The Wine Curmudgeon

Happy New Year 2012

The blog is mostly off today for the long New Year's holiday weekend, but we'll be back Monday with the usual features. The best news? The 2012 $10 Hall of Fame is just a week or so away.

Until then, Happy New Year, and thank you for every time you visited the blog in 2011. The numbers were so good the Wine Curmudgeon is running out of ways to say thanks. 

And please don't try this at home (video courtesy of Percipient24 on YouTube) -- yet another reason why Americans don't drink more sparkling wine:

Champagne and sparkling wine for New Year's, one more time

Still not sure what do about Champagne or sparkling wine for New Year's? Don't worry -- the Wine Curmudgeon has you covered:

• The annual sparkling wine and Champagne post (which includes links to posts from previous years).

• New Year's wine suggestions from around the Internet.

• Wednesday's wine of the week, a sparkler from Spain -- Freixenet Cordon Rosado Brut NV.

• The sparkling wine category, which includes reviews of every bubbly in the blog's four-year history.

Mini-reviews 31: Carmel Road, Campodelsole, Wine Guerrilla, Embotellado

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 (Thursday this month because of the holiday):

• Carmel Road Liberated Chardonnay ($16, sample): Unoaked chardonnay that is fresh, clean and crisp. Holds its 14.1 percent alcohol well, and is pretty much a value at this price.

• Campodelsole Sangiovese 2008 ($5, purchased): As The Italian Wine guy put it: "That $5 wine should be $12. But we don’t know how to sell it to Americans. So we are discounting it while it is still good. Our gift to you." Earthy and old-fashioned; needs food.

• Wine Guerrilla Rebel Cru 2009 ($25, sample): Powerful zinfandel red blend with massive fruit, almost 15 percent alcohol and very little subtlety. If you like that style of wine, you're going to love this. Excellent example of post-modern California winemaking.

• Embotellado Rioja 2010 ($12, sample): Lots of red fruit in the middle. Nothing really wrong with it if you want a fruit forward wine that tastes like Australia but comes from Spain.

Wine of the week: Freixenet Cordon Rosado Brut NV

If most wine drinkers know Freixenet, it's from the black bottle that they see at the grocery store. And the black bottle is decent enough $9 Spanish sparkling wine, or cava.

Sometimes, though, if you're lucky enough, you'll see the black bottle's cousin, a rose cava called Rosado ($9, purchased). It's a step up from the black bottle -- a little fruitier and a little more polished. In this, it sits between two of my favorite rose cavas, the Cristalino at $7 and the Seguras Viudas at $10.

The wine is made with trepat, a Spanish grape used only for cava, and garnacha, the Spanish version of grenache. Hence some soft red fruit (strawberry?), as well as a little yeastiness and lots of bubbles. In this, it's an excellent example of how a multi-national producer can turn out a cheap wine with character.

The Rosado will handle New Year's ably, whether it's for toasting on Saturday night, for brunch on Sunday morning or for sipping anytime this week. And it's an excellent food wine; I drank it with oven fried chicken and it was delicious. Highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2013 $10 Hall of Fame.

Winebits 209: Champagne and sparkling wine

Some thoughts on bubbly for the New Year from around the Internet (and not a Veuve Clicquot recommendation among them):

• Sparkling wine advice: One of the best -- perhaps the best -- primers on bubbly comes from Tim McNally at New Orleans magazine. It's so good, in fact, that I'm going to steal much of it for use here. Writes Tim: "Never allow the wine to flow out of the bottle after opening. It’s a terrible waste." Is it any wonder I think so much of the post? Tim includes Champagne history, advice on opening a bottle, some recommendations, and even his analysis concerning the number of bubbles in a bottle of bubbly.

• Value-oriented Champagne: Yes, the real stuff -- sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France -- is expensive, but that has not deterred my pal Dave McIntyre from looking for bottles that offer the most for your dollar. Dave's finds are here and here; availability may be a problem away from the East Coast, but these are wines worth looking for. The Jose Michel (the second link) sounds especially good.

• Price-conscious selections: Fred Tasker in the Miami Herald offers 11 bubblies to try, and only one costs more than $27. Which, for sparkling, is impressive -- even by the Wine Curmudgeon's standards. The Woodbridge extra dry, which is only $10, is an intriguing choice, and should please anyone who wants something sweeter but is intimidated by the whole sparkling wine thing.

2012 $10 Hall of Fame coming on Jan. 6

The 2012 $10 Hall of Fame will be announced on Jan. 6, and the posts that week in the runup to the Hall will all be about cheap wine. That's a little different than in year's past, when I posted the Hall on the first day after the New Year's holiday.

But I wanted to build a little excitement about the Hall this year, as well as give you a chance to offer your thoughts. Eligibility rules are simple: the wine has to cost $10 or less and it has to be generally available. That means no private labels, like Trader Joe's Two-buck Chuck, or obscure one-off wines. Otherwise, it's eligible.

The 2012 Hall is mostly compiled, but there's still time for changes and emendations. Leave your suggestions on the comments here (or in any post up to Jan. 4) or send me an email.

New Year's sparkling wine 2011

How confused are Americans about sparkling wine? Very. The Wine Curmudgeon was in line at one of Dallas' upscale grocers last week, and the woman ahead of me in line had all sorts of expensive produce and meat -- and six bottles of $9 Freixenet black bottle cava. That almost certainly never would have happened if she had been buying regular, or still, wine; then her cart would have had the required 92-point bottles.

Or, to take it to the other extreme, a very well-known TV chef advised her viewers a couple of weeks ago to make mimosas -- the 20-somethings' favorite hangover remedy -- with $40 sparkling wine. Which would be the equivalent of making sangria with one of the $40 reds I review in the monthly expensive wine post. Which would seem certainly seem like overkill.

What's the reason for all this confusion? Because sparkling wine is seen as even more confusing than still wine, and still wine confuses us enough. Sparkling wine is more difficult to open. We're only supposed to drink it on special occasions, and never for dinner in the middle of the week. And it has bubbles!

But sparkling wine doesn't have to be this way. In fact, other than opening it, bubbly is not much different from still wine. It's made with the same grapes, it's made in much the same way, and it pairs with food just like regular red and white wine. Best yet, quality labels are available at all prices, even for less than $10.

After the jump, what you need to know about bubbly and my suggestions for the New Year's holiday.