I do this to make a note of the price, so I can quote it correctly for you dear reader, when I finally sit down – either in an inebriated state, or perhaps even months afterwards, using notes and making sense on a second tasting of what I said while inebriated… right after the first tasting!

You see I often write up the review, then not hit “publish” because my writing just doesn’t make sense. Shocking, I know.

But little photographic nuggets like this are helpful in more ways than one. You see as I was at the check-out counter this particular bottle for some reason did not scan at the register. The cashier was about to call the wine dept when I said “It’s $9.99″ and held up the photo on my phone’s screen. She looked at me like I was an alien. I also noted that she also moved as far away from me as she could within her little cashier’s pen… “Why do you take pictures of things like that?” she inquired, in a tone reserved for subjects such as Furries (really, do NOT google that term. I mean it. Seriously!) I sighed, put my phone in my pocket and, fully expecting her to call security any second, admitted I wrote wine reviews. Suddenly her demeanor changed, she no longer cringed at the far reaches of her workspace, but visibly relaxed and said “oh, that’s interesting!” and carried on checking and bagging my groceries.

What she couldn’t see in that photo, but you can as I’ve blown it up for you, is a strange faux pas committed by the wine dept:

I love a good Cabernet Sauvignon. It is indeed a fine Bordeaux grape, but so is Carmenère, which is a completely different varietal! Sure, Carmenère has often, and even famously, been confused with Merlot, but Cabernet Sauvignon? C’mon! The rest of that paragraph is just so much wine jargon bullshit that when combined with the goofy grape gaffe it nearly sent me into a rage. If I had my battle axe on me I might have gone berserk right there. A barbaric pillaging and burning of the grocery store. Instead I bid the cashier good-bye with a monosyllabic grunt and pushed my shopping cart menacingly out to my car.

I planned to open up the Carmenère in a few days when we expected an old friend of Mrs. Barbarian to come by for dinner. That dinner was postponed though, and I failed at securing this bottle from pillage by Mrs. Barbarian. Sure enough she plundered the cabinet where I keep bottles for imminent consumption, opened it, and drank a glass. To add injury to insult, she then put the bottle into the refrigerator! That is where I found it one morning when I went to make my breakfast… a bottle of Carmenère in the fridge door!

Grrrrr…..

I pulled it out and set it upon the counter. It was a good thing that Mrs. Barbarian wan’t in the house at the time.

We drank the rest of the bottle at dinner, but given that it had been opened, and then refrigerated, I felt that any impressions I had of the wine may have been tainted by the poor treatment torture inflicted upon it by Mrs. Barbarian.

So I went back to the store a few days later. This was after the quake had rocked Chile, and I returned with the goal of buying nothing but Chilean wines. They’re going to need all the help thy can get, since wine is likely their second largest export item after copper, and while the copper mines are all located in the desert north which was largely unaffected by the quake, the vineyards are mostly located in the hardest hit regions of Chile. I bought four bottles of Cono Sur 2008 Carmenère, and once again the cash register didn’t ring it up properly and I said ‘It costs $9.99.” The cashier called the wine department who walked over with the tag for the cashier to scan and it came up $10.99. They had raised the price on me by a buck in under a week! I certainly hope they are not profiting on the tragedy in Chile. I felt like an heel for claiming a dollar discount per-bottle. The cashier eyed me suspiciously while I muttered about having bought the same bottle for $9.99 the week before.

This is not a great wine, but it certainly is a great value wine. Very much like most Chileans, in that you get good quality for a very low price. A wine of this level from here in California would set you back $30—$45, but coming from Chile it is around ten bucks. Viva Chile!

I heartily recommend this wine as a “nightly drinker” value wine. Great with dinners at home, or no particular special occasion. As a Carmenère it doesn’t stand up to many of the samples I’ve tried, but it is certainly a reasonable representation of the grape. Lots of flavor, and stands up to spicy foods well.

Given how hard I worked to get to this point I would have loved to uncovered a gem, but this one wasn’t that amazing. Good, but not great.

Cono Sur 2008 Carmenère
About $10.00
http://www.conosur.com

Enjoyed a “Calcu Super Chilean” tonight with dinner. Drank it before, seemed even better this time.

Above is a photo taken at dessert at our favorite restaurant. Yes, I made a mess of the tablecloth!

Old Review: http://bit.ly/bXV0ZL

Mrs. Barbarian made a Costco run today, and returned with several industrial-scale boxes filled with foodstuffs. At first I thought she was planning to load a C-130 headed for Haiti, but no… we’re supposed to eat it all. Conspicuously absent from the booty was any wine (Costco is where you’ll find our every-day wine choice, Cameron Hughes.) Thankfully I had stopped at our local grocer to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy on Friday and as always made a detour through the wine section to grab a few bottles. Dinner tonight was meant to make a dent in this huge food cache and Mrs. Barbarian cooked up some cornbread from a package the size of a pillowcase. Meanwhile I opened a gunny sack of broccoli flowerettes, and some (thankfully in a small package) bratwurst.

Food of this scale requires a big wine. A sledgehammer of a wine. No subtlety required. I reached for the Petite Sirah.

Concannon was the first winery to bottle Durif’s grape on its own, and the label proclaims it as “America’s First Petite Sirah.” It is also a 125 year old family-owned winery. This is a 2006 vintage Central Coast Petite Sirah. The label says “Limited Release”, which may be hyperbole if I was able to grab this for $11.25 ($15.99 retail, $12.49 with grocer’s loyalty card, $11.25 when combined with a multi-bottle discount!) at my podunk small-town grocery store.

It certainly is quite good though. When I first opened the bottle the nose was a little strange but that vanished quickly. In fact by mid-meal the wine seems to have lost all of it’s nose. That is OK though since it tastes wonderful. Big and broad-shouldered like a Petite Sirah should be, and easily able to stand up to the big flavors on the plate. Mrs. Barbarian liked it even more than I did, as I noted that after dinner there was maybe a glass-and-a-half left, and I sat down to write this review. I snapped the photo you see above (note: new cell phone… much better image quality from the camera!), then turned back to my computer to write; when I next turned to grab the bottle to read the label it was empty. I heard her come in and leave the room, but did not turn to look. She obviously slurped up the rest of this nice wine.

www.concannonvineyard.com

After the disaster that was the Raucous Red, I had to save the evening and the dinner with a “sure thing”. Around our house that usually means something from Cameron Hughes. CH Wines are almost always consistent. Consistently good that is. Mrs. Barbarian is partial to Pinot Noir, so I grabbed a bottle of Lot 110, a 2007 Pinot Noir from the “Los Carneros” AVA, which straddles both Napa & Sonoma valleys in California.

As usual, Mr. Hughes delivered on his promise and provided an excellent value wine for about ten bucks. Mrs. Barbarian liked it, and so I was spared any more discordant screeching that night.

Thank you Mr. Hughes, I am forever in your debt.

When you think of great wine cultures your mind conjures up provinces of France, rugged struggling vines in Spain, fruit & nut Californians, enterprising Australians, and Carmenere-saving Chileans. Probably the last culture you would associate with viniculture are horn-helmeted raiders from the land of the midnight sun. No great wine has ever come out of Norway aboard a longship. Sure these barbarians named Sven and Ole would plunder a cask or two, but make it? Never.

I know that Washington State is one of those places where Norwegians settled upon emigrating to the USA, but what lunatic thought that melding that with the state’s wine production was a good idea? Somewhere in the Yakima Valley of Washington is a place called Outlook, and though I’ve never been there I’d have to say the Outlook is bleak if this is what comes from there. My dictionary describes the word “raucous” with the following synonyms: harsh, strident, screeching, piercing, shrill, grating, discordant, dissonant; noisy, loud, cacophonous. That pretty much sums up the drinking experience.

I paid $7.99 for this bottle, and that was a deep discount. I can’t imagine how cacophonous my reaction would be had I paid full retail!

The look on Mrs. Barbarian’s face upon her initial tasting of the wine could serve as a dictionary illustration for “grating” or “discordant.” Thankfully I had a funnel handy and the glass you see here went right back in the bottle after I confirmed her suspicions.

I initially thought about saving it for use in cooking, which is my usual response to a bad tasting wine. After further consideration I ended up pouring that $7.99 right down the sink.

While I like a good Pinot Noir, the Vinagoth rarely buys any. Why? It is really hard to find a cheap Pinot that is a GOOD Pinot, that is why. There are lots of cheap Pinot Noirs out there, but they are generally unpalatable swill. There is however an exception: Momo Pinot Noir from New Zealand. I’ve mentioned it before and as I tasted some recently it is worth mentioning again. I generally buy a few bottles of Momo every year, as Mrs. Barbarian likes Pinot Noir and this one from down under has yet to let me down. This bottle cost me a mere $14, yet was every bit as good as every other bottle of Momo Pinot I’ve tasted over the past half-decade or so since I first tried it. I don’t know what those Kiwis are doing to make Pinot so consistently good, but let’s hope they keep on doing it.

I picked up this red today at the grocery store for $10.49. The weather has been atrocious all day and Mrs. Barbarian didn’t want to venture out of the house. However I found myself short a few ingredients for the Sunday dinner I was planning in my head. Braving the elements I dashed into the store, avoiding the cold wet stuff falling from the sky. After I had grabbed the vegetables I sought, along with a few pounds of the flesh of lesser beasts, I wandered over to the wine section and spotted this Chilean. The store had hung a tag up under the bottle telling of a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère, and Cabernet Franc… three of my favorite grapes (after Petite Sirah of course!) It was surrounded by a host of Chilean Cabs, all sporting distinctly un-Chilean price tags in the mid-$20—to low-$30 range so my hopes were not high. I lifted the tag to check the price, expecting twenty-something dollars but instead saw $15.00. This store offers a discount if you buy four bottles (any bottles, mix&match), so I grabbed this along with 3 others (a bottle of aussie port, a Nuevo Mundo Cab/Malbec blend, and a California wine I’ll try later this week.) This discount knocked the cost down to $10.49 to be exact, so I’m a happy barbarian!

Dinner was a pasta dish with Italian sausage, along with some baked asparagus, sauteed broccoli/kale, and garlic bread. This wine worked very well with it all… very smooth, lots of flavor, a big sort of presence without being overpowering. Not much nose, but plenty of good stuff going on once it was in the mouth. The label has a watercolor picture of a bull, but this bottle has no bull in it whatsoever. Just a very good wine at a very reasonable price. I may go back a buy a case.

“Calcu”
2006 Red Wine “Super Chilean” from the Valle de Colchagua, Chile
60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 25% Carmenère, 15% Cabernet Franc

EXCELLENT value under $20.

Perhaps this is a dinner table conversation best left to Carl Jung and Robert Pirsig, but…
Is it because the Secreto is so inexpensive, yet pretty good, that I liked it more than this Viu Manent, which was also pretty good, but twice the price of the Secreto?

Then again, this was not a side-by-side comparison. These two tastings happened months apart. Maybe it was the foods paired? Perhaps it was high expectations? Maybe the 2008 vintage doesn’t stand up to 2007? Who knows. While this wine is certainly enjoyable, and a good value at around $18 a bottle, it’s little brother was a delight for under $10.

I think I have one bottle of each still stashed away downstairs so perhaps a head-to-head rematch is in order? Stay tuned.

Viu Manent
Estate collection
2008 Malbec
Colchagua Valley
Chile

Some business travel recently had me in, of all places, Elkhart, Indiana for one night. It was a dark and stormy night to be exact. One of those midwestern dark-sky, thunder and lightning, pressure so low you feel underwater even though it isn’t even raining yet sort of evenings to be even more exact. I figured a tornado was going to drop onto us and send the entire hotel off to crush a witch along with the entire village of Munchkins at any moment.

So we went out to dinner.

Why be party to small-scale (pardon the pun) genocide when we could be quaffing cheap red wine? My traveling companion picked an Italian place from the phone book and we piloted ourselves through the whirlwinds to their parking lot. How did this place get here?All I could figure was that this place must be owned by somebody in the Witness Protection Program. The food was excellent. Just basic hearty Italian fare that exists somewhere between what I’ve come to expect from either over-done, over-thought, over-wrought Italian Cuisine found on the west coast, and the exceedingly bland spaghetti & Ragu one finds in the midwest. This wonderful place had exactly what you imagine when you think of Italian food. Subtle flavors, and simple presentation all backed up by excellent service. Our breadsticks and marinara sauce were amazing, especially the sauce. Light, tangy, with exactly the right amounts of herbs and spices. Salads were simple, and really the sole low point of the experience as the dressing was served in a little plastic cup… I much prefer my salads pre-tossed and people with diet hangups who want to have complete control over their fat and caloric intake shouldn’t be going out to dinner in the first place! For the entree I picked a calzone. I chose the smallest (9″) one as we were leaving early in the morning and I knew there would be no way I could keep the leftovers for tomorrow. My companion chose the veal, despite the lack of a comedian nearby suggesting he try it. (hey, don’t look at me!)

As we awaited our entrees a bottle of Chianti arrived. Cecchi Chianti Classico 2005. Ah Chianti, that super-cheap Tuscan. In this case it fit the bill. Not so amazing as to outshine the basic fare, but certainly not strictly a cheap buzz. Basic, reasonable quality red wine. You should be able to find it on a shelf for under $15.

Our entrees arrived and my calzone was bigger than my head. I asked the waitress for a ruler, claiming that there was no way this pie started out anywhere near nine inches across. She just laughed and walked away. It was excellent and I ate it all.

The Vinagoth loves him some Petite Sirah. While all manner of grapes grace these pages, when it comes to sitting down for some serious swilling your author oftentimes chooses the delectable delights of Dr. Durif. A considerable amount of the best Petite Sirah I’ve consumed originates from the Paso Robles area of California and some recent travels found me in that very town. I was traveling by car and Paso Robles fell at the half-way point of our two-day drive. While the town itself is not much to behold (think “Sunburns and Tractor Pulls!”) the vineyards of the region produce some damn good fruit.

My traveling companion and I went out for dinner upon our arrival. He chose the place, I chose the wine. He chose a local pizza joint, then informed me that he doesn’t drink. The things I have to endure! The pizza place was nice, with a big brick oven and a huge choice of wines, all local. We ordered a medium pepperoni, and I requested jalapenos and garlic on my half. (what can I say… I’m a barbarian!) Afterwards I walked over to the huge array of local wines and spotted this Petite Sirah, the only Durif in the whole display! I ordered a bottle, and the nice lady behind the counter handed me an open bottle and a glass.

Peachy Canyon 2005 Petite Sirah, Paso Robles, CA ~$18/bottle

Love this wine. Big. Tasty. Just like a Petite Sirah should be. It even stood up to the killer death barbaric pizza… well almost. You see they mangled the order and forgot the garlic, so we were given another pizza for free. The first had the jalapenos, but not the garlic. The peppers themselves were killer-hot. Like wines, you never know what you’ll get with a Jalapeno. Sometimes they are sweet and mild, sometimes, once bitten they will burn through matter like the blood of a H. R Giger Alien, seeking the gravitational core of the planet. The Jalapenos of Paso Robles fall into the latter end of the Scoville Scale. I had to peel off quite a few of the damn things to be able to taste anything afterwards. Very few wines, especially reds, can stand up to a Capsaicin clobbering such as the one I was enduring. The Peachy held up “ok” with plenty of ice water “palate cleansers” thrown over the tongue to douse the wildfire burning there.

I re-corked the bottle and brought it back to the hotel, where I assumed I’d have another glass before turning in. The stuff was so good I polished the whole bottle off that night…