Plus, I could bribe the toddler to stay in the cart while I stocked up with a small blue froggie.  (I’m virtually certain Specs does not stock bath toys. Hint, hint, y’all.)  And yes, I take my preschooler wine shopping.  How else is she going to learn?

So Good Cheap Vino was interested in the Bogle Chardonnay ($8.99), Pacific Rim Riesling ($9.99) and Hess Sauvignon Blanc ($11.99), among others – which definitely piqued my interest.  However, once I made one round (and with the family budget in mind), I set myself the challenge to “get down, girl, go ahead, get down.”  And whaddyaknow if I didn’t walk out of that store with 8 bottles of white for $60 (plus $3 for the above-pictured blue froggie. He goes “puff-puff-puff.” It’s pretty awesome.)

But the most exciting thing… do you want to know the MOST EXCITING THING?  The thing that will probably get me BACK to Cost Plus World Market, heaven help me?

Dude.  Dude.  This $3.99 Rene Barbier Mediterranean White.  It’s sick. I want to bathe in it.

And it’s only $3.99, SO I CAN AFFORD TO.

Lemon yellow in the glass. Lemon/granny smith nose, floral notes and a whiff of the seaside. Bright and lively on the palate with just a feint of sweetness before the refreshing lemon/lime flavors and the edge of the edge of petillance chase that off. Nice medium weight, and a respectably long finish of mineral and (hey, what a coincidence!) lemon peel. Really delicious. Yum.

Rene Barbier is a pretty respected winery in Spain (owned by the Ferrer family – they of Freixenet – since 1984), and from what I can tell their Mediterranean White (also comes in Rose and Red, btw) is Made For the USA.  Which, um, yeah – cool with me.  I’m going to drink the crap out of this wine over the summer.

The region spouting this tasty jooce is Catalunya, which is the most northeastern area of Spain, on the Mediterranean.  The grapes in the wine are a blend of Xarel-lo, Macabeo, and Parellada – all grapes used in Spain’s signature sparkling wine, Cava.

The alcohol level is higher than my other go-to summer wine, Vinho Verde, at around 11.5%.  Which is fine, since this is a lovely food wine – anything you can imagine squeezing lemon on will pair well with this.  And the food will soak up some of the alcohol you’ll have ingested when you realize that somehow you’ve drunk half a bottle all by yourself.

When you go get some – and I encourage you to do so in the next couple of weeks, before the price goes back up to $5.99 – please don’t buy it all.  I’m almost done with this bottle already.

Here’s how it went, today at 5:50: “Hm, I guess while the kiddo is watching a special treat TV show before dinner, I’ll surf around wine blogs for a sec.

Wait, is it Wednesday?

Wait, isn’t there a WBW coming up?

Wait, is today the effing 16th?

GD it, I was going to drink that crisp white in the fridge tonight.

Hell.

Do I even have any Rhone varietals in the closet?

Cotes du Rhone, Morgon, Bourguiel… Oh!  I forgot about this little Garnacha.

Campo de Borja, cool.  $7.50, easy to open for no other reason than blogging.

Plus, that’s all I’ve got that works.

OK, let’s crack it open, snap a photo and get to writing.”

So I poured out a glass and got started 10 minutes before dinnertime.

This is a pretty little wine; purple in the glass, with ruby-red tints, it smells of raspberries and mint. Tart on the palate, with pepper and flavors of unripe blackberry now, as well as a hint of… tar?  Then the tannins come and chase everyone out of the room; the finish is pretty long, with cane berry flavors re-emergent and lingering.  A decent level of complexity for this wine I spent $7.50 on at Austin Wine Merchant, though more of a quaffing wine and less of a food wine, to my mind at least.

I am confident of the latter statement because I happened to make barbecued chicken thighs, anasazi beans and baked sweet potato fries tonight for dinner, which was, I thought, fortuitous.  I like Rhone varieties with barbecue flavors – Syrah especially, of course – but Spanish Garnacha can be so heavily extracted that they can sometimes pull off that sweet fruit/charred notes match.

With the Santo Cristo, though, the barbecue sauce on the chicken really brought out the tarry notes in the wine.  Maybe if there were more acidity in the wine to offset the tomato… but the creamy sweet potatoes and beans didn’t match very well either.  If I knew then what I know now about this wine, I’d put it with a fattier meal, like a grilled sirloin, or maybe just not tricky-dick barbecue sauce.

Garnacha is my ticket in to Wine Cast’s Wine Blogging Wednesday #71 because it is the Spanish version of Grenache, that staple grape of the Southern Rhone.  Grenache/Garnacha is a high-producing vine that is known for its spice, ample berry fruit and high sugars (which translate to high alcohol).  When the Spanish vinify their really old, old vines, however, the resulting Garnacha wine bears only superficial resemblance the French Grenache.

OK, so this is probably my worst WBW post ever.  I did not plan, so I have not had time (had people over this evening after I got the kid to sleep, and it’s late – for me at least – now) to really research the producer or write a cogent breakdown of the region or the grape. I really like the Campo de Borja region for wines that drink way above their price tag, just so you know.  And I am in favor of Rhone varieties wheresoever they are planted.

Drink Garnacha.

Scamp out.

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!

Here’s a summary of the infotastic blurb I introduced the wines with:

“As with most areas in the US, winemaking in Oregon dates back to pioneer days and was halted by Prohibition. Oregonians waited over 30 years after the Repeal to get back to stomping the grape, though, and it was actually Californians who brought the impetus and the grapes to plant in the Willamette (rhymes with “damn it”) Valley in the late 60s and early 70s. A milestone for Oregon wine was when a Pinot Noir from Eyrie Vineyards won the Wine Olympics in 1979. Oregonian wineries, like those in Texas, tend to be small and family-owned.

The Willamette valley, home to the largest concentration of Oregon wineries, is located at roughly the same latitude as Burgundy, with cold, wet winters and warm, dry summers. No, it doesn’t rain all the time everywhere in Oregon. Pinot Noir makes up about 70% of the wine output of the state.” Or something like that.
Then I laid down a brief description of What You Might Be Smelling and Tasting and commented on how PN is well known for its uniquely silky texture. And we all set to the serious business of sniffing and sipping. I’ve listed the wines below in order of my preference, but really all of them were lovely business.

Bethel Heights Casteel Reserve Pinot Noir 2005, $50: Gorgeous minty, Bing cherry, lavender, mushroom and forest floor aromas. Bright, sweet explosion of acidity on the palate, with really integrated tannins and lovely Portobello and clove flavors. The texture is truly fine, solid but satiny. Extravagantly good.

Penner Ash Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2006, $48: Very fragrant, with mint and truffle, vanilla and strawberry syrup on the nose. HUGE on the palate, with bright cranberry and concentrated cherry cordial. Very intense, spicy tannins, and rich, unctuous, concentrated structure. Flamboyant, but sleek.

Benton Lane Pinot Noir 2006, $26: Candied cherry, vanilla, rose petals and over-the-top strawberry. Slightly on the astringent side, the palate has cranberry, earth tones and sharp-edged tannins, with a little Prince of Wales tea on the back end. Very structured.

A to Z Oregon Pinot Noir 2006, $19: Kind of a whang on the nose at first, but that blew off to show really distinct strawberry and cherry, with a really earthy palate of plum skin, crazy overflowing spice and ripe mushroom. The finish goes on and on.

Erath Pinot Noir 2006, $19: Nutmeg and distinct strawberry cream cheese on the nose. Smooth and sensuous on the palate with black tea and bright cranberry cocktail. Sexy, sexy.

Solena Cellars Grand Cuvee Pinot Noir 2006, $25: There was this chewing gum in Mexico that came in the flavor “violet,” and this had that smell, kind of chemically flowers, along with some slightly charred truffle. Soft and supple on the palate, without much grip. Kind of mediciney.

I’ll be at the Winebat blind tasting tonight at Green Pastures, where we’ll be enjoying six Spanish reds and matching light apps for only $25. Coming?

Bright gold in color. Nose of butter, honey, hazelnut and cream. Woodsy on the palate, with candied apple, tropical flavors and rounded creamy tones. Slight bitter astringency from oak tannins, a hint of copper penny minerality and a lingering finish of Golden Delicious apple.

I was hoping that this might pair well with maple-glazed roast pork loin with rosemary that I had planned for that evening, and I whipped up some creamed spinach and creamy polenta with garlicky mushrooms. I rarely prepare Cooks Illustrated recipes, as they are usually complicated despite their relative perfection. This pork loin, however, looked quite simple and seemed to result in a minimum of pans to clean. Of course, I mucked that up for myself by making those two side dishes, but there you are.

The Chardonnay took the pork easily, and the rosemary was felicitous, but the maple syrup glaze brings a candied element to the wine. The wine was divine with the creamed spinach; creamy flavors met buttery wine, and the spinach tasted clean but without bitterness. The polenta was an interesting pairing; the oak tannins quarreled with the corn flavors, but the parmesan was oddly OK with it all. It was kind of like the stereotypical Italian family, where yelling is the norm but no one takes it wrong.

The Galilee region of Israel is the northernmost wine appellation in the country, and the coolest growing region. The Odem Vineyard has been farmed organically since 1998, and is located at an elevation of slightly under 4,000 feet.

Israel, of course, has been making wine since time immemorial. One big blip in this millenia of history was when Baron Edmond Rothschild aided a group of Jewish immigrants to Israel in 1882 by sponsoring their attempt to found a winery. They struggled for a while, but in the end Rothschild built two wineries in Israel. His son donated the wineries back to the growers cooperative in 1957.

Israeli vineyards started modernizing in the 70s, and now owe more to California than they do to France; this Chardonnay is certainly testament to that.  Golan Heights Winery, which produces Yarden as well as two other labels of wine in Israel, is one of the houses that’s lead the charge to bring the entire industry up to world standards.  I’d say they’re there.

Truth in advertising, y’all. I could have been more impressed by the food (my strip steak was correctly cooked to temp but could have been more much flavorful), but the wine list at the Cowboy Steakhouse is really impressively extensive. According to their website, they’ve got over 600 labels on the list, and that’s quite plausible based on the list I saw. They also have multiple verticals (a collection of the same wine from many different years), some dating back to the 80s. The Ferris family has been in the restaurant business since 1977, so I suppose all that collecting could have happened slowly and over time. At least I hope so, or I hope they have pockets as deep as Micheal Bloomburg.

After dithering extensively over the pages and pages of wine available, I found a 1997 Cabernet from Leeuwin Estate in the Margaret River district. They make the best Australian white wines I’ve ever tasted, but I confess I had never been blown away by their Cab. Nonetheless, I was excited to find this aged red on the wine list for only $59.

Great deep black ruby in color; little no brick red on the edges. First up in the glass, menthol, redfruits, pine tar and cassis show in the nose. The palate showed great smooth raspberry jam and a hint of red Swedish Fish. The finish of green tobacco and cigar box is remarkably smooth, with rounded, soft tannins.

As it opens up, a musky limburger aroma shows up and the menthol strengthens into eucalyptus and cedar. Some green olive scents are evident, as well. The palate develops into licorice and coffee, with kirsch, graphite, green pepper and black olive. The flavors are exceptionally well-integrated. With steak, even the smooth tannins recede, and a cocoa-cassis syrup element peeks around the corner.

Leeuwin Estate was part of Robert Mondavi’s  attempt to break into the Australian wine region in 1972.  Dennis and Tricia Horgan founded this winery, located in arguably the best wine region in the country, with Mondavi’s guidance.  They have three labels: “Siblings,” meant for drinking young, “Prelude,” meant for drinking within a few years of release, and “Art Series,” meant for aging.

The winemaker’s notes predict an aging period of 7-10 years, but the 1997 Leeuwin Cabernet Sauvignon is in its prime at eleven years and counting. If you can find any (and it looked like the Cowboy Steakhouse had about 10 bottles left), I suggest you run, don’t walk, for a corkscrew.

Label image lifted from http://www.leeuwinestate.com.au/

Since we were tasting wines from a region, rather than a single varietal, we did a flight of whites and a flight of reds. This was a neat exercise in blind tasting to detect varietal, and I did medium-OK considering my nasal handicap. Wines listed in order of preference within each flight:

d’Arenberg “The Hermit Crab” Marsanne/Viognier 2006 ($16): Musky, tropical aromas (almost a moldy pineapple smell) with mango and peach notes. I spotted the Viognier in this right away. On the palate, there was good viscosity, with mineral and quince/pear flavors as well. Good tartness & length. This is a winery I love very much; their long family history in the business and traditional winemaking techniques result in consistent quality that never fails to wow me. I’ve never had a bad bottle of d’Arenberg. Evidently this was also one of the Spectator’s Top 100 Wines of 2007.

Trevor Jones Virgin Chardonnay 2006 ($23): White grapefruit, apple, canteloupe and white flowers on the nose. Palate is musky again, with lemon this time, as well as peach and a solid mineral backbone. Acidity accelerates the flavors here. Refreshing, with a sweet-tart finish. This is one of those unoaked chardonnays I’m liking so much from Australia these days. Kellermeister Wines makes this lovely white, which Parker gave a 90 pt score to, and they’re located in the Barossa Valley.

Devil’s Lair Margaret River Chardonnay 2005 ($30): Buttery oak & vanilla, accompanied by intense clove and some cream notes, are all over the nose here. All I got on here was oak, oak, and more oak, which thoughtfully allowed some apple and over-ripe pear flavors to squeak through on the long finish. The Spectator review must have had a different experience, as they gave this bottle a 91 and described it as having finesse and elegance. I could very easily have been handicapped by my recovering nostrils, but I did not enjoy this wine at all.

And the reds:

Zonte’s Footstep Shiraz-Viognier 2006 ($16): Up-front blueberry and blackberry aromas here, with a sprig of mint on the side. Nothing fancy, just fruit, fruit and more fruit. On the palate, things got more complicated, with coffee and mocha and muted black currant flavors. I like wines that have a lot of contrast between the nose and the palate, I’ll admit. I also adore Shiraz-Viognier blends, though I did not spot this as having Viognier in it; I didn’t get that lifted quality on the nose that I’m accustomed to. For the money, this is a kick-ass value, though.

Glaetzer Godolphin Shiraz-Cabernet 2005 ($60): Plum, blackberry, vanilla and herbal aromas, with some spicy components as well. Spicy and peppery notes dominate the palate, with a core of sweet raspberry jam. Great texture of mouth-coating glycerin and tannin, and the raspberry flavors persist on the long finish. This was excellent with the veal & mushroom sauce over gnocchi. I talked about Ben Glaetzer once before, when reviewing his Mitolo GAM Shiraz. Parker loved this wine to the tune of a 93 point score, calling it a “beautiful marriage of power and elegance.” The name for this wine changed to Annaperenna in the 2006 vintage.

DeLisio Quarterback Meritage 2005 ($22): Eucalyptus, tobacco, currant, and vanilla on the nose. On the palate, coffee, tar, Sour Patch Kid cherry, crunchy pot soil and vanilla. When it opens up, though, the herb disappears, and the wine gets flabby. This interesting blend is comprised of nearly equal parts of Shiraz, Grenache, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, hence the name Quarterback. Another big scoring wine that ravished Parker’s palate and left mine cold. Am I an Alice Feiring-in-training? Maybe if I study hard and eat all my vegetables…

Another nice thing about the Austin Wine Merchant is that they actually have some reasonably priced bottles, which is sometimes hard to find in collector-oriented stores!  I picked up this Domaine Andre Brunel Grenache, a Vin de Pays de Vaucluse, for only $5.99! 

AWM is the Austin dealer for Robert Kacher Selections, meaning that they have lots and lots of wine from this premium French importer; Stephen Tanzer of International Wine Cellar says ” . . . the Robert Kacher Selections imprint on a label is a virtual guarantee of high quality wine.”  I can’t tell you how important it is, when you’re exploring regions you don’t know backwards & forwards, to identify an importer that you trust.  My big four for France are Kermit Lynch, Eric Solomon, Terry Thiese and Robert Kacher.

Brilliant purple in color.  Great big nose of mushroomy earth and sweet blueberry jam and syrup– more Garnacha than Grenache (mustache twirl), it seemed to me, though I couldn’t defend that opinion with any plausible argument.  I was getting a lot of alcohol, too; at only 13% I would not have expected this heat.  Might calm down with a little more cellaring?

Palate was surprisingly tart, considering the syrupy nose.  There was a good tannic grip on the insides of my cheeks, and mostly tart or barely-ripe blackberry/blueberry flavors with a good lingering finish, but it’s still very FRESH. Not complicated, but quite structured for a wine of this price category.

I bought this last night and couldn’t wait to open it; I’ll be going back this week to buy a few more bottles.  I tasted it alone and with the dinner that I made last night.

Picadillo Estilo de Casa Scamp is basically ground beef browned with diced potato & onion, with one small can of tomato sauce in it.  Add cumin, chili powder, cayenne and a dash or two of cinnamon.  Once everything’s melded, toss in frozen petite peas and about a handful and a half (just a handful for you — I have freakishly small hands) of currants.  Salt & pepper to taste.  I serve it over rice and then also use it as burrito filling.   Sorry, but I didn’t get a chance to snap a photo.

This French Grenache from the Rhone was a nice pairing with the picadillo:  the spiciness cancelled out the tartness of the wine, and the slight richness of the meat eased up the wine’s tannic astringency in the mouth. The slight hint of sweet from the currants in the dish brought something to the table, too, against that jam-jammy nose!  And I didn’t even have to add any wine to the dish to make this cross-cultural pairing work…

Andre Brunel is best known for his Chateauneuf de Pape Les Cailloux, it seems, but he makes a few wines for The Rest Of Us, as well.  His Cotes du Rhone is fairly well lauded, and I bet I’ll be telling you about it within a few months or so; I was eyeing that bottle at AWM too.  Robert Parker has called him “one of the bright shining lights of Châteauneuf du Pape.”  Brunel’s grandfather was a winemaker, as was his father, and the family has lived in the Rhone since the 1700s.

This wine is 90% Grenache and 10% Carignan, tank fermented and aged (no oak here) to perserve freshness.  A little more than half of the fruit is declassified Cotes du Rhone; that means that it was grown to be part of the Brunel Cotes du Rhone but wasn’t quite up to standard, so was bottled as something else instead.  Cheapskate Alert: This is an excellent way to get good wine, cheap, from a winery with very high standards.  Their high standards make their best offerings very expensive, but their declassified fruit can make wine that is better than the competition’s Good Stuff. 

If you live in Austin, I urge you to go down to the AWM and pick yourself up six bottles of this excellent value wine.  On Saturday, after I buy my case… no, really, there’s plenty for everyone.  Enjoy!

If you don’t live here, you probably haven’t tasted a Texas wine. I know I hadn’t, until I moved to Austin. And there’s a good deal of wine to taste, really: Texas is fifth in U.S. wine production, after California, Washington, New York and Oregon. All in all, Texas makes about 1.5 million gallons of wine every year, and about 95% of it is consumed in Texas. Are we bad sharers? Well, it’s not like you’ve been asking for any.

I actually live very close to one of the most winery-rich areas in Texas, the Hill Country. In 2006, there were 127 wineries in Texas, and over 80% of them were small ones, with production of less than 10,000 gallons (that’s about 4000 cases) a year. I did the rounds of my nearby wineries when I moved here a couple of years ago, but haven’t had much time to revisit them with a wine blogger’s eye in the past 6 months. (Can you believe it’s been 6 months? Gee-whiz!) I’ll be trying to get out into wine country more often this year, starting with a little trip my sweetie and I are making, pre-Valentines, to a B&B near Kerrville called Trail’s End Guest House.

This is where Wes Marshall’s excellent book, The Wine Roads of Texas: An Essential Guide to Texas Wines and Wineries comes in. With more than 40 winery profiles organized into regions, it’s the perfect companion to any Texas road trip. (Really, a two-hour drive in Texas is less of a road trip and more of a commute, at least if you live in Houston or Dallas.)

This really is a book written for travelers: every chapter is divided up into trips, with 3 or 4 profiles on wineries that are close to each other (from a Texas perspective), followed by a breakdown of “Food, Shelter & Fun” to be found in the area. Shelter includes some camping options at nearby parks, and the restaurant recommendations are for those tiny little places that only locals recommend. You get the whole package with these trips: out-of-the way wineries with real stories behind them, local restaurants and fun things to do — like having your picture taken with the World’s Largest Strawberry (or a model thereof) in Poteet!

Wes Marshall is Appellation America’s regional correspondent for Texas; he writes for my local weekly, the Austin Chronicle, and a host of other papers. I really enjoy his work at the Chronicle — you might remember him as the guy who organized that huge blind tasting of “box” wines last summer. Recently he organized another of these big blind tastings for Texas-made spirits, which included setting Tito’s Handmade Vodka against Skyy 90 and Grey Goose with very Texas-pride-inspiring results. (Sidebar: I think Tito’s is one of the best vodkas in the universe. Buy some.) Anyhow, Wes Marshall is a fantastic cheerleader for Texas beverage, and his book’s a pleasure to read.

One of the things that resonates for me about The Wine Roads of Texas is that it’s really about the people who take the leap of faith and decide to try to earn a living from making wine. Texas does love its iconoclasts — hell, Kinky Friedman ran for governor a couple of years ago — but it takes a special kind of Texas grit to coax drinkable juice from the soils here. Every winery profile in this book is essentially the story of some brave soul who decided to throw caution to the winds, to risk it all. Somehow it makes a less-than-outstanding wine more palatable to know who put their blood, sweat and tears into the making of it. Sometimes literally; Cathie Winmill of Comfort Cellars (located in Comfort, TX) tells Wes that terracing her 2 acres of steep, limestone hillside vineyard was “grief therapy” for her after her husband died. That’s a Texas woman for you, I don’t care if she was born in Illinois.

The wine industry in Texas is not what you’d call young (we started growing grapes for wine around 1650, and it was a Texan who discovered the solution to France’s little bout with phylloxera in the 1880s), but it’s still finding its feet when it comes to what grapes do the best where, and what the consumer will buy. Remember, most Texas wine is drunk by Texans, and Texans seem to like their wine sweet, more than anything. An off-dry Cabernet Sauvignon? Not something that’s likely to endear you to Robert Parker, exactly. But that’s what the consumers in Texas want to buy, so that’s what Fredericksburg Winery has available.

Many of the wineries profiled in Marshall’s book sell their wine exclusively through the winery, though he does write about the state’s largest winery, Ste Genevieve, as well. From Big Bend to Tyler, from Lubbock to Del Rio, Wes covers wineries from all corners of Texas. Originally published in 2002, a second edition was released in 2007.

If you are a Texan who loves wine or a Texas wine lover, Wes Marshall’s book is really required reading. It’s also fun and engaging, full of true stories about the kind of people that continue to make Texas great.

Pale straw in color. Very, very green on the nose, with a slight copper penny whiff of mineral, and lots of lime zest and honeydew melon.

Lovely minerality and acid on the palate, with prickles on the sides of my tongue. Delicate herbal flavors of chive and thyme, with lemon/lime-coated honeydew and green apple. Exceptionally refreshing and well-balanced. A great quencher of a wine, with lots of style. Yum.

Tablas Creek Vineyards was founded in California’s Paso Robles region by the Perrin family, famous winemakers of Chateau de Beaucastel, the iconic Chateauneuf de Pape, as well as other great Rhone wines, and Robert Haas, a highly influential American importer. They imported all their vines from the Rhone, and all of their wines are made from estate-grown fruit. They also farm organically and have a minimalistic approach to winemaking, meaning they try to fiddle with the wine to the least amount possible. General Manager Jason Haas has a blog, and posts interesting stuff a couple times a week on average.

The grape Vermentino is best known as an Italian varietal, grown all over the country but with distinction in Tuscany, Liguria and Sardinia.  It’s thought to have been brought over from Spain in the Middle Ages.  In southern France, the same grape is called Rolle, and vinified in Provence and Corsica, the latter of which is really well-known for its great Vermentino-based wines.

When Tablas Creek was purchasing vines from the Perrin’s source in France to import to America and grow in Paso Robles, the nurseryman recommended that they also purchase some Vermentino, as he thought it would thrive in the rocky, limestone-rich soils (which makes me wish some Hill Country winery would plant them some Vermentino.  Spicewood Vineyards?  Are you listening?).

Tablas Creek originally tried to blend the Vermentino into their other whites, but the wine was so distinctive that they ended up bottling it by itself.   They bottle all their Vermentino with a Stelvin closure (which is a fancy kind of screwcap).  The minerality makes it a great pairing for shellfish and the citrus and herbal qualities make it a natural for Mediterranean cuisine as well.  A little pricey at $21 or so, the wine was impressively well-made and it was interesting to taste a US Vermentino, for sure.  If you’re into obscure varietals and you don’t mind plunking $20+ for a light, refreshing, sporty white, this is your bottle fa shizz.