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

As some of you know, I love Chilean wines. They are right in my sweet spot of “Cheap & Red” while also usually being quite good. As you also no doubt know, Chile was struck by a huge, and I mean HUGE earthquake over the weekend. 8.8 on the Richter scale is mind-bogglingly huge. Over 100 times the size of the quake that essentially destroyed the country of Haiti a few weeks ago. The epicenter of the quake in Chile was just west of the critical wine producing regions of Chile, most especially the Colchagua Valley. It is too soon to know what extent the quake will have on wine production

What you may not know is that your author shares a closer to connection to Chile beyond just a love of wine. Though I’ve never been there some in my family have lived there in the past and I have friends in that wonderful country. While the news media keeps heaping praise on Chile for being prepared and not experiencing total Hatian-levels of collapse, the reality is that this earthquake was VERY strong and has caused a significant amount of damage. It will take Chile a while to recover and we should all do our parts. While copper is the leading export, wine and fresh fruit come in close behind, and have the benefit of being consumer goods. (I don’t know about you, but the only copper I collect is in 1¢ increments in a jar on my dresser.) We can help Chile now by purchasing and consuming Chilean goods. I’m doing my part by only buying Chilean wine for the next two months. Sure, I have other stuff cellared and may drink them over the next sixty days, but my dollars at the wine merchant, and grocery store are going solely towards Chilean vintages.

You can help too! Buy Chilean!. Discover the “lost grape of Bordeaux“, some great Cabs, bargain Merlots, and wonderful blends. Chilean wines are every bit as good as what California produces, at usually less than one-third the price. Great value. Great wines. Viva Chile!

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.

I’ll let you in on a not-so-hidden secret: While I like wine quite a bit, I don’t know much about wine. When I sit down to share what I thought about any particular wine it is usually a bit after the fact. I snap a photo of the wine, and jot some drunken notes on my not-so-smartphone. I can recall the reactions of those who are with me at the time, and can certainly remember if I liked it or not. But anything more factual is usually conjured from the vast reaches of the Internet via Google. I like to provide links should you, my dear reader, wish to go out and buy some of this stuff yourself. I never read what other reviewers have said about a wine… I honestly do not care. Besides I find all the wine-snob terminology frustrating as hell. I swear, if I ever actually hear somebody say something like “essence of blackberries and tobacco” in my presence I’m likely to bury my forks in their eye sockets (salad fork in the left eye of course!) and drink all their wine myself. I’ve been known for other barbaric, though not-so-dramatic acts… for instance taking empty wine bottles home from fancy restaurants. I do this as a reminder to myself of how good the wine was, and a way for me to catalog it later for you. Mrs. Barbarian is always shocked and embarrassed by this behavior of mine … though she hasn’t yet said “oaky” or “shoe leather” yet while at a fancy bistro with me. She thinks walking away with an empty, and then (shock! horror!) leaving it sitting at my desk for weeks on end is “tacky.” Of course my retort to her is “you picked me… what does that say about your judgement?”

Not long ago Mrs. Barbarian & I visited our favorite eatery and as my eye wandered over the wine list it fell upon something I’d never seen before. A Petite Syrah from the Pacific Northwest. I had to try it. The proprietor of this place loves to present hard to find, usually very unusual wines. Sure, he has a big list of safe choices for those lacking in courage, but there are enough whack-jobs like myself among his clientele that oddball wines and offbeat varietals are always available on the periphery of his list. I suspect that in the case of this wine, he only had a handful, if even a case. It was there one week, and gone the next. I’m glad I stumbled into enjoy it while it was available.

Despite the fact that I kept the bottle, this Petite Syrah remains a mystery.

The front label says only:

Fallöbst
Petite Syrah
Zephyr Ridge Vineyard
Alc. 14.2% by volume

2006

The back label continues the enigma:

I’m Just Sayin’
I have eaten
the grapes
that were on
the vine
………………..
and which
you were probably
saving
for harvest
……………….
Forgive me
they were so delicious
so sweet
and so oval

PRODUCED AND BOTTLED BY FALLOBST
MILTON FREEWATER, OREGON

All that Google can tell me is that Fallöbst winery does exist in Milton-Freewater (a town not far from Walla Walla, Washington), has paid taxes, and has distributed this wine to a few places in the Pacific Northwest (how it got here to me is yet another mystery!) Zephyr Ridge Vineyard appears to be in Horse Heaven Hills, which is in Washington state in the Columbia River Valley. Beyond that this wine retains all manner of mystery.

I can not recall what I paid for it, likely around $35, which means if it was on a store shelf it would cost around $15—$19. That my friend would be a bargain because this is a wonderful Petite Syrah. Big, bold, smooth, and able to stain your teeth beyond any hope of a career on television.

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