Wine of the week: Clayhouse Adobe Red 2011

 Clayhouse Adobe Red The Wine Curmudgeon spends an inordinate amount of time trying to find California labels to use for the wine of the week. Either they’re too pricey, $10 wines in $16 packaging, or too crummy, one-note wines with little more than focus group sweet fruit.

So when I find a California wine to use, like the Clayhouse Adobe Red ($12, purchased, 13.7%), you know it’s not a wine of the week just to fill space. Rather, it’s one of a too-rare example of what California — in this case, the Paso Robles region — can do with cheap wine when a producer focuses on wine and not hocus pocus.

This red blend, mostly zinfandel, has lots of sweet red fruit. But that’s not all it has, and the fruit is more than balanced by a surprising grip, some zinfandel brambliness that you almost never see anymore, and soft tannins on the finish. That a wine at this price and this style has tannins to complement the fruit shows how serious Clayhouse is about quality.

Highly recommended, and so far above the glut of grocery store wine that I must endure to do what I do that I could carve out a special place in the 2016 $10 Hall of Fame for it. Serve the Clayhouse Adobe Red as winter ends, but keep it around for summer barbecues.

3 thoughts on “Wine of the week: Clayhouse Adobe Red 2011

  • By Niklas Gerste -

    Great choice as the wine of the week I can say, it has amazing taste and unique qualities as I have already tested it.

  • By john f. -

    I have been drinking this wine for years now one of my favorite go to every day drinking wines. And when you say BBQ this is the wine for BBQ.

  • By scott gray -

    I had a glass of this in a very interesting, long standing, restaurant in the college
    town of Athen GA. called the Last Resort Grill. This wine was on the “by-the-glass”
    offering at lunch on Saturday. It was reasonably priced. I found this blog while looking
    for it…on line. This is as good a red blend as I’ve ever sampled….I’d say you were spot
    on in your summary. There’s something going on here; fine tannins, a little extra
    something and little out of the ordinary. Great stuff

Comments are closed.