Yep, it’s September — supposedly the end of summer and the end of the summer wine. But it’s still hot. Too hot to think of drinking those hearty red wines that are stashed in my wine cabinet. The heat won’t dissipate for another few weeks, so I’m going to have to purchase a few more bottles of that white stuff. I love the idea of sitting out on the patio of a summer evening with a lovely glass of crisp Sauvignon Blanc or an off-dry (slightly sweet) Riesling, maybe a Viognier with a hint of tropical fruit like papaya or pineapple, or something new and not all that common — Symphony which is light and fruity with a floral aroma, slightly on the sweet side. A perfect “patio wine.” It’s such a charming picture, but the problem is that the temperature hovers around 100 until late at night, so sitting… Read More »
The 3 Rs of Zinfandel
It was several years ago that a wine buyer for a market told me I could not go wrong with zinfandel if I stuck to the Three R’s: Ridge, Ravenswood and Rosenblum. I think there might be a 4th R and there are many excellent zinfandels that don’t start with R — but it was a handy, quick guide. I thought of that a couple of weeks ago at the wine tasting at Marche Bacchus. We were tasting wines from Hahn Winery in the Santa Lucia Highlands. The Santa Lucia AVA is on the backside of the mountains that face Monterey Bay. I’ve been there several times and loved the Hahn tasting room and always ended up buying a couple of bottles. In fact, just the night before I had opened a Hahn Syrah with my friend Susan. So at Marche Bacchus, we were listening to the merits of the various wines when… Read More »
The Irony of White Wine
Now that weather is finally showing signs of cooling down (the thermometer on the patio dropped below 90 last week) I am looking forward to getting back to the red wines I most enjoy. However, last week I’d fixed some shrimp for dinner and suddenly realized I had no white wine — or even a nice dry rose which would go well with shrimp. (How about trying pink wine with pink food like shrimp and salmon? Pink wine — blush, rose — isn’t necessarily sweet. In fact the trend now is a lot more toward dry rose which can be a bit of a shock if you’re expecting something that tastes like white zinfandel! But I digress …) I looked through my rapidly dwindling stock of wine and found two whites — both expensive wines from Daou (www.daouvineyards.com) in Paso Robles. WAY too expensive for me to just glug by myself. So instead I… Read More »
Think White
QUICK … name as many white wines as you can think of in the next two minutes. I just joined American Wine Society (AWS) which keeps me in the loop of wine tastings here in Las Vegas with a bunch of really nice people. They also sent me a membership card which entitles me to discounts at … ah, I forget. But here’s something really fun — they have a magazine. I love reading about wine! When I took wine classes, I took the textbooks to bed with me. I highlighted and underlined and put little Post-it arrows on the pages. What fun! Man, who ever knew this stuff? How much of do I remember? Not much. But it was fun reading about it and I do use the books for reference constantly. So last night I took my new AWS magazine to bed and started reading about hybrids in the 21st Century. The first unfamiliar name… Read More »
