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...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...
Edits: 11/08/09Follow Ups:
I contacted Green and Red Winery last week after a good review on their zins from WS "Insider". They've shown up a couple of times before. I'm always looking for those few wineries that offer excellent wine at good prices.
Anyway, I googled them and then called. A woman answered the phone with a simple hello and when I asked if I was talking to G&R she said "Oh, you want to speak to my husband". She then handed the phone to him. After some conversation I said that I was looking to order some wine but noticed that Texas wasn't on his shipping list. He said he'd check it out and call me back. An hour later he called and said he can't ship to individuals in Texas because the state require a $250 annual fee and his was too small an operation to afford the fee.
Like Joe at Hillcrest Cellars, it is always just that much more fun when you come across the small/personal operations making wine for the love of it (and hoping for a profit).
Give Green and Red a try and let me know.
...for wine tasting.
It's like the Napa Valley was maybe 15 years ago before it turned into wall-to-wall winery Disneyland.
In Sonoma, things are more spread out among the vinyards and you're much more likely to meet the winemaker pouring in the tasting room and hear about his passion for making what he does and how he got there.
Like seeing a band live instead of just hearing their CD.
And I hear the Paso Robles wine area is even better.
I've drank a lot of Green and Red over the years - their Chiles Mill zin alwys scores pretty high. A knowledgeable salesman in a local wineshop recommended the latest vintage to me a couple of weeks ago, but I picked up a couple of others instead.
I'll try it and let you know.
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