This is one of those wines that is always at TJ’s. I didn’t realize until Mrs. Q came home with a bottle the other day that it had been a few vintages since we had tried it, and that I had never written it up for the blog. I do have an issue with TJ’s fairly small selection being the same-old same-old stuff too much of the time, but if you can get a decent bottle of Chianti for nine bucks every time you shop at TJ’s, that’s not something to complain about.

The wine shows cherry candy on the nose, with wet dirt and not much else. Simple but pleasant enough. It’s more dry on the palate with a leathery quality - more varietally correct, I guess. Very short finish. Quaffable enough but nothing to get excited about unless maybe you’re sipping it while looking out over Tuscan vineyards at sunset. I’ll probably wait another vintage for two before trying this again.

Price: $8.99
Score: 101%

It’s hard to believe that I have never said anything about this wine, which usually sells at our local independent grocers for about $10. A paradigm of ten buck wines, it’s a rich, bold, clean, well -made wine that stands up to a variety of dishes and tastes as good the second or third time you try it as it does the first time around. This screw-capper is a blend of Zin, Petite, Carignane, and Syrah from various appellations in Northern Sonoma County. On the nose, it’s got briary fruit with considerable peppery spice. The mouth is rich and fruity and juicy - ripe but not quite jammy - with a nice framing of oak, and a good long finish. This is a good house wine. And it doesn’t hurt my affection for it that we call our youngest “Patch.”

Price: $9.99

Score: 145%

I’ve been so glad that the designer water trend is on the downslope and people are finally realizing that their ubiquitous plastic water bottles cost 10 times as much in water and in energy than the perfectly potable stuff from the tap. But not everybody has caught on. Just got a press release from the flack for these folks, who are making and marketing designer ice cubes. Just in time for the barbecue season!

Oy.

I live in Santa Rosa, the largest city in Sonoma County. In culinary terms, Sonoma is rightly considered a backwater of Napa and San Francisco, though it’s been making some progress lately. But what we lack in high-end places, with notable exceptions like Cyrus, we make up in real food, like pizza. With Rosso and Bovolo I’d put our pizza up against anything in Napa, Marin, and maybe even SF.

Michael Bauer’s blog on the SF Chronicle does weekly Pizza Friday posts, including a video. A few months back, they featured the pizza at Rosso, which is freakishly good. Today, they visit John Stewart and Bovolo, which is just as good - maybe even better, because you can have have an amazing pork cheek sandwich with salsa verde if you prefer, and you can follow it with wonderful house-made gelato. (there are no desserts at Rosso)

I defy you to watch the video and not get hungry:

Yuck.

Too ripe, too much charred oak, too plonky.

Oh, well, at least it’s a screwcapper, which means it’s less likely to spill in the fridge while waiting to find its true purpose in life as the base of a red wine sauce.

UPDATE: No sauce for this wine after all. I tried it the second night and it seemed much less offensive; the third night it wasn’t bad. What’s the lesson in that? I’m not sure. On the first night, my tasting of this wine was preceded by a glass of a quite good zin from Rusina, while on the second and third night, it was my first wine of the day. Possibly the Lindemans developed some after exposure to air, but possibly it was too big a step down, after a glass of good wine, but not so bad without that frame of reference. Yet more proof that the tasting and enjoyment of wine is at least somewhat subjective.

Price: $7.99

Score: ?

One of my favorite winery clients, Volker Eisele Family Estate, has had to accept a settlement that requires them not to use the domain name that they had been using for years, so they have had to move their website to a new domain http://volkereiselefamilyestate.com/. It’s a real pain in the neck when years of search engine results are gone and you have to start from scratch. I have followed all of Google’s recommended steps to get their software to drop all results pertaining to the old site, and to list the new site, but so far, this has not happened.

So what does that have to do with the Quaffability reader? Not a lot, except that the wines, all grown organically by the family on their beautiful property in the Chiles Valley appellation of Napa, are excellent and I would suggest trying them if your budget permits. Also, since this blog is indexed frequently by Google, I am hoping that the Google robots will follow this link to the new site and that maybe that will help prime the pump. We’ll see.

You don’t think of Oregon for Bordeaux varietals, but the Southern part of the state is much warmer of than the famed Willamette Valley and the rest of Oregon’s Pinot Noir country in the north. Today’s wine is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc from the Rougue Valley near Medford. It’s a simple, quaffable wine, with pleasant red fruit on the nose, similar flavors in the mouth, and a clean finish that turns nicely spicy. There is not much complexity or depth to the wine, but also nothing off or plonky, which is 4/5ths of the battle at this price.

Price: $6.99 ( I think - can’t find receipt / I’d buy this happily at $5.99 to $7.99)

Score: 125%

Just one brief thought on the 2008 American Wine Blog Finalists: when Quaffability was among the finalists for Best Wine Review Blog last year, I was awfully flattered, but I felt like a bit of a pretender, because I knew that there was a blog right in my niche that was much, much better. In fact I was astounded by how much time and writing skill was put into this blog, and I thought the author could easily get work as a wine writer if she didn’t already have a real job.

So I am really happy that Good Wine Under $20 is a finalist for not just one but a whopping 3 categories, including Best Wine Blog. Congrats! You deserve it, Debs.

UPDATE: Dr. Debs won not one but two awards! Good job!

Pleasant, but about as aromatic and complex as this stuff:

With such a surfeit of inexpensive but overripe, over-oaked Syrah that is indistinguishable from other red wines, this wine is terrifically refreshing. Yes, it’s on the ripe side too, but not too much, and yes, it has its share of oak, but it’s in balance and wraps around the fruit, and there’s a sense of varietal correctness, in other words, you get the idea that you’re actually drinking Syrah; more importantly, it’s petty darn tasty Syrah.

The nose shows lots of blackberry and boysenberry with an undercurrent of peppery spice and earth. In the mouth it’s ripe and fairly round, with pleasantly juicy flavors and a caress of oak leading to medium-long finish. This is a great TJ’s deal if you can find it.

Price: $7.99

Score: 199%

Do you like Rombauer Chardonnay? Me, I don’t, not so much. It’s a big, fat, oaky, butterscotchy fruit bomb of a Chardonnay that is just not my thing. And yet, when I worked in restaurants, I must have sold a couple pallets of the stuff, because it delivers a heck of a good bang for the buck to the large group of folks who like that style of Chardonnay. Today’s wine is a Viognier crafted by by the man who created the Rombauer style. Before I spotted this bottle at TJ’s, I had not tried the Gregory Graham Viognier for a few vintages, though I remembered it as a big flowery viscous wine that was a great intro for Chardonnay lovers looking to branch out in a safe way. This 2003 vintage is certainly all that, and then some. Maybe the style has changed, or maybe my palate has changed, but this wine seems big, ripe, and tasty, but too sweet for me. The nose has lovely honeysuckle and apricot aromas that are developing nice complexity with bottle aging. In the mouth the wine has a great feel and good fruit flavors, but the sweetness makes it cloying. Just in terms of the deal TJ’s has gotten on this wine, this is worth a try if you don’t mind considerable sweetness in your wine, and it’s not a bad choice if you need something to tame some fiery stir fry, or maybe even to pair with very ripe cheeses. As a normal table wine I would have to give it a pass. It’s just too sweet.

Score: 99%

Price: $9:99

We have a split decision on this cognac at our house. I feel that it’s a little simple and light-bodied for a cognac, but that it does fit Colonel Potter’s description of a good brandy in that there are not enough O’s in “smooth” to describe the overall flavor and finish. Mrs. Q, on the other hand, thinks that it lacks the requisite “bite” and wishes that there was more smoke to it. (this from a lady who hates Scotch) . It’s my blog, not hers, so I’ll say that at TJ’s price of $19.99 this is the real stuff at a reasonably affordable price.