Vineyard update

It’s been quite a while since the winemaker of your Two Wine Nuts gave an update about what is currently happening on the fermenting front.

Our 2006 wines are Riesling and Pinot Noir. The Riesling grapes we normally buy from a Willamette Valley vineyard tend to produce a very acidic wine – think something closer to orange juice than apple juice. Well, in ’06, the grapes finally got ripe enough to be more gentle. It’s still not a really sweet wine, but it’s more likely to be sipped in the afternoon than with bacon-n-eggs in the morning.

The Pinot Noir is an interesting story. In May of ’06, the Two Wine Nuts went wine tasting. We found a gentleman pouring wine with a picture of his vineyard behind him. The poor vines were growing out of what looked like softball-sized rocks with the occasional patch of dirt thrown in – very similar to the soil where we have planted our 54 Riesling vines.

After some serious talk, we convinced the man to sell us some grapes. His vineyard actually has very rocky soil in one area and more standard soil in another, so we took grapes from both. The wine from the less rocky soil ended up fruity and lively, but with very little backbone. The more rocky soil wine is still waking up – it’s rather dark and brooding at the moment. Good, but hidden. Ah, but blend them together 50-50, and you have a real winning wine, even now. I can’t wait to see what happens with more aging.

In 2007, we’ve got 3 wines working. First is another Riesling, this time from a different vineyard that tends to give more standard flavors like melon, peach, and pear. Second is a Syrah which is very dark at this point and really just needs some time to figure out what it’s going to be when it grows up. And third is my first “dessert wine.” It is a faux-ice wine made from fractionally thawed Riesling juice. Yum!

Our vineyard is sure taking its sweet time growing. After the 2007 growing season, only about 6 or 8 vines grew to a height where I can let them branch off. This means they will produce grapes during 2009. The rest of the vines still need a year to grow their trunks. There were also about 5 that I had to replace from scratch. Those won’t even have a chance to produce grapes until ’10, and are more likely to have to wait until ’11. Sigh…

At $10, this Cabernet is over-priced

In two previous posts, we have reviewed some new offerings from Cost Plus World Market. Presumably in an attempt to introduce people to some traditional California wines at great prices, World Market has recently introduced Chard-on-yeah! (see November 8, 2007 post), Zin-fat-u-ation (see December 17, 2007 post), and Cab-u-lous. Having now sampled all three we can definitively say we are unimpressed at best, disappointed at worst.

Cab-u-lous is billed as “…the way one feels when experiencing a perfect Cab.” Cute enough. And we would agree that a perfect Cabernet Sauvignon is indeed a fabulous experience. Sadly, this wine won’t get you even close.

The 2005 Cab-u-lous had a heavy plum nose that mostly overcame the big whiffs of alcohol. A perfect Cab will smell of blackberries and jam and likely some woodiness. It will smell deep and rich. This one, well, we would sum it up as a mediocre house wine with a thin, burnt oak flavor. Honestly, it tasted like a cheap Cabernet which made us conclude it is over-priced at the usually consumer-friendly price of $9.99. At $5 or $6 we would have felt our money had been better spent.

Perhaps our biggest disappointment with these three varietals offered by World Market is that folks new to wine will sample them with the assumption that they are representative of Chardonnay, Zinfandel, and Cabernet Sauvignon. In our opinion, the Chardonnay comes closest to tasting like its namesake but the other two sadly miss the mark.