Looking for Wine? Try Vinquire

I develop crushes on wine sites. Some of them last only a few weeks, but others stick with me. I got hooked on CellarTracker! a few years ago and visit it compulsively every day. Ditto Chateau Petrogasm. My new crush is on Vinquire, the wine-searching site that delivers a whole lot more than its competitors in my opinion.

First, it aims to provide you with information on where to find the wine you want for the price you want without charging you to see all the search results. Second, it has wine 2.0 built into it in the form of customer reviews and recommendations. Third, it has a blog built into it (the latest post was "how to spit with style," for instance).

But the best feature you won't see anywhere else is that you can find recommended wines by store chains. Albertsons, BevMo, Costco, Kroger/Ralph's, Safeway/Von's, and Trader Joe's are currently online, and it's great to check out what folks are finding there before you step out to the store and wonder how the wine you've never heard of actually tastes.

In exchange for an email and password you can set up an account that lets you submit reviews and thereby fully participate in the sites features. This account also makes it possible for you to access all your reviews in one place, so that the site can function as an electronic tasting journal if you are interested.

Two thumbs up to the folks at Vinquire for providing for free what other folks are charging for, and for adding features bound to make wine lovers even more happy. Now that it's the holidays, you are surely looking for some special wines. Check out Vinquire and see if they can help you find it!

Smoke and Mirrors: The Story of Fume Blanc

1968 has a lot to answer for: the assassination of Martin Luther King; the musical Hair; "Up, Up and Away" winning Song of the Year at the Grammy Awards; the Tet Offensive; the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russians; and Fume Blanc.

Once upon a time in 1968 a California winemaker named Robert Mondavi decided to buy a load of sauvignon grapes from a local grower. California sauvignon blanc didn't sell well in those days; it was too grassy for most palates. In a game of smoke and mirrors, Mondavi decided to barrel-age the juice (hence fume, or smoked, to refer to the oak influence), and give it a French name that might conjure up images of Pouilly-Fume in the minds of customers.

It worked. Sauvignon blanc sales shot up. And the legacy of confusing American wine drinkers with made-up names instead of proper varietal ones continued, so that today many in the US still don't know that Fume Blanc is made with sauvignon blanc grapes at all. Both CellarTracker and the ATF recognize Fume Blanc as a synonym for sauvignon blanc, which is incomprehensible to me.

Given my feelings about this dubious historical development, I opened the 2004 Hannah Nicole Vineyards Fume Blanc with some trepidation ($14.99, Wine Q) Just like Mondavi's 1968 version, this fume blanc is aged in oak barrels to give take off sauvignon blanc's more assertive edges. Unlike Mondavi's original Fume, however, this wine is is blended with 12% viognier. This accounts for the perfumed aromas of citrus with a floral overlay. The flavors in this wine were less zingy than zingy than most New Zealand sauvignon blancs, and not as rich as most California viogniers. There were flavors of pink grapefruit and Meyer lemon, with some floral notes on the finish. Despite its oak aging, I didn't detect much discernible oak in this wine, but felt instead that most of the roundness in the flavors was coming from the viognier.

All in all I felt this wine had good QPR, and it provided an opportunity to think about wine trends and fashions and the role that marketing plays in telling us what we are--and are not--drinking.

CellarTracker Tracks Thanksgiving 2007 Wine Patterns

What wine did you have with Thanksgiving dinner?

CellarTracker started tracking what people were popping open with friends and family on Wednesday, and will continue tracking the stats throughout today. These numbers provide a fascinating window into what varietals and producers were popular among one cross-section of wine-crazed consumers. So far more than 6500 bottles of wine have been consumed and the data entered into the program. (image from Daedalus Howell)

The varietal winner so far? Pinot Noir, followed by Cabernet, Chardonnay, Red Bordeaux Blends, and Zinfandel. We drank an excellent white Rhone blend from Tablas Creek, but white wines were the minority in the top ten, which went on to include Syrah, Red Rhone Blends, Riesling, Riesling, Shiraz, and Sauvignon Blanc.

The leading producer so far? Kistler (chardonnay and pinot), followed by Turley, Ridge, E. Guigal, and Chateau Ste. Michelle. Kosta Brown, William Selyem, Peter Michael, Beringer, and Carlisle rounded out the top ten.

Keep in mind that the numbers reflect that some people were having BIG parties and were lucky enough to have multiple bottles of the same wine to open. They are also incomplete since folks are probably just beginning to count the empties and enter their notes from last night. But it's a fun feature to check out today if you are bored with shopping or finished your turkey sandwich. You can sort the list every which way--by producer, vintage, varietal. Have fun and see where your wine came out in the rankings!

Happy Thanksgiving

Good Wine Under $20 wishes you and yours a happy, joyful, and safe Thanksgiving.

Mauritson Vineyards, Dry Creek Valley

Holiday Wine and Food Survival Strategy #2: Spice it Up

By Friday morning, it is highly likely that you or your loved ones will be uttering a version of Scarlett O'Hara's famous phrase that goes like this, "As God is my witness, I'll never eat turkey again."

If this is the case, then there is one surefire antidote to the Bird Blahs: you can spice things up a bit. Thanksgiving dinner tends to be a symphony of earth tones, creamy textures, and fairly bland seasonings. What you need is something vibrant, something red, something with lots of oomph in the flavorings.

You need saffron, fennel, garlic, tomato--none of which is normally on the menu for Thanksgiving. You need a bowl of pasta with saffron and sausage sauce. (photo from Food & Wine Magazine) It has chunky tomato sauce, laced with saffron, sage, and basil. Sausage gets crumbled in there, too, and then the sauce goes over any kind of pasta shape. The recipe calls for malloreddus, but I usually use penne and it's just fine. The result is warming, spicy, and silky.

With it, pour yourself a spicy, silky wine that can stand up to the tomatoes and the saffron, like the 2003 Herdade do Esporao Trincadeira (this was included in domaine547's Catavino blogger-pack of three Portuguese wines that I purchased recently, or you can buy a single bottle from domaine547 for $24.99) This was a very good bottle of wine. Dark aubergine in color, it wasn't filtered and threw some sediment so if you don't like that you might want to decant. There were spicy aromas of plum and vanilla, which followed through to the flavors. In your mouth, some blueberry notes entered into the mix, and added a nice richness and complexity. There was some grip on your tongue from spicy and toasty oak, but the texture of the wine remained fairly silky. This was my first experience with this grape, which was like a spicy pinot noir, and it represented good QPR.

One surefire way to survive the holiday season is to remember that some spice every know and again can really help to balance out the creamy, heavy, and rich foods of the season.