Wannabe Wino Wine Blog

Oh dear, this month WBW really crept up on me. If you don’t follow me on Twitter (and WHY don’t you follow me?) you may not have seen that I’ve been pretty sick and even had to cancel the trip to Portugal that I was so looking forward to.  I’ve only been tasting wine again for a couple of days and here it is WBW. I’m generally always up for a challenge and a challenge is what my friend Rob, of RB Wine Post, our WBW host, set us to this month.

Rob asks us to find our wine muse. He set us to the task of going to a wine we know well and have had many times or a wine from a wine shop that we’ve been meaning to try. Additionally, he wanted us to time how long we enjoyed the wine and then spend that many hours writing our post on the wine and to edit and find something we might not know about the wine. AND (man, he’s a demanding task master) he wanted us to give our writing some flare. I’m not sure he’s talking about flair in the adding bright colors or shiny objects sense either, though I could easily do that…I even have a pretty picture of a butterfly I recently took that I could distract you with….Thea, look, butterfly! You can read ALL the details over at Rob’s WBW post.

The easy part: I popped my bottle of wine open at exactly 7:42 and enjoyed the very last sip out of my glass at 10:37. Two hours 55 minutes. Rob is going to have to excuse me, but I don’t have 5 hours and 50 minutes to write this post. I can show you a doctor’s note….cut me some slack, we’re lucky I’m even sitting here writing now as I was out of work for over 2 weeks! However, I did spend much more time on this post than I usually do, so that should count for something.

I also need some slack on the wine I chose. It’s a wine I’ve been wanting to try for a long time…but it didn’t come from a wine shop, it came from my own cellar. I had the plague, no one wanted me in a wine shop. And it also isn’t a wine I’m all the familiar with, in fact, I’d never had it before, not even a taste. But I really really really wanted to try it, so does that count? I’m a big fan of Bill Wertzberger’s wines. He makes a Grenache that is to.die.for. Because I like his wines so much, I am willing to buy them untasted…which says a lot…outside of my club shipments I rarely, rarely buy a wine without tasting it first. I picked the 2006 Wertzberger Syrah from the McDowell Valley Vineyard’s Y Block. I think paid about $25ish for this, though I see it’s retailing for $30 on Bill’s website.

Something I didn’t know about the wines: Bill paints all his own labels. How cool is that?

The production on this wine is extremely low…the back label says 24 cases, though the website says 50 cases. Either way, it’s handcrafted by Bill and you can pretty much only find it on his website.

I’ve thought for some time now on how to make this different than my normal review, to add ‘flare.” And I finally came to the conclusion that I would borrow from an ancient 😉 WBW #42-from Spittoon, Just Seven Words.

Liquid velvet cherries sprinkled with crushed violets.

Thanks to Rob for hosting and as always a virtual tip of the hat to Lenn, our founder.

Expect a full review of this wine in the next week or so.

Filed under: California, Red, Syrah |