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

At the moment we have a long-term houseguest, who (irritatingly) is a vegetarian. They are one of Mrs. Barbarian’s close relatives, so I have to refrain from my natural instinct, which is to eat them, er… make jokes at their expense. Instead now everything we cook has to have some meatless component. When I cook I really don’t cook for Mrs. Barbarian, I cook for me with some extra for her. I make what I want to eat. I like to eat meat.

On a recent evening I arrived home too late from work to really make anything elaborate, so I grabbed one of those ‘Boboli’ pre-made pizza crusts and made a cheese pizza, and threw slices of a leftover bratwurst, and some green onions on top of “our part” as that was the closest thing I had on hand for pizza-topping made from the flesh of a lesser beast. It actually turned out delicious!

To accompany this fine cuisine I grabbed this bottle of 2006 Bodega Septima Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina. Mrs. Barbarian loved it, as did I. Our houseguest, a teetotaller did not sample the wine (or the bratwurst either… more for me!) The Malbec was wonderfully earthy and full of flavor. Best of all? It was $6.99. Gotta love an El Cheapo red that actually tastes good!

I’ll be grabbing a few more bottles of this to add to my Cellar of Cheap Reds being hoarded for the apocalypse.
Maybe I’ll lock the vegetarian down there too… stock the larder.

After Mrs. Barbarian looted and pillaged her way through Plan A, I hid Plan B away and out of her reach. Thankfully Mrs. Barbarian is diminutive in stature and cannot reach high places around the house, and all I have to do to save anything precious from her is slide it onto a top shelf somewhere. Not exactly the best place to store wine, but it only had to stay there a day.

In vino veritas indeed. I do not know what family dinners are like at your household but I know our table becomes a wonderful place in the presence of a good wine. Monday night when I opened this bottle was one of those instances. The Mrs made some red-peppery-garlicy pasta while I sauteed my infamous broccoli, in and of itself also a little stiff on the garlic end of the scale. It was a modest meal, made in a wonderful harmony by the two of us around our stove. Midway through cooking I opened the wine and took my first taste. Mmmmmm. The Mrs takes her share and makes the same happy noises.

At the table the wine flows, the garlic grows, and the conversation wanders off along tangents of life, love, history, markets, travel, economics, cultures, dreams, recreation, desires, and goals. A mundane meal made truly wonderful by the presence of a great wine!

So what is this wine? Let’s just say it is our little secret.

Between you and me, this Viu Manent Secreto 2007 Malbec is worth your efforts to find. Wait, what’s that? A Chilean Malbec? Indeed it is! From the Colchagua Valley. Malbec doesn’t have to be from Argentina, (or indeed France, though you’ll hardly ever find that word on a French bottle, it is inside plenty of them.) “But why Vinagoth, why?” you ask… “Why choose a Malbec to write about on Wine Blogging Wednesday when Chile has so many wines it specializes in, including one of your favorites!?”

You already know the answer to that, I’m a Barbarian, I follow no rules!

I will say this Malbec is one of the finest values I’ve ever enjoyed. The cost? $9.99. Yep, you read right. NINE DOLLARS AND NINETY-NINE CENTS! A sawbuck minus a penny. A tenner and it is yours.

Mrs. Barbarian even violated long-standing household wine protocol and poured the last glass for herself! That is how good this wine is. To further underscore the point when the bottle was gone and I reached into the wine cabinet for an encore I grabbed a Napa Cab… an Oak Knoll District Cabernet Sauvignon.. a >$40 wine that I felt would be the only thing that could top the Chilean Secreto. Both the Mrs & I looked at each other in abject disappointment. “This is not as good as the first one” said the better half of the Barbarian household. I agreed. The conversation sank like the proverbial lead balloon. Dinner ended on a whimper. Think about that. Here is a cheap red wine that blew the doors off a Napa Cabernet. Mind you that cab could use some years in the bottle, and I plan on doing so. But still.

Nuestro secretito. Our little secret. GO BUY THIS WINE.

 Last week it was two wines from Chile, this week it is two from Washington state… sort of the American equivalent of Chile I guess. Both have dry desert areas, glacier-clad volcanoes that occasionally erupt. Both sport fjords filled with whales, and rugged islands connected by ferry boat, and both produce excellent value wines. They differ in shape, with Chile being long and thin, and Washington being sort of squat. Separated by latitude, but connected in a great attitude towards wine.

I saw these two wines from the Challenger Ridge winery and decided to buy them. After all, they are from the romantically named town of Concrete, Washington. How can you turn that down? Seriously though they turned out to be a complete yin and yang experience. Both cost $17.99, but each was as different from the other as black is to white, male to female, night and day, disco and rock n’ roll, or Bush is to Obama.

The differences I suspect came down to terroir and varietal. On the one hand there was a 2005 Pinot Noir. This is grown in the Puget Sound region of Washington, which I imagine is not the best place on earth to grow grapes. It rains there a lot, and temperatures stay cool all the time (unlike Oregon to the south which can get quite hot in summer.) Of the two, this one was the weaker, by far. It had no backbone, and really not much to offer. The guy in Sideways must be right, Pinot is a hard grape to make wine out from, and if this Pinot is any indication perhaps the efforts up there in Concrete should be directed elsewhere. This wine is not worth eighteen bucks. It isn’t horrible (we did after all DRINK it, unlike some poorly reviewed wines around here!) but it just wasn’t that good either. Mrs. Barbarian, who normally likes most Pinots, had not much nice to say about this one.

On the flip side however is this wonderful 2003 Cabernet/Malbec blend from the Columbia Valley, Washington’s great wine production powerhouse region from over on the dry side of the state. This wine is big, bold, and very flavorful. Everything you expect in a great red wine. Unlike the Pinot, I’d call this a bargain at $17.99. I’ve tasted California reds at 3X this price that were not as good. Good stuff! Give it a try.

Through an unusual set of circumstances completely unrelated to anything I do here online I found myself in Walla Walla, Washington recently. This is far from my home and a place I had never been before. What an amazing place. I imagine this is what Napa was like in the 60s and 70s… an agricultural place but being transformed by the wine industry. Unlike Napa however it is literally in the middle of nowhere. This valley was the center of trade and culture in the early 1800s, being a vital stop on the Oregon Trail, but today it is near nothing in particular.

I know somebody who grew up here and asked him via an email where I should eat, and he provided for me the name of a small neighborhood bistro… the sort of place that only locals would know. The menu was appealing and the wine list, as you would imagine, excellent and stuffed with mostly local favorites.

I’ve had a few of the valley’s rock star wines over the years, but this time I figured I’d drift off that beaten path and try something completely off the wall… I asked our waitress to suggest something in that vein and this is what she brought: Dusted Valley 2006 Malbec. I’ve never seen too many Malbec’s that didn’t come from South America for one thing. For another… this wine was wonderful. Reasonably priced, full-bodied, and quite tasty. Both me and my traveling companion really enjoyed it. It is a shame that I was merely passing through (and actually had not even planned on being here, as literally an accident brought me to Walla Walla!) I plan to come back and prowl the valley’s tasting rooms at some point.

Dusted Valley

The Vinagoth has been in a minor love affair with Chilean wines for a while now.

I stumbled upon this one during my weekly skulk around the wine section of my local grocery. They had signs up about how it was organic, vegan, etc… basically a bunch of complete bullshit that I could care less about. All I saw was: Chilean Cabernet Malbec blend at less than twenty bucks. This grocery also gives a 10% discount if you buy four bottles (of anything) and a greater discount if you belong to their “club” (I signed up under a pseudonym, “Choad Strumming” with a completely bogus phone number and address… I don’t want or need their junk mail… just give me the discount!) so in the end I think I grabbed this one for about $14.

After I drank it I went back and cleaned them out of stock.

Some I’m drinking now, the rest I’m hoarding for the apocalypse.

This is an awesome wine. Chilean wines are a fantastic middle ground flavor-wise between California & France. They have that old world earthy nature, with the precision and power of a new world product. If I were ever to leave the USA and go somewhere it would certainly be Chile, if only to blow a huge wad of Bernardo O’Higgins visaged Pesos on swilling as much cheap Red as I could handle. I can’t speak a word of Spanish, but I can point wildly at bottles and my mouth… that’ll work, right? Donde esta de casa de vina? Solo me parte el conjunto de botella, por favor!

This is 75% Cab/25% Malbec, and 100% Fucking Awesome. Sorry for the blurry cell-cam shot, I was a bit drunk, but overall a very happy man. The label goes on and on about how they’ve organically grown the grapes in feng shui’ed rows of happy vines and certified it for consumption by weirdos who don’t eat anything but dead veggies or something. I just fired up the grill and threw a slab-o-steer on there and uncorked the Nuevomundo. Good stuff!

Seek this one out and serve it with a big slab of sizzling flesh for your vegan friends. Better yet, grill up your vegan friends and invite me over!