Pillar Box Red 2006: B+

so...to continue the dribble...i opened up a bottle of pillar box red (preferred wine of Tom Brady and the future super bowl champion New England Patriots - see photo to right) that i got on sale at the corner liquor store ("martin's" - on corner of Florida and T Street, next to the Washington Hilton) for 9 bucks. this wine falls into the aforementioned "wine i open when i am alone so i don't feel bad if/when i don't down a whole bottle". initially attracted by the smart looking screw cap and the simple cover art, this juice was a pleasant surprise. on the nose i had a hard time identifying the dominant characteristic, but settled on a combo of carob, prune, and date. any carob fans out there? i didn't think so. i only know what carobs are and taste/smell like because my mom used to occasionally try to trick me into thinking she was putting a chewy chocolate chip granola bar into my lunch box, when in reality they were carob "chip" granola bars from the health food store. for the uninitiated, carobs taste nothing like chocolate.

when tasted, this shiraz/cab/merlot blend was not overly big and fruity and had nice tannins - just the right of top of the mouth cotton for my taste. when i smell from the top of my glass, it has a really different nose then when i stick my snout down in - like almost savory, i want to say some kind of gamy meaty smell. this juice seemed to flatten out as i drank it and lose some of the initial tannic punch. i think i actually liked the jumpier tannins when i first opened it up. over all a great value - especially at the martin's sale price.

admission of guilt

following a seemingly endless thursday of reading, reading, more reading, then class with former special assistant to president clinton for latin america arturo valenzuela, i was ready to flop in my apartment. i had a great comfort food dinner of grilled cheese and homemade french fries with paola and retreated to my apartment to clean up and, of course try out a new wine. i find myself entangled in a recurring dilemna where i never want to drink an entire bottle of wine by myself, but i am not a real "save the rest for tomorrow" wine drinker. wine just never tastes quite as good to me after spending a night in the fridge. as a result, i oftentimes drink half a bottle of wine, save the rest only to have a half a glass the next day and then pour it out a week later when it is clearly no longer drinkable. i am aware this is a terrible and incredibly wasteful offense, probably deserving of a one way ticket straight to wine hell, or at least purgatory. The only half-solution i have found so far is to have a couple of cheaper bottles of wine around that i feel less bad about wasting. needless to say, this is a bad solution. of course i usually share bottles with one or more friends, so this isn't an issue, but on the off chance i get in a wine drinking mood when i am alone in my apt, this conundrum presents itself. any thoughts? i have had mixed success with the air-sucker-outer apparatuses.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

while i'm not sure i would go as far as herman hesse, i am gaining an appreciation of "pleasant temperature", especially as it refers to my wines. my parents, in an act of extreme kindness and generosity not uncharacteristic for them, bought me a wine.....cooler i guess you call it. i have always sort of thought that the only things that qualified as wine coolers were produced by bartles and jaymes, came in such flavors as green apple and fresh strawberry, and were consumed en masse in the early to mid nineties, preferably poolside. lucky for me, this is not what they got me, rather a wine cooling apparatus , more specifically the "Vinotemp 21 Bottle, Thermo-Electric, stainless steel, 2 Zone Wine Cooler"

i love my new wine toy, but it's presence in my apartment has had three immediate effects:

1. i feel really cool, knowing that i am treating my wine the way a proper wine connoisseur would treat his or her most prized bottles (when i'm feeling this way, i am of course ignoring the fact that i am not a proper wine connoisseur in any way shape or form, or even really know what that might mean).

2. i feel like the kid whose parents foolishly buy him the nike air jordans (4th generation, black, gray, and red) the day before junior high basketball tryouts and then he doesn't make the team and is left playing rec basketball with a sweet pair of jordans.

3. i spend time that i should be using to not fail grad school wondering about the temperature at which i should store my wines.

it is this third point that is the purpose of this entry. after doing some quick research on the web i am thoroughly confused. of all the temperature advice, i think my favorite comes from a website that i can now of course not find, but summing up, said "twenty minutes before serving, put your red wines in the fridge, and take your white wines out". Wine Intro has a chart with some rather impractical temperature guidelines. can anyone offer any guidance in deciphering all of this - in the meantime, my vinotemp air jordans will be set at 53degrees and 61degrees.

Clos la Chance Syrah 2005: B

last night paola and i decided it was time to pull out the decanter and give this syrah (which coincidentally was a christmas present from my sister and brother in law - they correctly assume that wine is always a safe gift for me) a try. We had wanted to get a table at bistrot du coin, the french spot two blocks from chez moi, two nights earlier, but it was full and i think both of us were left with the urge, even two days later, to wash food down with wine. granted, had we gone to B du C, the food being washed down would have most likely been an onglet á l'échalotte, not the safeway pepperoni oven pizza that i was able to whip up last night in less than 14 minutes time, and far from the Roasted Pork with Molé Sauce, Grilled Lamb with Blackberry Sauce recommended on the back of the bottle.

upon first taste, paola's reaction was that it tasted sort of woody, even oaky, something that seemed sort of a funny to me. i certainly didn't taste any oak, but i also wasn't bowled over by big dark fruit. this wine is rather inky in color so i expected it to have a bit bigger taste. it was definitely good, and i would drink it again without hesitation, but it didn't have the bold flavors or aromas that i expected it to based on it's color. i would say that i tasted a pleasant mix of red and dark fruit - maybe heavier on red, with soft tannins. as for Paola's woody characterization, on the clos la chance website for this particular wine it says that "barrel allocation consisted of 28% new french oak and 7% new american oak" - so i guess we know who has the keener palette of the two.

I think that a second tasting of this wine is in order, paired with something different than crappy pepperoni pizza. aside from the fact that the aforementioned cuisine choice has a pretty overpowering taste, we were so hungry that i think we ate it too soon after it came out of the oven and kind of burnt our mouths - not conducive to fair tasting judgements. i will keep you informed as to how tasting #2 goes when/if i can get my hands on another bottle of this juice.

ps. i wicked love Bistrot du Coin and highly recommend it to anyone who is in DC and hasn't already been. you gotta love a place that in true western european social democrat style is open 364 days a year....every day except???...christmas? NOPE......new years?? NOPE....Bastille Day?? NOPE.....Labor Day?? Mais oui!!!

Montes Alpha Syrah 2002: A-

wow. i love this wine. i first tried this bottle two years ago. i had always been curious about the montes alpha wines but had never really had the cash to justify buying one. then when i was in bolivia for work i came across the 2002 and 2004 syrah and 2004 cab in some supermarket for the equivalent of ten bucks (...oh how i long for the days of a strong dollar once again), and couldn't resist. i loved the 02 syrah the first time i tried it - i think at the time i may have even said that it was my favorite wine EVER. it just has a really great sort of brooding licorice quality to it. not too jammy really, but big dark fruit and just tannic enough to make you feel like you are drinking wine, not wicked expensive grape juice. i have since found this wine online at international cellar for 16.99, a price well worth paying in my humble, extremely un-wine-educated opinion. so this time around i got to enjoy it with my buddies seth and sobo and their respective ladyfriends at chez sobo. sobo makes a mean lasagna, not to mention he produced an amount of lasagna that would have been enough to feed the entire 1998 brunswick high school boys soccer team (of which we were both members), even including bionic swedish exchange student henrik jacobson. in any case, the lasagna made a nice food pairing. this time around maybe i wasn't paying as much attention but the 02 syrah didn't completely blow me away like it did the first time. it was very, very good - even exceptional, but i would not say it is my favorite wine ever. it tasted a little thinner to me than i had remembered and lacked the sort of dark, syrupy (but not sweet), concentration that made my like it so much last time. david ogilvie, a fellow wine blogger from "purple lips", who is actually professionally and educationally qualified to hold an opinion about such things seems to think that the '02 syrah is "not holding it's age in the mouth", which, if i am understanding correctly what that might mean, it could be why i had such different feeling about this one a couple of years. again - in my opinion, this wine rulez (yes, with a z), but is not the A+ material i had felt that it might turn out to be. that said, it is well worth your money and time.

rating system

it seems to me meaningless to just blabber on about wines that i have tasted in poorly written prose rife with tired metaphors and glaring grammatical mistakes...sooo....following in the footsteps of the aforementioned erwin dink, i will rate each wine that i taste. the grading system used is purposefully unscientific. A to F with pluses and minuses at my discretion. wines that i would drink again typically fall within the B to A+ range. of course, a wine that i give a C- could be an A to some - again...this is not scientific, but like erwin, i think it is important to give reader(s) a reference point, plus we americans like to rank everything anyways.

an important footnote

i should mention that my inspiration for this blog is another fellow wine drinker friend of mine from atlanta, erwin dink over at winefoolery.net (thanks for the correction Erwin). in addition to being a kick ass bikram yoga idol, he runs a much more respectable wine blog, complete with real knowledge and a more experienced palette. so cheers to you erwin, we raise our boxes of mountain chablis in your honor. wine on!

Cline Cashemere 2005: B-

i had this wine two or three years ago and remembered it being it concentrated, dark, velvety, deep - what i usually really enjoy. this time it was pretty unremarkable. i am aware this sounds ridiculously obvious, but the only real description i could come up with for the nose on this juice this time was "box of sunmaid raisins". it really just lacked distinction. i keep telling myself that cline makes pleasant wines at a good price...but am not sure why i am convinced of that. i definitely would not spend the 17 bucks i dropped at world market on this wine again. i even decanted this one and drank it in my fancy wine glass. i am not a huge fan of super tannic wines, but i would have liked a little more punch in the tongue from this one. it was just flat. for those inquiring minds, the cline cashmere is a blend of mouvedre, syrah, and grenache. interesting thought, a bit lacking in execution. not bad, but definitely not great. so you believe i really drank this wine...see pic.

intro...

so to give you a bit more of an idea about my wine palette...i am willing to try anything, but tend to buy more syrah, petite syrah, cabs, and an occasional carmenere, malbec, or blend. as a grad student, i often buy wines that err on the side of "light on the wallet". i also often times pair my wine with rather non-traditional (read, nasty) culinary selections...like when you are at whole foods and the fancy little card underneath the bottle says "bold, daring cabernet with hints of blackberry, cassis, and darkly toned kenyan roast arabica. enjoy with piping hot turkish mint jelly garnished rack of lamb accompanied by hand harvested organic free-frange legumes brined in sea salt. i sort of understand the point scoring system, but am never sure what to do with these descriptions and meal suggestions. if i were to write these tags, they might read: "this wine tastes especially delicious chased by reese's chocolate covered peanut butter cookies (i can tell you where to get these, they're wicked awesome)." i regularly buy my wine at gas stations, but occasionally spring for a decent bottle. i once worked in a wine store for two months. that said, nothing at all qualifies me to write about wine other than that i enjoy it. here goes.