese red wine blends.

• Jackson-Triggs Vidal Icewine Proprietors' Reserve 2006 ($20 for a 187-ml bottle): Ice wine is one of the world's great guilty pleasures, and this is no exception. It's dessert wine, so it's honeyed, rich and luscious, but the sweetness is much more than just sugary.

For more on Mother’s Day wine:
• Buying Mom wine for Mother's Day
• Wine of the week: Acrobat Pinot Gris 2008
• Mother's Day wine 2009

Mother's Day, holiday wine, white wine, red wine, dessert wine, wine reviews, Charles Krug, Portuguese wine, ice wine

Wine of the week: Acrobat Pinot Gris 2008

Boy, was the Wine Curmudgeon ever wrong.

The Acrobat, from Oregon's well-regarded King Estate, is the wine my panel gave a gold medal to at The Dallas Morning News Competition -- the same wine that I had dismissed when I tasted it at home. The difference, of course, was blind tasting; the News judging was blind and my home tasting wasn't.

The Acrobat (about $12, sample) offers the kind of quality usually found in more expensive wines for as close to $10 as you're going to get in Oregon. Look for green apple and a bit of lime, but not overdone and balanced with the acid. This is a seafood wine, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. It was a winner at the 2010 Pacific Coast Oyster Wine Competition (along with several other Wine Curmudgeon favorites, including the Hedges CMS and Anne Amie Muller-Thurgau). But the Acrobat is also the kind of wine you can keep chilled in the refrigerator and open when you get home from work.

Highly recommended, especially for Mother's Day -- and boy, am I glad I was wrong.

wine reviews, wine of the week, Acrobat pinot gris, King Estate, blind tasting

Winebits 128: Local wine, corporate wine, Aussie wine prices

• A victory for local wine: DrinkLocalWine.com co-founder Dave McIntyre has scored a major coup for local wine. Organizers of a major local food event in Washington, D.C., weren't going to serve any local wines -- only California wines. Wrote Dave on his blog and in the Washington Post: "The Park Hyatt is not alone in this hypocrisy. Alice Waters, the doyenne of the 'eat local' movement, has organized a series of dinners in DC the last two years to preach the eat-local gospel. Each time, she has served only California and Italian wines." Organizers relented, and announced this week that they would serve a Virginia wine as well. Well done, Dave.

• Mondavi blasts corporate wine: Major corporations like Constellation and Diageo can't make great wine, Michael Mondavi told Decanter magazine. Mondavi, who ran his family's self-named company after it was bought by Constellation, said "You start talking to the chief financial officer and ask the question ´how do I improve earnings?´, not `how do I make better wines?´ "

• Australia growers continue to struggle: Some Australian grape growers will receive just A$.27 for each bottle of wine sold this year -- about 25 cents U.S. -- as the wine business Down Under is still trying to find a way to solve its oversupply problem. News reports say that consumers can buy some wines for less than the cost of a bottle of water, and that growers in South Australia are being paid less for fruit than they received in 1992.

Local wine, local food, Michael Mondavi, corporate wine, Australian wine

Bodega Montecillo's Maria Martinez-Sierra

In 1976, Maria Martinez-Sierra at Bodega Montecillo in Spain's Rioja may have been the only woman winemaker at a major Spanish producer. But no one is sure if that is the case, because that was not the kind of question one asked in Spain in the mid-1970s.

The country was still caught in the social, cultural, and political repression that characterized the Franco dictatorship. Though Francisco Franco died in 1975, it took more than a decade for Spain to get used to him being gone. One of the hallmarks of the Franco regime was the permiso marital -- wives were forbidden from almost all economic activity, including working, owning property, and even traveling without their husbands' permission. In fact, when Martinez became Montecillo's winemaker, her mother stopped speaking to her for 12 years. Spanish women were not supposed to do those sorts of things.

Some three decades later, Martinez has become an icon of Spanish -- and Rioja -- wine. She has firm opinions about how wine should be made, about Spain's role in the wine world, and about what's wrong with the modern wine business. More, after the jump: