*Disclaimer: I received this wine as a sample from Michel Schlumberger.

We’ve been drinking our way through Michel Schlumberger’s second label, Petanque.  Tonight I grabbed the 2007 Petanque Sauvignon Blanc to drink with the grilled Cod I made.  The Petanque line is designed to be easy drinking backyard wines to enjoy with friends over a lawn bowling game.  The Sauvignon Blanc retails for $12.95, has a plastic cork closure, and clocks in at 13.8% alcohol by volume.

On the nose I found lime, spice, tropical notes, white flowers, pineapple, orange blossom, melon, and molasses. (That last note was a bit odd.)  I liked the nose…I thought it promised good things in the mouth. In the mouth I got melon, lime, peach, and a general sense of overripe citrus.  The mouth seemed to fall off and it wasn’t crisp like I expected from the nose.

Many Happy Returns to Wine Blogging Wednesday! This August, when I get the honor and pleasure of hosting for the second time, is the 5th birthday of WBW! Lenn of Lenndevours deserves some huge credit for starting the tradition 60 months ago.  That’s older than most wine blogs around today, so for it to have survived the comings and goings of original participants, the proliferation of wine blogs and wine social networks, and everything else that’s changed in the last five years is a testament to how many wine lovers enjoy this event every month.

In case you are new to the world of wine blogs, WBW is a once monthly event where a host blogger (that’d be me) sets a theme and bloggers and wine enthusiasts from around the world choose a wine to meet the theme.  The host then rounds up the posts in some fashion so everyone can discover some new blogs and visit with old friends to see their takes on the theme.

Zin fangirls (and guys), Zin Freaks, and even those of you who aren’t so sure about Zin, get ready! The theme for this 5th birthday of WBW is “I Have Zinned.”  Nothing too crazy there. It’s summer and I’m not sure about the rest of you, but we are grilling and BBQing almost every night here at the Wannabe Wino household.  Zinfandel is my absolute favorite wine to pair with grilled foods and bbq, so in honor of the height of grilling season, I’m asking everyone to pull out a Zinfandel, throw something on the grill (or the Foreman or in a pan if you don’t have either), and tell me about your favorite grilled or BBQ’d food and how it goes with Zinfandel.

The deadline to submit is August 12th.  You can leave a comment here or shoot me an email at ctsonadora@gmail.com with a link to your blog post. As always, if you don’t have a blog and would like to play along, send me an email with your write up and I’ll toss it up as post here. I’m hoping for some record participation for the 5th Birthday event, so don’t let me down!

Boys and girls, get Zinning!

I must sound like a broken record with this wine. Here’s the review of the 2007. And the 2006.  But really, it is my absolutely favorite Michel Schlumberger wine year to year. Of course….I don’t drink the Cabernet Sauvignon in my club shipments because I’m gathering a 10 year vertical to serve….well, it will have to be in a few years because I currently have 1998 through 2005. I’m almost there.  Don’t you want to be my friend when I pop that open? Totally off point though. I picked the 2008 Michel Schlumberger Pinot Blanc to drink this evening. I’d been ITCHING to open it since it arrived in one of my recent club shipments.  The Pinot Blanc sports a real cork closure, clocks in at 12.5% alcohol by volume, and I believe it retails for $21, though I got it in a club shipment and every M-S club shipment is $50 regardless of what’s in the box.

On the nose of the Pinot Blanc I found sweet ripe pear, white peach, white pepper, a hint of honey, spice, lemon, honeysuckle, and white flowers.  I liked this wine so much last year that I put it in the Summer Sipper Wine Blog Pack I helped design for Jill.  In the mouth the wine showed lemon, peach, honey, ripe pear, ripe apple, melon, and a little essence of apple cider.  Overall, it’s crisp, light, and consistently delivers a bottle of wine that I love.

*Disclaimer: I received this wine as a sample from Sort This Out Cellars.

I’ve been friends on Twitter with stoc, or really Felicia, the personality behind STOC, which stands for “Sort This Out Cellars” for quite some time.  Recently she tweeted about taking STOC on the road, and I wondered if they would be coming to Virginia, alas, no, but Felicia offered to send me my own personal “road show” to taste.  Among the wines was the 2006 Sort This Out Cellas Viva Las Vegas California White Wine.  Viva Las Vegas White retails for $15, has a cork closure, and clocked in at 13.5% alcohol by volume.

On the nose I found honeysuckle, white flowers, orange zest, golden delicious apple, lemon, pepper, and pear.  In the mouth I got spice, pepper, apple, crisp pear, lemon, white pepper, orange, orange zest, and tangerine.  I like the finish on this one. It struck me as clean and zippy. The Viva Las Vegas would make a great wine to enjoy poolside on a hot day.

*Disclaimer: I received this wine as a sample from Michel Schlumberger.

Michel Schlumberger recently released a new second label called Petanque. Petanque is a French game that I sorta equate with Bocce. A little different I guess, but I’m not quite so sure since I’ve never played! But the idea behind the line is that they are wines you’d enjoy while playing a leisurely game with friends. Nothing to ponder, just something to drink while hanging out.  We tried the 2006 Petanque Syrah the other night with bacon blue cheese burgers. It retails for $12.95 a bottle, has a plastic cork, and clocks in at 14.4% alcohol by volume.

On the nose I found spicy plums, blackberries, chocolate, pepper, black currants, and oak.  In the mouth I got plums, blackberry, black fruit, raspberry, spice, and pepper, along with a good dose of oak.  It went fabulously with the burgers, the oak seemed to do well with the grilled food.  We served the second bottle this weekend with bbq ribs and chicken and it was gone in an instant!

*Disclaimer: I received this wine as a sample from Spy Valley Winery

Spy Valley makes some excellent QPR wines. I’ve been really pleased with everything I’ve tried so far from the line. I’m looking forward to tasting the Gewurztraminer and Pinot Noir that I still have left.  I’m not sure if the Riesling is available in the US as I don’t see it for sale online.  The 2008 Spy Valley Riesling clocks in at 12% alcohol by volume, has a screw cap closure, and looks to retail for around $20.

On the nose i found lemon, spice, white pepper, white flowers, wet stone, and peach.  In the mouth I found peach, pear, lemon, orange, honey tones, stones, and lime on the finish.  The wine was crisp and a really nice effort.  I enjoyed it with grilled chicken marinated in Italian spices, probably not the best match, but it worked.

No formal review today, just a quicky wine suggestion.  On our recent vacation, we stopped overnight in Roanoke, Virginia on our way home in order to break up the 9 hour drive.  We ate at Le Bistro, a fabulous little restaurant in downtown Roanoke, choosing to do the Chef’s Tasting Menu.  One of the wines was the 2006 Annabella Napa Valley Cabernet.  The Annabella retails for as low as $11 on the internet and you should get some.  It is hands down the best sub-$20 Cab I’ve had, and it hails from Napa!!  I recall it being elegant and refined, this was not a knock you down and kick you while you’re on the ground Cab.
I had to learn more about it after we got back, and discovered that Annabella is a line from Michael Pozzan.  Supposedly the wines are limited production and allocated?  But 27,000 cases were made of the 2006 Cab and I see it is easily available on the internet, so scoop it up and enjoy this gem.

This post is LONG overdue. I had some great momentum coming off my last trip to CA in April, and I got out a bunch of posts from the 5 day trip pretty quickly. Then I petered out.  I’m sorry! I still have several more winery visits to talk about from the trip and I will try to get them up here in short order!  However, tonight at 6pm est is the St. Supery Twitter Taste Live and I just felt I should get my post up about it before I go twittering away about their wines this evening!

On our last day in Napa, Thea, Matt, and I did a whilrwind tour of 5 different wineries.  One of them was St. Supery.  Thea had visited St. Supery earlier that spring for a blogger day and thought we shoud see it too, so off we went.  Even though St. Supery was our last stop, at the end of the day, it was absolutely packed! Amazing to me…Napa is just SO different than Sonoma to me.  Though I guess the fact that it was a Saturday probably didn’t help, tour buses were crawling everywhere.  And good samaritan Thea spotted a pile of wallets, cash, and cell phones just sitting on a retaining wall as we walked in to St. Supery and turned it in at the tasting bar.  Some poor tourist probably got back to his hotel and paniced!

I didn’t get too many photos at St. Supery since it was so crowded. Sorry!  That said, the tasting room is quite spacious…there were just that many people there.  Everyone seemed to be having a great time and enjoying themselves, as we did!

2006 Virtú White Wine: $28. Grapefruit, tropical notes, cream, lemon, guava, passion fruit. Nice. We took home 2.

2006 Rosé: $20. Smells like port, raisins, dried plums, lime, tastes like port, chocolate.

2002 Merlot: $27. Plum, spice, cedar, pepper, smoke, green pepper, tomato vine, black fruit.

2005 Petite Verdot: Blue fruit, smoke, pepper, really nice, red fruit, berries, blackberries, inky, licorice.  We bought one.

2000 Limited Edition Dollarhide Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon: $85. Blackberry, cedar, spice, coffee, red notes, plums, oak.

2005 Élu: $65. 75% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Merlot, 3% Petite Verdot, 3% Cabernet Franc. Pepper, smoke, espresso, chocolate, blackberries, black cherry.  Very nice.

Matt poses with the car we drove all week!

All in all a fun tasting. I wish it had been a bit quieter so I could have asked the litany of questions I usually ask about wineries when we are there, but oh well.  We picked and chose what we wanted to taste….the list was quite exhaustive.  Tonight at the TTL, we have the Sauvignon Blanc, the white Virtú, the Moscato, and a Cabernet Sauvignon.  We are having a bunch of people over tonight, who don’t yet know that they get to geek out alongside me so hopefully they won’t mind too much!

*Disclaimer: I received this wine as a sample from Artisan Family of Wines.

Petite Sirah! Petite Sirah! Petite Sirah! Well, Petite Sirah is a quick way to my heart, I love the stuff! We opened up the 2007 Seven Artisans Petite Sirah the other night, clearly killing it in its infancy.  Poor wine.  It’s a baby.  The parts are there, but they need time to meld together.  After 3-4 hours in my glass, the wine showed some of its potential, but probably could have used a night in the decanter.  The Seven Artisans hails from the Suisun Valley, clocks in at 14.9% alcohol by volume, has a real cork closure, and retails for $17.99.

On the nose I got blueberries, cream, blackberries, blue fruit, pie, vanilla, blueberry cobbler, fruit punch, more blue fruit and blueberries…more blueberries, blueberries, and blueberries.  After this got going, it was extremely aromatic and yummy smelling.   In the mouth I found fresh tart blueberries, blackberry, raspberries, more red fruit on the edges, bittersweet chocolate, anise, some more raspberries and blue fruit o the finish.  This had tannins to spare…so decant.  Or stick it in the basement for a couple years.  Yum!

*Disclaimer: I received this wine as a sample from Wines of Germany.

I’m in a Riesling state of mind…okay, well, not really, but they are among the wines I’m drawn to when the weather heats up.  Oh, who am I kidding, I’m always drawn to wine!  But really, the folks from the Wines of Germany have been sending me bi-monthlyish Riesling shipments, so I’ve been drinking a little bit more of it than normal.  Tonight I chose the 2007 Graf Hardegg Vom Schloss Riesling.  It had a real cork, clocked in at 12.5% alcohol by volume, and appears to retail for around $19.

On the nose I got lime, minerals, wet stones, kiwi, melon, and apricot.  In the mouth I found lemon, lime, melon, stone, tropical notes, white peach, and flowers.  I found the wine to be light and crisp, and extremely easy to drink.  We had this on its own before dinner the other night and it really whet our appetites.