A Great “Go To” Zin

Yesterday was a wonderful preview of Spring 2007. We celebrated the sunny, warm air with BBQ’d hot dogs, cheese, crackers, tapanade, and an old stand-by Sonoma Zinfandel. We and our neighbors toasted the arrival of daffodils and riding mowers with a 2004 Murphy-Goode Liar’s Dice Zinfandel. Yum.

We first discovered Liar’s Dice at a Zinfandel festival in San Francisco back in the late 1990s. We then visited the Murphy-Goode winery in Sonoma and bought several bottles of the then hard-to-find Liar’s Dice. These days, you can find this reliable, proud-to-serve (red) Zinfandel at Costco for $14.99.

Murphy-Goode produces some very solid, representative wines. If you want to know what a Zinfandel or a Fumé Blanc (also called Sauvignon Blanc) or a California-style Chardonnay (heavy oak and butter) is supposed to taste like, Murphy-Goode is a great place to start.

In terms of their Zinfandel, Liar’s Dice has a deep, seductive berry nose with a dark cherry, currant, and peppery taste. It is a pleasantly rich Zinfandel that will go nicely with any BBQ’d meal, as well as pizza, pasta dishes, or just a nice kick-back evening on the patio. It feels a tiny bit special to open on a Wednesday night and is great to open with friends when you want a nice bottle without breaking the bank. We’ve been drinking Murphy-Goode’s Liar’s Dice for over ten years and have never been disappointed.

We’d buy it if it were $15 or less

We had dinner at some friends’ house last night (fabulous, as always) and they brought out a bottle of 1999 Forest Glen Sangiovese. None of us could recall the winery so we really don't know when or how this wine came to be in their closet. Nevertheless, this mysterious Sonoma County wine was pretty tasty.

The Sangiovese grape is the basis for Chianti. So, this wine tasted a lot like a Chianti but a bit thicker and more pronounced. It had a nice fruity flavor and went down smoothly both as a sipping wine as well as with our Italian Chicken Soup. It didn’t go so well with the lemon cake, but then again, it wasn’t supposed to.

Web research has not been as fruitful as the wine, unfortunately. The winery’s website is currently under construction. An article by a wine writer in 1999 praises Forest Glen for its award winning wines and amazing value, as none of Forest Glen's wines at that time sold for more than $10. It does appear that the winery is now owned by a company in California’s Central Valley, and the winemaker is supposedly John Franzia. If he is the namesake of those ubiquitous boxed wines, our guess is this wine is still reasonably priced and not too hard to find. If you find it, drop us a note and tell us about it. We will do the same.