Price: $7.99 at Whole Foods
I got the heads-up on this wine from The Cork and Demon, a great Austin wine blog. Taj paired it with meat manicotti and friends; I had it with pizza and Borat with friends.
The color is bright garnet, with a nose of jammy blackberry, a little spice and just a tiny pepperyness. In the mouth, the texture is soft, and it’s obvious you’ve wrapped your gums around a fruit bomb. Rich, sweetish blackberry flavors are balanced with some cranberry and raspberry notes with some acidity, which is good because this wine has NO tannins. It doesn’t even recognize tannin on the street; it’s all, “Tannin who? Tannin what? Never heard of it.”
Overall, a medium-bodied, simply tasty wine that is everything I want out of a casual table wine, including the price. Juicy-juicy goodness.
A confession: I knew I would like this wine because the label said it’s from Fine Estates of Spain, run by Jorge Ordonez. This guy is my absolute favorite wine importer, bar none. He looks like a kind Jim Belushi, and brings wine values to this country from Spain that just knock your socks off for price-value ratio. To be fair, he also has some more expensive wines in his portfolio, but they’re also a hell of a lot of wine for the money. In a world of average-tasting $20 California cabs & chards, a wine with Jorge Ordonez’s name on it assures me that there’s a $30 wine in that $10 bottle.
This particular wine is, evidently, a joint venture between Ordonez and the Gil family, who make freaky-good wines in Jumilla. Another of his joint ventures is Numathia, which is also hot shit, though more in the $20-30 range, and made to age. Check out more wines from Fine Estates of Spain! (I’d give a link, but their website seems to be under construction.)