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Wine weekend...

Posted by mkuller on November 8, 2009 at 12:19:52:
...a friend an I went to our local wine shop Friday evening tastings and tasted Spanish wines. Interesting but nothing really knocked our socks off. My favorite of the six was a lighter style red grenache for under $9 a bottle.
Ferrari-Carano holiday open house on Saturday in Sonoma Dry Creek.
Not as crowded as last year.
Small gourmet plates paired with each wine - about 10 wines in all - then the rest can be tasted upstairs in the tasting room. Everything for at least 20% off.
Their Reserve Chardonnay is still one of our favorites. Their regular chardonnay is my wife's every day choice.
Most of the excellent vinyard designated chardonnays had already sold out.
They had a couple of reds I hadn't tasted before - one new Bordeax blend they had a contest for amateurs to make and the winner got bottled - the couple who designed it were pouring. Not bad.
But their best red is still their Back Forty - yum. My wife likes their regular $20 Cab because it's on the lighter side.
Then over to Old Dry Creek Rd. to Zichichi to pick up the futures we bought last year. Small winery with only a few red wines but he's an interesting guy. He's in his late 40s and was the orthopedic surgeon for the NO Saints. After hurricane Katrina, he decided to retire and move his family - wife and two small boys - to property he owned here and make wine. Does almost everything himself, but hired a vinteculturist and a winemaker. Estate grapes are grown on the property you look out over from the tasting room deck.
Has an interesting business model - you taste two or three wines in the tasting room (2 zins and a cab on Sat. - $5 against a purchase) and then you go into the back room and taste from barrels (a zin and a cab) which you can buy at a discount as futures. Most of the wine sells out before it's bottled so he has your money way before you get your wine. And he hired a good winemaker so it's mostly pretty good stuff. So you come back in to pick up your futures, taste and buy some more. Repeat business every year. vry smart.
Playing Tab Benoit's, "Best of the Bayou Blues" in the tasting room - sounded really good - I'll have to pick it up.
I'm wined out for a while...