Jack over at Fork and Bottle has announced the theme for January’s edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday as the wines of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. For those not familiar with this region, it’s in Northeastern Italy and borders Austria and Slovenia. Although the wines are well respected, they seem to fly a bit below the radar for most wine lovers as they are almost totally white and made from blends of obscure native grapes. All this makes for an interesting challenge of finding a bottle but I’m sure there are some selections in some of the better stores here in the Twin Cities (your mileage may vary so start checking stock at your local wine store).

Join us on January 16th by either posting a review to your blog or register and post at our WBW Community website.

Sonadora, the hostess from Wannabe Wino, proves she’s no wannabe with her round up of over 75 Petite Sirah tasted for Wine Blogging Wednesday 40. Over 50 participants enjoyed wine made from this underrated grape from Israel, Mexico, Australia, Chile, and it’s “home” in California. A lot of great values are to be discovered reading the summary; check it out here.

Meanwhile, Andrew, the unofficial photographer of WBW, has started a new Flickr pool to share our photos taken for the event. If you want to contribute, just visit the group page and join us.

Watch for the announcement of WBW 41 coming soon…

Longtime readers and listeners know about my love of Zinfandel. In fact, the most reviewed varietal here is this California transplant from the Old World. My love for Zinfandel started right when I got into wine in 1982. Most of the first wines I tried were either from Napa Valley (Cabs and Merlot) or Bordeaux (indifferent bottlings of third rate wine). While I liked some of what I was drinking, I gravitated toward wines with more fruit. Then I had a Zinfandel from Lytton Springs Vineyard. This was before Ridge bought them and I was hooked. Sebastiani Zinfandel became my house wine for all of $2.50 a bottle; ah, the good old days…

Aside from Ridge and Sebastiani another name stood out for Zin in my formative wine years: Foppiano. A family winery for more than 100 years, this Sonoma winery produces some of the best Petite Sirah and Cabernet in Sonoma. I’ve also enjoyed their Zinfandel over the years but have not had the opportunity to taste a recent vintage until they sent me some samples recently. And I’m glad they did as this is one of the better Zins under $20 now in wide release.

Foppiano Vineyards, Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley 2004 ($15/sample) - Medium purple in color with aromas of blackberry, black raspberry, fennel and vanilla. Nice dark cherry and blackberry fruit flavors with cracked black pepper and moderate tannins. Textbook, old-school Sonoma Zin.

14.5% ABV

Natural cork closure

Score: 87

Rating:

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This month’s host, Sonadora from Wannabe Wino, picked one of my favorite varietals for this month’s virtual tasting: Petite Sirah. This grape is originally from France where it’s known as Durif, a name also commonly used in Australia for the variety today. According to Jancis Robinson’s “Oxford Companion to Wine” now resting in my lap, DNA research in California linked the name Petite Sirah with four varieties: Durif, Syrah, Peloursin and a Peloursin + Durif crossing. But today I think all that is sorted out and Petite Sirah in California is actually all Durif.

I think I’ve always loved Petite Sirah because of it’s connection with Zinfandel. In the century old vines of Sonoma, Petite Sirah is often found inter-planted with Zin to make the field blends I love, such as Ridge Lytton Springs. It’s tannins backbone and soft fruit help to bolster Zinfandel and transform the result into something more complex. Another reason I like this variety so much is the best examples are pure fruit bombs.

So I was really looking forward to tasting a few examples of this variety this month. As luck would have it, I received some samples from Foppiano Vineyards, a name like Concannon closely linked with Petite Sirah. My other selection was from a producer I’ve never heard of before but will seek out from my tasting this evening.

Tasting Notes:

Foppiano Vineyards, Petite Sirah, Russian River Valley 2004 ($23/sample) - Dark black-purple in color with aromas of blueberry, plum and licorice. Soft black currant and blackberry flavors with pepper and spices finishing with firm tannins. Textbook Petite Sirah but could use some time in the bottle to soften those tannins.

14.6% ABV
Natural cork closure
Score: 88
Rating:

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Peltier Station Winery, Petite Sirah, Lodi 2005 ($18) - Dark purple-black in color with aromas of boysenberry, black raspberry, bacon and fennel. Rich and massive blackberry and blueberry fruit with cracked black pepper, medium tannins and a bit of minerality & sweet caramel on the finish. A blockbuster Pet that I’ll be cellaring to see what happens.

14.8% ABV
Natural cork closure
Score: 90
Rating:

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Thanks again to Sonadora for an excellent theme this month. Join us next time when we’ll be exploring an underrated region of Italy.

There’s an interesting article over at BusinessWeek about Wine 2.0 that features many of the sites linked on my right sidebar. In the year that I’ve blogged about Wine 2.0 I have often wondered who will break out and become the “Facebook of Wine.” Since wine is a social beverage, I reasoned, someone would create a site that would combine Web 2.0 with wine and create a social network around this concept.

But this has not happened. Today we have about a bunch of wine social networks all fighting for attention. The only ones that have built any critical mass are WineZap, Snooth and Cork’d/Wine Library TV. And it’s not clear if any one of these will break out of the pack and become the de facto Facebook of Wine. Right now I think that Facebook itself stands as much chance as any Wine 2.0 sites but it will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few months. I expect to see consolidation in this space and one or two leaders emerge.

Check out the article here and slideshow profiles of some of the leading Wine 2.0 sites here.

Ever want to break bread with New York Times wine writer Eric Asimov? How about your own private episode of Wine Library TV performed live in your house? These and many more prizes can be yours for as low as a $10 donation if you participate.

That’s right, it’s time for another Menu For Hope fund drive and I’m pleased to again participate by donating a prize for the raffle. Between now and midnight December 21st, you can bid on many great wine and food prizes including my lot of 3 bottles of the open source Roussanne I’m making at Crushpad. This is from my personal allocation and I’ll be happy to sign and/or personalize each bottle for the winner. Given the various wine shipping laws, I can only offer to ship this lot within the United States.

This project will only produce about 50 cases of a Rhone-inspired white blend made mostly from Roussanne grown in the noted Westerly Vineyard in the Santa Ynez AVA. We’ve just finished fermentation and now will let the wine settle in for aging in neutral oak barrels (pictured to the right). Our group will decide the final blend this spring which will also likely include Marsanne and Viognier.

The only way to buy this wine is to join my Crushpad group which includes a 1 case allocation. If you want less than a case, here’s a way to get 3 bottles for as low as a $10 donation (the wine sells for $18 per bottle plus I’m covering the shipping cost to your door so this is over a $60 value). Just bid on code WB17 for your chance to win this rare wine.

Menu For Home started four years ago and all donations support the UN World Food Programme. Last year nearly $61,000 was raised to feed the hungry around the world. I encourage all readers and listeners to support this effort by buying raffle tickets for this and many other prizes listed at Chez Pim and Vinography.

Donation instructions:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope at http://www.chezpim.com/blogs/2007/12/menu-for-hope-4.html

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4 and make a donation.

3. Please specify which prize you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code. Remember the Winecast Roussanne prize code is WB17.

Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02. Please write 2xEU01, 3xEU02

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we could contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Check back on Chez Pim on Wednesday January 9 for the results of the raffle. I will also post here when the results are announced.

Thank you for your support of this worthy cause.

In my blog reading today I came across a post about recent domain name auctions in the .mobi top level domain. For those not familiar with this TLD, it was created in late September of 2006 to bring the mobile web to cell phones and other devices. I looked at getting winecast.mobi at the time but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Fast forward 15 months and wine.mobi sells at auction for $30,000. Not bad for a few moments of work and several months. It remains to be seen what will come of this domain but this sale was enough for me to buy my .mobi domain today. What I’ll do with it is another story.

To me Beaujolais Nouveau is a celebration wine as it is released the week of my birthday each year. It also celebrates the just completed harvest and the promise for the wines made in Burgundy that year. Seems a lot of wine geeks and other bloggers don’t care for the stuff and that’s fine with me as you should drink what you like.

Before I present my favorite wine tasted this year, a bit of a story about my relationship with Beaujolais Nouveau. Back when I lived in Orange County, California there was a restaurant called Bouzy Rouge in Newport Beach. This was before the area was branded “The OC” in television and lifestyles of housewives so a bit of eccentricity was still allowed. The owner’s dilapidated Citroen was parked in front of the restaurant and they had some fun events, like the Beaujolais Nouveau release each year. My wife and I went every year we lived there and the young wine was served directly from the barrel into carafe or glass. It was almost like you were in Beaujolais. So this is what I remember each year when the time comes to try the new vintage.

This year I went to a couple of the better local stores and sampled 7 or 8 wines from different producers. Most were fine; fruity and exuberant but seemed a bit one dimensional which is par for the course here. Only one wine was very disappointing, served from promotional barrel (a very small one) that took me back to Bouzy Rouge. Ironically it was from the same producer I enjoyed so many years ago, Georges Duboeuf (could have been an off-barrel, I suppose). But of all the wines I sampled, only one stood out as something I’d like to take home. And I did just that and offer this review from the bottle opened this evening.

Pascal Chatelus, Beaujolais Nouveau 2007 ($12) - Bright ruby in color with aromas of wild cherry candy and banana. Juicy and tart in the mouth with candied cherry and strawberry fruit with some banana from the mid-palate to the finish. Just what I’m looking for in a Beaujolais Nouveau. Drink before 2008, preferably with food and good friends.

12.5% ABV
Composite cork closure
Score: 84
Rating:

…I reviewed four Beaujolais Nouveau on my podcast and liked the Antonin Rodet, Beaujolais Villages Nouveau 2005 and Mommessin, Beaujolais Nouveau 2005 equally.

Stay tuned for my pick of this year’s harvest posted later in the day.

I first heard about this wine on the 3 Wine Guys podcast (thx, T-bone) so I picked up a bottle when I saw it at a wine store this summer. And I’m glad I did as it really shows off what blending young vines can do for a wine.

This is a blend of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot from noted winemaker Chris Ringland. I’ll have to check out his other efforts given what magic he casts on this modest wine.

Henry’s Drive, “Pillar Box Red” 2005 ($10) - Deepest purple-black in color. This one needs to unwind a bit before it shows it’s best but once fully open it features nice black and red fruit aromas with fennel and a bit of chaparral. Full and rich black cherry and strawberry fruit gives way to a bit of licorice, vanilla and spice on the finish. A delicious fruit bomb for everyday drinking.

15% ABV
Stelvin closure
Score: 90
Rating:

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