Varietal: Carmenere
Region: Chile – Curico Valley
Cost: $8
Winemaker’s Notes: Dark garnet color or great intensity with an aroma of generous ripe red fruit and merged peppers with toasted French oak. A silky, flavorful mouth feel, creamy with great volume. Firm tannins provide an enjoyable finish. Best paired with light hors d’oeuvres and pastas.
My Review: My wife and I are always on the lookout for inexpensive wines that may not excite or inspire us, but are easy to sip on and are more interesting than cheap merlot or cabernet sauvignon from California, Australia, or New Zealand. Chile has become a favored region to get affordable wines that mix it up ever so much. When a friend recently brought over a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that he had picked up and we enjoyed it we decided to pick some up at the store the next time we went. They were out of the Cab Sauv, but had a healthy supply of the Carmenere that we decided to give a try to.
Varietal: 100% Malbec
Region: Patagonia, Argentina
Cost: $13 (SRP)
Winemaker’s Notes: A deep ruby-colored wine with rich, smooth blackberry flavors and vanilla aromas. Pairs well with red meats, cheeses, and pastas.
My Review: I’ve been a fan of Malbec for some time now, I’ve found it to be, on the whole, a nice inexpensive alternative to numerous other budget wines where you can get far better quality than your dollar would lead you to believe, especially coming out of South America, and it tends to pair well with the foods I like to eat. Because of that, I was pleased to receive a bottle of Malbec as a sample right at the end of the year, and my wife and I finally decided to pop the cork and give it a try last night.
Varietal: 100% Pinot Grigio
Region: South Eastern Australia
Cost: $7 (SRP)
Winemaker’s Notes: Light bodied with ripe peach and tropical fruit flavors. Pairs well with Korean BBQ ribs with spicy tofu soup, Teriyaki chicken with a side of pork or vegetable potstickers. An excellent wine to enjoy with our without food.
My Review: I’m somewhat hit or miss on Pinot Grigio, so when some samples showed up and there was a bottle of Pinot Grigio included I’ll admit that I hesitated. However, when the tasting notes recommended potstickers, my wife pointed out that we had some chicken potstickers that we’d been putting off cooking up and that at the very least we’d have something to pair the wine with, so that’s just what we did.
Varietal: 59% Cabernet Sauvignon; 19% Cabernet Franc; 11% Malbec; 6% Merlot; 5% Petit Verdot
Region: Napa, California – USA
Cost: $40 (SRP)
Winemaker’s Notes: Rich garnet color goes perfectly with the holiday season and it’s aromas of toasted hazelnut and winter spices make this wine the perfect gift for anyone on your list.
My Review: Another of the bottles that I received just before the end of the year, and on an unseasonable warm day on Sunday (pushing 70 in Virginia? Really?) my wife and I decided to throw a couple of steaks on the grill and a bottle of red wine sounded like the perfect pairing.
While there are some violet streaks going through the wine, it was a nice deep red in the glass and I picked up aromas of spice and dark berry. In the mouth there was a ton of fruit, but it was by no means a “fruit bomb”. By that I mean there was plenty of body and depth to the wine that allowed the wine to present nuanced fruit flavors and have a bit of complexity and a medium-smooth finish.
Varietal: 100% Pinot Grigio
Region: Italy
Cost: $10 (SRP)
Winemaker’s Notes: A reasonably priced white wine with a crisp, clean taste. With its subtle fruit flavors, this wine can be enjoyed with rich holiday meals and allows your guests to enjoy the delicious tastes of the many flavors of the holidays.
My Review: I got this, along with a few other samples, right before the holidays but only just recently got a chance to get into them. It’s been a hectic beginning to 2012. That being said, because of the hectic nature of the start of my year, some wine has been called for and my wife and I recently popped open this bottle to go with some chicken.
When I was first getting into wine a crisp Italian Pinot Grigio was one of my go-to white wines. They tended to be approachable and weren’t overly sweet or overly complex for my developing palate. As my tastes evolved I moved away from how much of it I drank, not because I found them distasteful but because I was A) busy experimenting with other grapes, and B) I found I appreciated a bit more complexity to my wines. With that in mind, I was pleasantly surprised by the 2010 Barone Fini Pinot Grigio.
In a more perfect world I would have made some pointed and in-depth piece about what bottles of bubbles I was opening for the friends I was having over to my house on New Years Eve. We do not live in such a world. While I did come across tweets and pieces about people opening $100 bottles of sparkling wine and champagne, I just couldn’t justify that, in no small part because I knew exactly how the evening was going to descend (into a raucous good time).
I do, however, feel as though I owe it to the new year, and to the bottles that I opened, to show the bottles that I provided for the evening. Friends brought over others, but here’s a picture of the bottles that I provided for the festivities.
