I’ve been using Twitter for the past few weeks and while I think there are some interesting aspects to it’s intended purpose of telling friends and the world what you are doing, the true utility is microblogging. Your “posts” are 140 characters in length and can be entered from a web browser, instant messaging client or even a mobile phone via SMS.

So I mashed up this idea in a Wine 2.0 sort of way and started to post short reviews of the wine I am drinking right now. These will be posted well before formal reviews and will sometimes have scores if my description is short enough. I invite anyone else to join me and add their Twitter feed to my friends list. If there are enough wine loving Twitter users, I might even create a community blog to aggregate all our posts. A domain has been purchased for the purpose. I think this has a lot of potential but could be just too geeky to see the truth

Will anyone else join me?

I have to confess that this was the most challenging Wine Blogging Wednesday theme for me. When Roger from Box Wines announced his choice of Box Wines & Non-Traditional Packaging I thought this might be pretty easy. My plan was to go up to Solo Vino in St. Paul and ask for their best box wine. I know they have a few well chosen box wines not available at other area retailers. In the past six weeks, however, I have not had a need to go into St. Paul and it seemed a bit obsessive to make the 50 mile round trip just for a box of wine. So I ended up at one of those soulless wine warehouse stores out here in the ‘burbs over lunchtime today and selected the wine I will now present.

My selection criteria here is pretty much the same as normal for more traditionally packaged wines. I look for recommendations and then pick something I find the most interesting from the store’s selection. Roger has quite a few suggestions at his blog and I found some other recommendations at the San Francisco Chronicle. A scan of the box wine aisle at the store I went to turned up dozens of choices, but the most popular were the generics from Franzia and Almaden (mango sangria, anyone?). Of the more “high end” choices I debated between a Hardy’s Riesling or Shiraz-Grenache but held off since they were a full 3 liters and I didn’t need that much cooking wine should it be not my style. That is the root of the challenge here for me and I suspect for a lot of people; we don’t want to take a chance on buying this much wine we might not like. Perhaps that’s the genius of Roger’s theme here… we’ll certainly get a lot of interesting wines to try or avoid this month

Next in my wine browsing I looked at the Bandit Tetra Paks. I’ve had some of these at tastings and they were not too bad but the thought of a light and fruity Cab or Merlot didn’t seem too interesting to me. Then I looked down at the bottom of the shelf and found the last box of La Joya, Cabernet-Carmenere from the Colchagua Valley of Chile. For $18.99/3L I thought this was a decent value in everyday red wine and it seemed to be selling through well; another potentially good sign.

Casa La Joya, Cabernet-Carmenere, Colchagua Valley, Chile NV ($19/3L) - A non-vintage blend of 50% Cabernet and 50% Carmenere. Purple-black in color with aromas of dark fruit, black pepper and mint. Full bodied on the palate with flavors of blackberry, bell pepper and gunmetal finishing with moderate tannins. A nice everyday red wine and reasonable value for less than $5 a standard bottle.

13.5% ABV
Bag in box with plastic spigot
Score: 82

Thanks to Roger for an interesting and informative theme this month and I will be interested to read what other wine bloggers came up with this time out. See you next month where I hope the theme will be somewhat less challenging

One of the benefits of the new Amazon unboxed for TiVo is I can rent programs my local cable company does not deliver such as Corkscrewed: The Wrath of Grapes. If this effort is any indication, I don’t want the type of programing offered on Fox Reality. I’ve just wasted 44 minutes of my life on what might be the most contrived television program in history… and that’s a complement.

Basically, the concept is that the Brit expat producers of American Idol have just purchased a Paso Robles vineyard because they, “…like red wine.” Not the best reason for getting into the wine trade. All sort of mayhem ensue with the spurning of money from Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson (great calls, guys!) to the cancellation of contracts with wineries due to changing of ownership. From the 2 shows I saw (and investment of $3.98 in hard-earned funds) this venture is corked. Even if I could get this for free, my time is worth more here.

DO NOT WATCH THIS CRAP!

Last Tuesday night at Solera in Minneapolis eight wine lovers got together to taste a range of wines provided by the Twisted Oak Winery. When I arrived, about 10 minutes late due to some traffic, Boy Brainerd a.k.a. “Pimp Daddy” was holding court with a decanted bottle of Priorat. That wine was quite tasty but he had some of his own to share that stacked up pretty well too. Together we tasted seven Twisted Oak wines made from Spanish, Portuguese and French grape varieties grown in the Sierra Foothills AVA of California.

This get-together was hastily planned just about a week before the event so the turnout was on the lite side but everyone seemed to have a good time tasting the wines pared with small plates (”tapas”) of Spanish food. We started with the crisp and flavorful Verdelho and then moved to the rich and creamy Calaveras County Viognier, both from the 2005 vintage. Next we ventured into a flight of reds with %@#$! (”…rhymes with duck!”), Tempranillo, Syrah and a blend called, “The Spaniard.” We capped the evening with a taste of the now sold-out port-styled wine known as, “Pig Stai Pour’t” named in honor of their fearless leader El Jefe (Stai). All very nice wines that I will blog in order of my preference starting with The Spaniard a bit later today.

I had a great time tasting the wines and getting to know the attendees, all of whom I’ve never met before. Thanks Susan, Lynn, Craig, Angela, Jeff, Yvette and especially Boy/Pimp Daddy from Twisted Oak for their time, conversation, good food and kick-ass wines. I’m looking forward to doing this again sometime soon.

The passing of Ernest Gallo at nearly 98 years of age closes a chapter in American wine history. Sure we still have Robert Mondavi but he, and his brother Peter, are more emblematic of the second wave of wine growth which happened in the 1960’s with the introduction of modern technology and single varietal production.

Ernest and his brother Julio made a dynamic team with each knowing their own strengths and not getting in each other’s way. Julio grew the grapes and made the wine; Ernest sold it. Starting with only $5,900 in seed money borrowed from their family just after the repeal of Prohibition, the brothers build one of the largest family wineries and most powerful wine brands in the world. Over the years they innovated in the marketing of wine and created several brands based upon consumer trends. Their famous Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers are an example of this. Like a lot of wine lovers, I started drinking Gallo jug wines (chablis blanc and hearty burgundy, mostly) then graduated to other brands. The Gallo’s recognized this hole in their product line and started premium brands to extend the customer relationship further. I still pick up a bottle or two of Gallo’s Sonoma wines every once in a while.

Today it takes a lot of money and knowledge to start a winery and such rags to riches stories are rare. So it’s with great respect and admiration that I look at a life well lived here for inspiration as I continue to make a living marketing wine.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gallo.

There is a lot of “young wine” or “joven” from Spain on the market that make for great midweek drinking that won’t break your wine budget. These wines are totally made in stainless steel and are not aged in oak to preserve the pure fruit flavors. Made from vines between 35 and 50 years of age this Grenache-Syrah blend delivers the fruit bomb goods at a price that encourages case purchases. This is not a wine to ponder in your finest stems but gulp from water glasses with pizza or hamburgers.

Almira, “Los Dos”, Grenache-Syrah, Campo de Borja, “Old Vines” 2005 ($7) - A blend of 93% Grenache and 7% Syrah. Dark purple in color with aromas of cherry, fennel and pepper. Bright cherry flavors with some white pepper finishing with good acidity. Simple, juicy and a nice value.

14% ABV
Composite cork closure
Score: 85

Buy this wine online

There has been some interesting discussion on eBob recently about Wine Advocate #169 where Robert Parker’s new hires first publish recommendations. Apparently Dr. Jay Miller has caused quite a stir with five 100 point wines and a slew of 95 pointers in his initial coverage of Spanish wines. As Dr. Vino pointed out yesterday, does this mean the Wine Advocate is rating it’s wines the same way residents of the mythical Lake Wobegon judge their children? I don’t think so, but it does bring up some good points about the 100 point scale and how to calibrate your palate to these new critics.

As a recent practitioner of the Parker 100 point system, I can sympathize with Dr. Miller and his new colleagues as they traveled the world to taste hundreds of wines and record their notes and scores. The pressure must have been pretty high as they wrote their impressions of the wine’s color, aromas, flavor and overall quality/aging potential. What I like about this approach is that each component has it’s own sub-score and typically at a large tasting you don’t know the wine’s final score until you are finished and add up these components. The only time you are aware of the final score during a tasting is if you give a wine most or all the points for each area. In my short experience, this has only happened once while recently tasting at Pax Cellars. So it’s kind of surprising that five 100 point wines would come out of a few months of tasting but not unheard of given that very nearly one thousand wines were rated (how he managed to taste that many wines is another story).

But what this really brings to the surface for me is that Dr. Miller’s use of the Parker scale is different than with others who use it. As with any subjective enterprise, wine rating is an imprecise activity effected by a number of changing conditions. The temperature and lighting of the room, glassware used, condition of the bottle, corks, what you had to eat earlier, etc. All these things affect the result and any person rating a wine will most likely have slightly different results for the same wine tasted under different conditions. Hopefully this variation will be less than 5% so there will not be too much variation in the final scores. Your mileage will almost certainly be different so you have to experience some of the same wines yourself to get attuned to the reviewers preferences.

This also had me pondering what a 100 point wine is in the first place. I believe it is the best wine a taster has had without any flaws and the maximum of complexity. I’ve never had a wine I would rate a perfect 100 but I think I will know one when I drink it. Or maybe I won’t and all my “best” wines will be rated 98 or 99 points. It’s hard to say really since I’ve not tasted and rated very many wines.

So the bottom line for me is that I will try to taste some of these same wines and see if my ratings agree with Dr. Miller’s. As I expect they will not, I will have a rule of thumb to go by when reading his recommendations. It will also have me scrutinizing the written impression of the wine more and looking at the raw score less. That’s probably a good thing in the long-run.

I tasted this wine at San Francisco’s Vino Venue while tuning up for my barrel tasting the next morning at Pax Cellars. I’d heard of Two Hands Wines, and their reputation for fine Shiraz, but this was my first taste of their wine.

Two Hands is a single-minded effort to produce the best Shiraz made in Australia. Since starting only seven years ago, this winery has made some of the most celebrated Shiraz in the world and, if this tasting is any indication, their reputation is very well earned.

Two Hands Wines, “Gnarly Dudes” Shiraz, Barossa Valley 2005 ($30) - Dark purple in color with aromas of blackberry, plum, licorice and spice. In the mouth, concentrated blackberry, pepper and spice flavors finish long with a silky mouthfeel. Delicious.

14.8% ABV
Stelvin closure
Score: 93

Buy this wine online

Looks like we might fill that table for 10 I have booked at Solera tomorrow evening for the Twisted Oak wine and tapas event so if you haven’t let me know you will attend, please do so today so I can increase the size of the table.

See you there!

Ryan from Catavino has put together an interesting wine mashup site called Wine Blog Atlas. The idea is simply to catalog all the regional-specific wine blogs around the world on a big map and aggregate blog posts from those sites. Ryan talks about it a bit on his latest podcast. Since this blog is not specific to the wines of Minnesota (you have to live in the region you blog about), Winecast is not eligible but it will not stop me from blogging more local wines here and, perhaps, start another blog focused on this region.

Great idea, Ryan!