I keep coming back to this wine. Founded by Jean Pierre Perrin, the owner of renowned Chateauneuf de Pape house Chateau de Beaucastel, this house wine house consistently produces an undervalued, over-producing bottle of juice every year. I’ve reviewed it before, and the 2007 vintage is mighty fine, dear reader – just the thing for a value-driven wine lover who isn’t afraid to wander the dustier aisles of French wine real estate.

Cotes du Ventoux is a tiny little area in the larger Rhone region of France. That’s immaterial unless you just like knowing your geography – because what matters the most about this wine is not its countrified label or its low, low price (under $7, typically), but rather its snazzy one-size-fits-all style.

Comfortable in crystal or in a jelly glass, this wine does not peer at your dinner disapprovingly, or wonder why your friends are drinking Tecate from a can or vodka-and-cokes. Like a faithful golden retriever, this wine is just glad to be with you, alone or in a crowd, dressed to the nines or slumped on the couch with holes in your socks. There’s no judgement in this wine, only Syrah, Cinsault, Mourvèdre, and Carignan – and no more than 30% of any of those, as mandated by French law.

Raspberry/blackberry fruit on the nose, with a spicy/cedar hint around the edges. Palate has lots of acidity, making this one juicy mouthful of red berries and pepper. Just enough tannin, so it clings slightly to the teeth, as if the wine is running its hand along the slats of the banister on its way down the stairs.

But ignore that last paragraph and just drink it! Drink it with gumbo, red beans and rice, turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sandwiches, or gazpacho. Chill it down a little, like you would with a Beaujolais Nouveau, and swig in peace.

I buy all nearly all my wine in large batches.  Part of it is because there are frequently deals in my local wine shops in which you get 10-20% off when you buy a case. A mixed case, of course – I’m never in a position to buy a whole case of one wine at a time, as tempted as I might be.  Though I admit that I have considered buying that Famega by the case.

So in this last batch of wine, I bought a selection of white wines under $10.  It’s not easy to get a viognier for around $10 – the grape is a pain to grow and all – but Oxford Landing is a good bet for value, no matter the grape. I think I paid about $8 for this bottle.

This is a bit of a case of “you get what you pay for,” but not to the point of Stop Drinking.  The nose is heavily perfumed, almost soapy, with notes of overripe peach and newly cut oak slats. Palate = lemon, nectarine, something greenish, and cream.  Weirdish, like apple ice cream.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that this wine did not pair well with a PBJ (J was strawberry jam).  I was thinking about that, and viognier is actually a wine that I would have picked for PBJ, in that the body might stand up to the peanut butter oil.  Alas, a tannic wine would probably be better; the viognier was just nasty with it.

The wine WAS quite pleasent with beef stroganoff, though.  Makes sense; cream to cream, you know.  Unless you like a thick and creamy wine for sipping, this is not a “sit down and glug a glass in front of the TV” kind of wine, to my mind.  Good for pairing with creamy dishes, as mentioned, and perhaps some cheesy enchiladas or some such. Peach melba.  Fondue?  Enchiladas suizas might be the perfect dish… just brainstorming here.

This is my model wine for the summer.  I don’t know if you recall that I live in Texas?  We had about 67 days in June in which temperatures reached triple digits this year.  I always say that summer in Texas is like winter in the north – the weather irresistably drives one indoors for months, very inspiring of cabin fever.

(tin bugle sounds) Famega Vinho Verde to the rescue!  It’s so clear it almost looks like water – except with the slightest of green tinges.  Slight, as well, the effervescence in the glass – but it’s there, and it make this wine even crisper and lighter on the palate, and more fun to drink.  Flavors are Granny Smith apple, yellow Sweet-Tart and an inclination toward herbs and Honeydew.  The alcohol level is a smoking low 9.5%, making it really too easy to have a second glass, or a third.

I bought this little darling for under $6 at Spec’s.  It’s a screw-cap so you don’t have to pack a corkscrew to the picnic.

I’d tell you about the grapes and region, but they’re the only things complicated about this gorgeous gulper of a wine, so why worry about all that?  Buy a case and drink it until the air over the blacktop stops shimmering!

Did you wonder if you’d ever hear from me again?  I wondered, too. I kind of thought I wouldn’t be back – that the Scamp was not motherhood-friendly.  I’ve been blogging, off and on, at Careening and Gestating, and now at Wigglet McFancyPants.  But it was pretty impossible to keep Scamping when I had no taste for wine while pregnant and then insufficient courage to risk wine drinking while feeding a colicky baby nothing but my breastmilk.

Colic?  Ugh. Don’t get me started.

I finally started drinking wine again a month or so ago, almost more as medicine than for enjoyment.  Returning to the Scamp with little money and less time to taste wine is going to be a challenge, but I hope that you, dearest reader, will suffer through it with me.  I imagine that more than a few of the denizens of the Mystical Interwebs find themselves equally challenged, both financially and temporally.

On that note, here are tips for all those New Mother Wineaux out there:

1.) Drink cheap.  exersaucers and convertible car seats and diapers and baby pools and rompers and, most of all, DAY CARE, has begun to act as a budget-eating virus on your life.  Evidently, this doesn’t end for a long time.  Once you start drinking wine again, you’re going to want to do it a lot, so don’t imagine that you’re going to be quaffing Sine Qua Non – or even Shafer – until the little tyrant is at least in high school.

2.) Drink simple.  The last thing I want to think hard about after a long day of work, child ferrying, breast pumping, rushing through traffic, scraping leftovers into a semblance of dinner and getting the kid to FINALLY go to sleep… well, the last thing I want to puzzle over is a complex, hard-to-warm-up-to bottle of wine.  The pleasures reserved for new parents are simple ones.  Use your brain power to eke out more than 10 minutes to yourself every week.

3.) Drink food-friendly.  If you’re breastfeeding, you’re probably going to be drinking a glass of wine with dinner.  If you’re not breastfeeding, you probably need to multi-task and will be drinking a glass of wine with dinner.  And since dinner in my household – I don’t know about yours; maybe you have Chateaubriand every night! – but since dinner in my household is a PBJ about twice a week, I stock my fridge with wine that’s high in acidity and low in tannin.  As an example, Viognier + PBJ =

4.) Drink a lot.  Ha!  Just kidding. I figure that a glass of wine with dinner at night will, at worst, encourage the Wigglet to sleep better that evening.  I have not done any research, internet or otherwise, so I am currently Making This Shit Up to the Nth degree.  For the record, I hate Pump & Dump.  It’s such a pain in the ass to express breast milk that I can NOT just throw it away.  I’d rather exercise a little restraint.  Especially considering that’s all the exercise I get these days!

I’ll be trying to give you a run-down of some of my favorite wines that fulfill all of the above guidelines.  If this can help a wine-deprived soul up to her elbows in poop and spit up, all the better!

To out myself with regards to how passive-aggressive my relationship with wine has been, I got this Tablas Creek wine club shipment in April or May. Tonight while watching Micheal Phelps win another gold medal for being Aquaman, I finally entered the wines into Cellar Tracker. Not even because I thought the wine might be bored, locked for months in its shipper. No, this weekend we’re having houseguests in for the wedding of some very dear friends, and I thought perhaps Mike shouldn’t have to worry about tripping over my unassuming brown box of exquisite, exquisite wine.

As you can see, I had some help unpacking. If I my cats have learned to love Tablas Creek as much as I do, there seems to be a good chance that my child will as well.

I did notice that I now have a couple of wines in my cellar that will still be drinkable when my kid is 17. Which, now that I think about it, is right when I’ll probably need a 17 year old bottle of Tannat or Riesling. That’ll be a good goal for building the cellar: what will wine will make for good enough drinking in 2026 that I’ll survive the years of my kid’s adolescence?

more cat pictures

OK, so the Scamp doesn’t like me laying my heavy trips on everyone who trips on in here looking for a tasty glass of wine. However, I have a lot of heavy trips (and preggo-related anecdotes/points of interest) on my mind lately. Add to this situation the fact that I could personally be responsible for the decline in wine sales this year (I made this up – I have no idea if wine sales are down) and we have here what The Dread Pirate Roberts would call an impasse.

So I propose to Have My Cake And Eat It Too in the following manner: I will write about being pregnant, etc at my new blog careening & gestating from now on. I advise you, gentle reader, that there will be more writing over there for the time being. If I can careen my way into getting my head on straighter, the Scamp and c&g might just find themselves living as happy siblings. Meanwhile, when I drink a wine I have something to say about, or when I drink any wine at all, you shall hear about it here are the Scamp as per usual. (There is a bottle of Chenin Blanc in my fridge that’s been slowly jostling up to the front of the shelf.)

My hope is that I can land in that elusive place where I can manhandle both wine key and breast pump with equal dexterity. And isn’t that what all of us want, way down deep inside?

When you read about pregnancy, happy is the predominant emotional theme. Which is good, don’t get me wrong. But I doubt if I am the only mother-to-be on the planet who is struck dumb with jaw-clenching, heart-stopping terror at the prospect of motherhood – and where, then, is our survival guide? There’s a few palliative columns in your average “what to expect” book about how becoming a parent can be anxiety-causing, and that it’s normal to feel afraid. Seriously now, the term “afraid” so minimally addresses how I feel. I am caught in a blizzard of frozen panic, snowed under by fright.  I need a book on how to convert an office into a nursery when all you want to do is watch episodes of House and re-read old mystery novels  as your body relentlessly balloons and your brain disintegrates.  Week by week.

I’m sure it doesn’t sound like it, but I’m actually happy to become a mom; there are things that I’m really looking forward to, I swear. These aren’t cold feet talking (despite the blizzard metaphor) – rather, every element of my adult psyche is desperately circling in my head in some broken game of musical chairs, as the uneven, tuneless jack-in-the-box music plays, trying to eye which parts of my being will have no place to sit when the music stops in December. It seems very real and evident to me that I will have to sacrifice some pieces of myself to become a mother – it’s an equation that seems as natural to me as the patellar reflex. Something new comes in, and some things have to go to make room.

So I’ve been thinking it was time to give up the blog. I’m not feeling even remotely creative (possibly because I am crusted over in panic, I grant you) and I am not drinking enough wine these days to do anything like keeping my hand in. I haven’t been reading other blogs or wine news. My whole interest in wine has scabbed over, I think in my anticipation that I could not both be a mother and a wine blogger, possibly any kind of blogger at all. Because honestly if I don’t blog about wine I don’t know what I’m entirely comfortable blogging about. It’s all very… exposed out here without a stemmed glass, isn’t it?

But then, to quote Alice, “I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole–and yet–and yet–it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!”

Thus I am trying to dig myself out, gentle reader, of the numbing-dumbing snowbank. Melodramatic maunderings aside, I am taking it quite entirely on faith that I can be a mommy and a wine blogger. (My husband thinks I can.) It seems rather like Big Rock Candy Mountain at the moment, that combination of existences, but why not treat it like it could be true for a while and see what comes of it, I suppose? I’m honestly not sure what you’re going to be finding here from now on, but I’ll try to make it something. Don’t get your heart set – I make no guarantees.

Oh, and I had a tasty little Oregonian Pinot Gris the other night at McCormick & Schmick’s – called Cloudline, and evidently the consulting winemaker is Véronique Drouhin-Boss – which was lovely with my friend’s scallops and slightly less perfect with my pan-fried flounder.

Last weekend we picked my father-in-law up in Cuero and drove him to San Antonio to Do Something Fun For A Change. While Cuero (Turkeyfest Capitol of the World) is certainly a thriving metropolis in its own way, I thought Dad was a bit bored with small town life, so we went to the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit at the Witte Museum, which I recommend highly. Worth the drive from Austin if you’re planning a fun SA day trip.

What I was looking forward to more than anything, though, was going back to the Liberty Bar, which wins the Wine Scamp prize of Most Interesting Food That I Can Mostly Afford In San Antonio, as well as Least Plumb Building. It’s tough to get both prizes in the same restaurant, let me tell you.

I ordered the Grape Harvester’s Soup for a starter, the Cold Roast Lamb Plate for lunch, and their apple pie for dessert. The pie was tasty, though inexplicably contained raisins, but the crust was on the doughy side and the apples were kind of crunchy. Still.

The soup took me by surprise, I will say. It most resembled this recipe from Olney than any other recipe I’ve found online. I had no idea of what to expect, except that the server said it had tomatoes and onions, grape juice and wine. The first two were perfectly evident, though not the last to – this tasted more like a tomato-based onion soup than anything. It was good, but I won’t be dreaming of it for weeks, per se.

What made me wonder about this version of the soup was: apart from tomatoes and onions arguably being in season when grapes are harvested, why would this be a traditional dish for farm workers? It’s very light, and doesn’t seem like the kind of dish I’d be looking forward to after a long day of stooping, picking, and hauling. Most other recipes on the Interweb include stewing beef, making the soup more hearty. But Richard Olney was well-known for his traditionalist French cuisine, right?

Have you ever had Olney’s grape harvester’s soup? Do you know anything about its history? I’m terribly curious!

Thanks to an impromptu chat with a wise new mother, I was suddenly inspired to throw off Preggo Prohibition and Freaking Have A Glass Of Wine Already (my words, not hers). Yeah, mothafuckah……! (flips the upside-down bird at abstinence) Take that! I’m BACK!

Since the rapidly growing criatura is the size of a turnip this week, we’re celebrating said humble root vegetable with take-out Thai food and a Jaboulet “Parellele 45″ Cotes du Rhone Rose 2007. Makes sense in my head, anyway.

After ordering the Scamp household classic Thai food comfort order (spring rolls, pad thai, red chicken curry), I toddled off to World Market for some wine, thinking vaguely that they might have chilled wine. It’s been so long since I opened my cellar closet door, I couldn’t even remember what was in there, and I certainly haven’t been keeping anything cold.

WM doesn’t have a cold box, unfortunately, but I enjoyed browsing anyway and I bought a couple of wines from their Wine Speculator Top Whatever List display (an 05 Lehmann Shiraz and a Mosel Riesling), but for tonight’s momentous occasion I grabbed the Jaboulet Rose for only about $11.99, which is reasonable if not ridiculously cheap for said bottle.

I mostly went to WM because it was quite close to the restaurant, Blue Bamboo, which is the Thai place closest to my house. They’re both in this ridonkulous strip mall on Highway 71, and I was mitigating the guilt over my splurge on Wednesday’s dinner by not driving all over creation. For the record, in Texas this can be a challenge. I have found some decent inexpensive everyday wines at WM, so I have to give it at least a B- as far as a wine shop goes.

Blue Bamboo gets a C, I think, after their second chance. It took a Really Long Time to get my take-out order, and their pad thai is stunningly bland, though the red curry was acceptable and the spring rolls had nothing particularly wrong with them. I’ll try eating in the restaurant before I give up on them completely, but Thai Spice in Lakeway is much better, for the same money or less.

The wine wasn’t cold when I brought it home of course, and the bean was insisting on food immediately upon my arrival home. What’s a wine lover to do, in this situation? Unless you have a way cool insta-wine-chiller, I recommend the method indicated in the photo.

The Jaboulet CDR Rose is a charming salmon pink in the glass. Nose of grapefruit, raspberry, and strawberry, with a hint of herbal-greeniness. On the palate, this mutha is TART, with flavors of strawberry lemonade with mineral ice cubes. Nice body and comfy mouthfeel. A tasty rose, complex for its price point, but not too involved.

With the pad thai, which needed lots of lime to bring it to life a little, the wine’s fruit just disappeared, leaving all the tartness and mineral – rather not The Thing, if you understand me. With the curry, however, which was much spicier and had that sweet-creamy richness of coconut milk, the fruit was much more forward. It was kind of like the tartness, and to some degree the mineral, was so busy fighting the hot pepper that it never made it to my tongue.

The wine is made up of 50% Grenache, 40% Cinsault and 10% Syrah, according to Jaboulet’s website. I’m not going to gabble on about the French region of Cotes du Rhone just now because it’s late and my womb treats everyone better when I get some good sleep. More than one post in June, though – I promise!

Seriously with the first trimester fatigue?

I’m sorry, people, but the bean just keeps sucking all of my creative energy out and using it to build a placenta and kidneys and synapses and other stuff it thinks it needs. Meanwhile, the Scamp languishes in obscurity, gathering cobwebs and inflicting unremitting guilt upon me, your inadequate host. I’ve missed Wine Blogging Wednesdays and Wine Book Clubs and all sorts of great stuff. I don’t even read wine blogs these days! Oh, the horror!

I remember discovering Basic Juice and enjoying it so much, and then I remember how sad I was when the supply dried up. I don’t mean to abandon you, really – it’s just that all I do is work and sleep and stare off into space while blearily creating life. Dullsville Township, population: me.

Oh and please don’t assure me that it only gets worse when the kid sheds me and starts screaming. If you have nothing nice to say… maintain radio silence, if you please.

Back soon, if the rumors about the second triathlon are to be believed.