Wine Notes

Shelby already wrote about the Beaujolais Nouveau party that her parents held last Thursday night. Fun! Fruity! Some other recent wine-related notes:

• Our friend the UPS man has been bringing us a lot of wine lately. In addition to our regular wine-club shipments from Ridge and Justin, we also got boxes from Huber and Kosta Browne.
  
  Huber was one of the wineries pouring at the Santa Barbara County Vintners' Association 'Celebration of Harvest' event last month. One of their wines was a Dornfelder, a varietal that I'd never heard of before; turns out that Dornfelder is mostly grown in Germany (surprise), and mostly used as a blending grape in Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir). A quick Google search through the English-speaking wine world seems to indicate that Dornfelder is thought of as a trash grape (this may have more to do with said world's general perception of German Rotwein than Dornfelder itself), but the Huber production was anything but trashy — very complex and interesting, and a very deep, deep teeth-staining indigo in the glass, almost black. Between its uniqueness and its Germanic origins, I had to get some.

  The case of Kosta Browne is a little simpler: they just make great Pinot Noir! We met Dave Kosta and Michael Browne at their winery back in 2003 during a trip to Sonoma. Back then, they were still building their reputation (and their winery); now, their reputation is firmly in place, as Wine Spectator has been giving them consistently high ratings — including a 95 for their 2003 Sonoma Coast Pinot and a 96 for their 2003 Kanzler Vineyard Pinot, which are both sitting in our wine cellar right now. Hopefully we'll keep our spot on their mailing list for future years, but we're not exactly bulk purchasers, and the frenzy of those swayed by WS rankings is growing ... I'll be very interested to find out what these bottles are like once the time comes for us to get around to them.



• This past Friday night, we had dinner with my friend Quynh at her soon-to-be-former home (long story) up in Pasadena. (Her s-t-b-f house is just a few blocks away from a number of houses that we looked at seriously back when we were shopping; we spent a little while musing over what could have been.) We brought a 2003 Nalle Zinfandel. The Nalle was excellent, like every bottle we've had from them — Nalle is my favorite winery, and a dependable source for tasty, well-crafted wine. After the Nalle was gone, Quynh brought out a 2003 Palm Zin — it was also very good, but almost a polar opposite to the Nalle; the Palm's very forward big-n'-fruity taste and relatively high alcohol underscored Doug Nalle's understated Zin-manship.