Tag Archives: red blends

Wine of the week: Moulin de Gassac Guilhem Rouge 2020

Moulin de Gassac Guilhem
Guilhem Rouge 2020/$9-$15

The Guilhem Rouge is the perfect red wine for winter’s weeknight dinners

Perhaps the most difficult thing about writing reviews for the blog is not the actual writing, but finding wines that meet the blog’s standards. This is particularly difficult for red wine, since the wine business seems to go out of its way to make especially plonky reds for $15 or less.

Which is why I was so surprised – and dare I say delighted – to find the Guilhem Rouge 2020 ($11, purchased, 13.5%). The white and rose are top-notch cheap wines, but even some of the greatest cheap wine producers have trouble with reds.

That wasn’t the case here. This is a red Rhone blend from France (mostly syrah and grenache, with a bit of carignan), but not too soft or too jammy, as is too often the case with red wine at this price. Instead it’s dark and full of red fruit (cherries?) , but also surprisingly fresh and mostly balanced. That means there isn’t any of that syrah inkiness that can creep in the back.

In other words, the perfect red wine for dinner during the winter, be it takeout pizza or meatloaf. And that this wine, made in a less well known part of one of France’s least respected regions, can do what it does as well as it does once again points out what California can’t do — or won’t — do anymore.

Imported by Palomar Imports

Wine of the week: Shannon Ridge Wrangler Red 2016

Shannon Ridge Wrangler Red The Shannon Ridge Wrangler Red is what we don’t see often enough – great, cheap California red wine

One of the blog’s great laments is the lack of quality cheap California wine. There’s lots of cheap wine, of course, but not much that most of us would want to drink. Because, as one of the blog’s regular visitors and a longtime California winemaker once told me, “we all decided we needed to become famous.”

Enter the Shannon Ridge Wrangler Red ($12, purchased, 13.9%). This red blend does what so many others don’t care to do – offer quality wine at a fair price that tastes like it comes from California. It’s a blend of syrah, petite sirah, tempranillo, and zinfandel, but remains balanced and interesting even though that grape combination can produce a six-megaton fruit bomb.

Look for some some sweet fruit (red berries?), but it’s not a sweet wine. There are soft tannins in the back, bracing the structure, just as they should, and there’s even a bit of acidity. In all of this, it’s not smooth, and that’s a good thing.

Highly recommended, and especially for anyone who likes this style of wine. And don’t be surprised to see it the Shannon Ridge Wrangler Red in the 2021 $10 Hall of Fame.

And, because I no longer understand how the wine business works, the 2012 vintage, which was also terrific, cost $14, $2 more than this one.

Wine of the week: Sicalia Terre Siciliane 2016

Sicalia Terre SicilianeThe Sicalia Terre Siciliane isn’t very Sicilian, but it’s still worthwhile when you need a red wine for a weeknight dinner

Italian wine producers, even though they have thousands of indigenous grapes to work with, are fascinated by what they call “international” grapes — those we know as cabernet sauvignon, melot, chardonnay, and the like. Their efforts can be uneven – for every great Super Tuscan, where international grapes are blended with sangiovese, there are dozens of $8 and $10 washouts. Which is where the Sicalia Terre Siciliane comes in.

On the one hand, the Sicalia Terre Siciliane ($8, purchased, 13%) doesn’t taste especially Sicilian. There is little earthiness or dark fruit or Old World complexity. And why should there be, since it’s a red blend, featuring the Sicilian nero d’avola and the and merlot?

On the other hand, it’s an enjoyable weeknight wine. Who knew? That certainly wasn’t the case the last time I tasted it: “ashy and unpleasant.” This time, though, the Sicalia Terre Siciliane was juicy, with enjoyably tart red fruit, a clean finish, and tremendous value.

No, it’s not very Sicilian, and yes, it needs food. But given the state of cheap wine these days, you could do a lot worse when you want a $10 red wine for a weeknight dinner.

Imported by Enovation Brands

Wine of the week: Our Daily Red 2018

Our Daily RedThe 2018 Our Daily Red is a step up from the last vintage – less rustic and a touch fruitier

Dear Wine Business:

I know it sounds like I do a lot of carping, but I truly do have your best interests at heart. Don’t we both want people to enjoy wine?

Which brings us to an odd red blend from California called Our Daily Red ($9, purchased, 12.5%). It’s a pleasant everyday wine, and one I have enjoyed before. In fact, this vintage is less tart and has a little more dark, almost cherry, fruit than the 2017 did, making it less rustic and more modern. In this, it’s a Friday night wine when you’re ordering takeout pizza and binging Netflix.

So what’s the catch? It’s the back label, which insists the wine is something that it isn’t: “fruit forward and loaded with black fruit.” A Lodi zinfandel is fruit forward and loaded with black fruit, not Our Daily Red.

This sort of untruth through advertising is quite common on wine back labels, which try to convince people to buy the wine based on what the wine business thinks consumers want instead of what’s in the bottle. Some big producers, I’m told, even have marketing companies write the copy.

So what happens when someone opens Our Daily Red expecting it to taste like a post-modern California merlot tarted up with residual sugar? They go, “Ooo, gross,” spit the wine out, and never let wine touch their lips again.

And spitting out is hardly what we want, is it?

So let’s take it easy on the back label hyperbole. All a back label really needs is a simple fruit comparison and maybe a pairing. Shouldn’t it be enough to trust your customer to enjoy a well-made wine?

Your pal,
The Wine Curmudgeon

It’s red wine, isn’t it? So enough with the sugar already

sweet red wineSweet red wine: It’s time for the wine business to admit it’s sugaring up our red wine and passing it off as dry.

The Wine Curmudgeon has been writing a wine of the week on Wednesday, alternating red and white, for as long as I have been doing the blog. But we almost didn’t have a wine of the week two days ago. Call it my aversion to phony sweet red wine.

I tasted almost a dozen reds from California, Oregon, Washington, Spain, and France to find something to write about. No luck: Most of them weren’t very good and some of them were hideous, a recent trend. What was worse is that more than half of them were sweet. Yes, sweet red wine – as in enough residual sugar so that my mouth had that cotton candy feeling after I finished tasting.

It’s one thing to taste so much bad wine; that’s the burden I accepted when I took on cheap wine. But that the wines are sweet, in addition to poorly made, is a new horror, and one that I refuse to accept.

Red wine, unless it’s labeled as such, is not supposed to be sweet. If it is, it’s Kosher. Or Lambrusco. And that’s fine. I have nothing against sweet red wine, and have enjoyed all sorts over my wine drinking career. But that the wine business – and Big Wine is not the only culprit here – has decided to “smooth” dry red wine by extreme winemaking or sweetening (sugar or white grape juice or whatever, depending on the law in the country where the wine is made) is a travesty. And I refuse to accept it.

Why is this happening? It’s a combination of things, based on the idea that labeling red wine as sweet is death in the marketplace. Didn’t the wine business spend 30 years telling us that the only people who drank sweet wine were crazy old ladies with cats? So we get “red blends” that are hugely sweet but are sold as dry to appeal to the rest of us. And that are flooding store shelves.

Consider:

• The idea that there is an “American palate,” in which we won’t drink something unless it has enough sugar to make us cry rock candy tears. This makes me crazy, since most wine in the U.S. is dry and has been for decades. And everyone made a lot of money over the past 30 years selling dry wine.

• Copy cat marketing. E&J Gallo’s Apothic, the first legitimate sweet red blend, is a huge seller. So everyone else has to have their version of Apothic.

• The cynicism that has become part of doing business in the 21st century. We’re not wine drinkers to them; we’re vast hordes of focus groups to be manipulated in search of profit. This story bears repeating: A former Proctor & Gamble executive once told me he could get a focus group to do anything he wanted – which, he said, was the point of focus groups.

So be warned, wine business. I won’t mention any names now. I’ll give you one more chance. But know that from now on: If the wine is sweet, and you don’t label it sweet, I’m calling you out. I’ll have a permanent post here, listing the wines. And yes, I’m just one cranky wine writer. But we have to start somewhere.

Wine trends in 2016

winetrendsWine trends in 2016? Expect to see consolidation continue, producers continue to aim at the consumer smooth tooth, and retailers focus even more on private label. And, not surprising given all of this, more of us move away from wine in favor of craft beer:

• Distributor and importer consolidation: Big Wine will get bigger in 2016, which won’t be anything new. The real news will take place among distributors and importers, as the biggest among those two groups buy smaller companies. We’ve already seen some of this, and there will be more for two reasons. First, historically low borrowing costs, which will make it possible for the biggest companies to buy more smaller companies than usual and even to overpay. Second, the graying of the family distributors and importers who started their businesses in the 1980s and 1990s and who brought us so much interesting wine. If you run a family business and you’re nearing retirement, and someone throws a ridiculous amount of money at you, wouldn’t you sell, too?

• Keeping it smooth: The number of red blends and pinot noirs, which have grown like crazy over the past couple of years, will keep growing. This includes (most importantly) sweet red wine, as well as any red blend tasting of massive amounts of fruit and without much in the way of tannins. It includes pinot nor, because pinot made for less than $20 is usually blended. It also includes Prosecco, which has jumped in sales the past couple of years and is increasingly being made to fit the smooth flavor profile even if that doesn’t necessarily taste like Prosecco.

• Bring on the private labels. One of the most important statistics about wine was buried in a Nielsen marketing report last year — 4,200 new wines were introduced in 2014, about 12 1/2 percent of the market. Those weren’t necessarily wines from new producers or new wines from old producers, but wines made for specific retailers, whether grocers or chain wine stores and called private label wines. They can be sold for a little less than national brands, or even the same (right, Kroger?) but reap more profit.

• Flat wine sales. Since the recession ended, annual wine sales have hardly grown at all. As wine market analyst John Gillespie has written, that could be because we’re switching to craft beer, where sales have surpassed almost everyone’s expectations. The most telling number: The craft beer market is worth $24 billion, which is two-thirds of the entire U.S. wine market. And it’s not like craft beer has been around for very long.

Call me cranky, but the first three things on this list explain the fourth. If wine is becoming boring — the same kinds of wine made by the half-dozen producers who dominate the U.S. market, why wouldn’t we look for something else to drink? Throw in that these are increasingly ordinary products, which so much private label is but are sold for higher prices, and wine’s sales slump seems obvious.

 

Winebits 411: Wine prices, Chinese wine, red blends

wine prices ? Expensive wine prices: Or, as S. Irene Virbila wrote in the Los Angeles Times, a look at old Kermit Lynch newsletters finds a “…breathtaking change in wine prices over the years. Over the course of three decades or more, prices go up, of course. But 10 times in some cases?” Lynch is the celebrated importer whose name on a French wine label is reason to buy it regardless of varietal or region, and Virblia has tracked price changes for several of his wines since the early 1980s with depressing results. Given that cheap wine prices have not increased 10 times over 30 years (maybe doubled, at most) and that the cost of wine production has remained remarkably stable over that time, this speaks to the increased demand for high-end wines since then, and especially for wines with pedigrees from experts like Lynch.

? So long, China: Remember when China was going to save the French wine business? Not now, says the Reuters news service. “Now wine is being sold below cost, some is going bad sitting for long periods in poorly maintained warehouses and decent Bordeaux wines are going for 15 yuan [US$2.50] a bottle.” Not that the Wine Curmudgeon warned the French about this, that raising prices to gouge the inexperienced Chinese had dangerous long-term consequences — but what do I know? The Chinese market has been hit by what passes for a recession there as well as the government’s continuing crackdown on corruption, in which wine bribes play a huge part. By the way, those “decent” Bordeaux wines that are selling for $2.50 in China cost 10 times that much in the U.S.

? Red blends take over: The popularity of red blends — which means, in most cases, sweet red wine — continues to rise, reports Nielsen. They accounted for more than 13 percent of the $13 billion that consumers spent on table wine during the 52 weeks ended Sept. 12, 2015, up from 11 percent in 2011. How important is that change? As I have written before, it’s almost unprecedented, with red blends the third biggest seller in the U.S. behind chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon in U.S. grocery and super stores. Interestingly, the Nielsen report doesn’t use the word sweet to describe the red blends, since so many producers don’t identify the wines as such. But we know what’s going on, don’t we?