Young Winos of LA

Last month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday adventure was a freeballin’, full-sprint marathon tasting in which we polished off a bottle of French Cab Franc, took meticulous notes, snapped and uploaded copious amounts of photos, and resized and formatted those photos using my time-consuming system which Jessica insists is inefficient (but which I continue to swear by). Then we uploaded the whole mess onto the blog, all within an hour’s time, and made it to Newsha’s for the Green Wines tasting — harried and disheveled, but only about ten minutes late. It was a frantic and desperate endeavor, and I promised myself it would never be that way again.

One month later, I’m in the familiar position of sitting on Jason’s floor, funneling our response to WBW #45 onto the blog, maniacally resizing photos, and frequently checking my watch. No time to stress out, though — the weekly meeting is imminent, and there’s a delicious bottle of Riesling to talk about before it begins. (more…)

After spending several arduous hours drinking by the pool, Emily was loathe to let the festivities end just because the sun was getting lower in the sky, so she invited the Winos over to her house and promised to grill up some huge burgers.  Andrew and I had the sense to take her up on her offer, as well as the foresight to go and grab two hefty bottles of Petite Sirah that had recently been sent our way by the good people at Aaron Jackson and Michael-David, respectively.

Why pair Petite Sirah with hamburgers?  Well, when you’re dealing with a meal that’s delicious, but might not be considered haute cuisine, you want a wine that’s similar: mouth-watering, flavorful, and free of affectation.  Enter big-and-bold Petite Sirah, with its massive fruit, sinister spice, and serious backbone.  If there was any grape that was going to make our taste buds as horny as those burgers were going to, it was this one.  As responsible journalists, though, we thought it best to start by tasting each wine on its own, prior to the hot beef injection. (more…)

Alkies,

I just finished a chapter in Red, White and Drunk all Over in which the author Natalie MacLean examines the “purely American phenomenon” of wine scores.  Hugely interesting stuff, and very relevant to us Winos; the vast majority of us, I would hazard a guess, are influenced by those 100-point-scale ratings that we see taped up next to displays of wine in stores.  Charged with a mandate to buy something relatively obscure (a bottle of Pinot Noir from Chile, lets say), and discovering two similarly-priced bottles at your local wine shop — both with positive reviews but one featuring a 92-point designation as well — who among us wouldn’t err on the side of critical approval and go for the numbered bottle?  This inclination, though, raises some important questions: which critic was it?  Is his/her taste similar to your own?  Do you know?  Do you even care… or is a “good” number from some expert simply enough? (more…)

Last year we embarked on an ambitious tasting endeavor with our 2007 March Madness blind tasting tournament. The results separated the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the boys from the women, etc. This year, we didn’t get a proper March Madness tournament going on (what with all the other madness the Winos were experiencing in March), so we satisfied our blind tasting jones by gathering in Jason’s living room for a one-day, two-varietal, nine-bottle event. (more…)