I’ve been asked to write an occasional educational article by the folks over at Openmarket Wine and they have posted my first effort today. Some of the articles will be cross-posted here and I won’t be doing any wine recommendations on their site. Openmarket Wine has an interesting business model of linking small wineries directly with customers over the internet that I hope gains traction.

I expect this will not be the only offsite writing gig I will be doing to promote Winecast.

This is the second Bodegas Borsao wine I’ve blogged in a week and I have to say that I really like what this winery produces. This wine is a blend of 75% Garnacha (Grenache) and 25% Tempranillo. I would be surprised if it saw any oak aging from it’s flavor profile.

Bodegas Borsao, “Red Wine”, Campo de Borja 2005 ($8) - Medium ruby in color with aromas of bing cherry, strawberry and cloves. Smooth and juicy in the mouth with black cherry, strawberry and white pepper flavors finishing with supple tannins. A fruit bomb, but I like it Also a great value for everyday drinking.

14% ABV
Natural cork closure
Score: 88

Buy this wine online

I’ve written quite a bit about Stormhoek here and even themed a podcast around the South African winery. So today I was again pleased to see them further expand their online marketing efforts with the addition of Gia Milinovich as a guest blogger.

If you’ve never heard of Gia, she is a blogger and British television presenter best known for her work on technology focused shows. But what does she know about wine, you might be wondering? From her first post on the Stormhoek blog it would appear not much more than the majority of wine consumers. This is what I think this is brilliant from a marketing perspective, because the winery will develop closer relationships with customers who will identify with some of Gia’s questions and be subtly educated along the way to prefer the Stormhoek brand. I think we are witnessing the future of wine marketing here.

In her inaugural post, Gia asks five questions that seem common to non wine-geek types like me and most other wine bloggers. I thought it would be fun to respond to each of them here:

1. What is a good wine to take to a dinner party when you don’t know what’s being served?

This is a common issue for all of us no matter how deep our wine knowledge. I usually bring two bottles to dinner parties, a white and a red. Both should be food friendly such as Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir. In the Stormhoek range, I’d pick the fine Pinotage for the red here. Should I bring just one bottle it would be either a rose or sparkling wine such as Champagne. Both of these pair with a wide variety of food.

2. If you don’t know the names of wines or vineyards, how do you choose what to drink at a restaurant?

Great question that is probably the biggest source of stress for most people. Assuming you are in a restaurant that has good wine service, I’d ask the sommelier for a suggestion. Be clear on how much money you want to spend and what types of wine you enjoy. He or she will ask what kinds of food will be ordered to narrow down the selection(s). If you are in a restaurant without a sommelier, I would look for brands I have enjoyed in the past first, then varietals I like second.

3. What if you don’t finish the whole bottle? Can you keep it until the next day without it turning into vinegar?

If local laws allow, restaurants will re-cork your unfinished bottle for you to take home. The wine should be fine for a day or two particularly if you store it in your refrigerator (including reds, but allow them to warm up before drinking). I use Vac-u-vin as a way to preserve open bottles up to a week after opening.

4. How do you get red wine stains out of carpet/clothing?

Two words: Wine Away.

5. Does that funny sucking/slurping way of tasting wine actually improve the flavour or do you just like looking silly?

While this technique may look silly, it actually provides better aeration of the wine in your mouth and exposes the wine to more flavor receptors on your tongue. All of this improves the flavor of the wine and helps us to write more detailed tasting notes. Unless I’m at a tasting with other wine geeks, I try to be subtle about this to avoid the arched eyebrow from my wife

Great questions, Gia. Rock on…

I don’t usually blog wines I’ve tasted that are from cult producers as these tend to be next to impossible to find in the marketplace. I made an exception here because this wine is the best expression of Rhône white varietals I’ve had made outside of France and it appears that some of this wine might be still available at some wine shops and restaurants (but not at the winery). I was also pleased to see this information posted on their website:

“CORE top 5 reviewers (responsible for most direct sales and new accounts): 1-Robert Parker, 2-Reviewers of our wines on web blogs, 3-Andy Abramson, 4-Los Angeles Times, 5-Grape Nutz”

Any winery who acknowledges the power of us wine bloggers deserves some space here

Dave Corey, the man behind CORE wines, has an interesting story and tells it on his, well, old school website (dude, what’s with all those Word files?). A vineyard consultant, Dave, and his wife Becky, started their own label in 2003. As in many family wineries, Dave does the winemaking and Becky the marketing. Both continue to hold down individual wine consulting businesses as well as their efforts at CORE.

CORE wines, “b. core”, Santa Ynez Valley 2004 ($28) - A blend of 57% Marsanne and 43% Rousanne, both varietals common in wines of France’s northern Rhône region.

Medium straw in color with aromas of melon, almond and herbs. In the mouth, the wine is rich with flavors of citrus, pear and minerals finishing with crisp acidity. The most Rhône-like California white I’ve ever had. Only 88 cases produced.

14.5% ABV
Natural cork closure
Score: 90

Find this wine offline (if you are lucky)

Find this wine online

The harvest appears to be mostly concluded in most of California and the early returns look promising for another good to great vintage. What I found interesting in the reporting I saw today was how uneven the distribution of good fortune was within the state’s appellations. One man’s “bitchin’ vintage” is another’s disaster with some reports of high quality Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot being unpicked because of poor market conditions (I hope some home winemaker’s got some of that fruit for some garagiste action). A piece in the Sacramento Bee today tells the tale of woe for some grape growers in Lodi. It also underscores the global realities of the wine industry today where government regulations and aggressive pricing from imports can eat into your business almost overnight.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the components of a successful Wine 2.0 mashup since my post last week. In looking at a general listing of all tech mashups, I found that most of them had some form of mapping involved. When drilling into the 36 food related mashups, nearly all of them had Google or Yahoo maps.

Hmm, this gives me an idea or two…

Now that Wine Blogging Wednesday 26 is over, I can now blog my full tasting notes for this wine…

Tres Picos is made from mountainside grown, 50 year old Garnacha (Grenache) vines from one of Spain’s lesser known appellations, Campo de Borja. The winery, Bodegas Borsao, is a red wine specialist making mostly Grenache and Syrah.

The Campo de Borja region was made a Denomination of Origin (DO) in 1980 with 7,940 hectares of vineyards in production. The region has been producing notable wines since Roman times and has been exported for the past 600 years. Located in north-eastern Spain adjoining the better known Navarra region, Campo de Borja is making a name for itself for it’s fruit-forward red wines. The predominate red varieties are Grenache, Tempranillo, Mazuela, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah. White varietals grown there are Macabeo, Moscatel and Chardonnay.

Bodegas Borsao, “Tres Picos“, Garnacha (Grenache), Campo de Borja 2004 ($15) - Dark ruby-purple in color with rustic blackberry and licorice aromas. In the mouth this is a rich and powerful wine with concentrated black cherry and blackberry flavors finishing with white pepper and dusty tannins. A delicious value in old vine Grenache.

14.5% ABV
Natural cork
Score: 90

Buy this wine online

I noticed fellow wine bloggers Andrew and Ryan putting the new Google Co-op custom search to good use today, so I couldn’t resist cobbling together my own version here. My search looks at most of the wine podcast sites and returns relevant audio and video results. It also gives you blog posts for some of us who do both. Let me know if I should add any other sites to the mix.

Cheers!

Beau has posted the winners for this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday with kudos going to Marcus from Dr. Weingolb with 14 correct out of 19. Neil from Brooklynguy’s Wine and Food Blog came in second with 13 correct. My guesses netted just 8 correct for fourth place. This was much more difficult to figure out than I excepted but I had a lot of fun, anyway.

Thanks, Beau!

Being the “wine guy” with my friends and family I often get asked for wine recommendations. Of course I send them here to find tasting notes but with over 100 wines already blogged and rising, it can get a bit overwhelming.

So I’ve spent a few minutes while watching the Vikings game putting together a recommendations page (it’s also linked at the top of the blog). There you will find my standout wines rated 8.5 (now 85) or higher from the past year. Since I don’t usually publish tasting notes from my podcasts, I’ll be doubling back from my show notes and putting those up over the next few weeks. Going forward, I’ll post my tasting notes and tag standouts for this page dropping off notes older than 18 months or so.

For RSS savvy readers, I’ve also created a feed from this page. Sometime later this week I’ll post a tutorial on how to sync this feed with your iPod so you’ll have these recommendations with you on the move; like in the wine store, for example.

Enjoy!