Color

Great rich purple with some nice flecks of garnet. Looks lip-smackingly good.

Nose

Strong dark cherry, vanilla and some dirt. Nice, open smell to this wine. Could even be put away for a year or two.

Taste

Strong, fruit-forward cherry mixed with a bit of tobacco and wet soil. The wine is hot, but not overdone. Still, you fans of not-so-alcoholic reds might want to steer clear or let this breathe for a few hours. Remember, all reds should be decanted for at least an hour, but you all know that. The wine has solid structure and is very firm in it’s finish. The finish is slender but there is enough flavor complexity to make you forget it.

With Food

Great red sauce wine. Most would also pair this with red meat, but I think it is best-served with red sauce. In fact, a really great pairing would be a wood-fired pizza with rich red sauce, linguica and some mushrooms. Forest fruits with a nice hard white cheese would work perfectly as well.

Where to Buy

$9.95 at NapaCabs.com!

Related posts:

1. Wine Review: Vina Robles Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
2. Wine Review: Cellar No. 8 Cabernet Sauvignon
3. Wine Review: Lindemans Cabernet Sauvignon Bin #45

So last week we left off at Ortman Vineyards in downtown Paso Robles, and for the conclusion of our little 2-day sojourn to Paso Robles, we’re going to get past the blur that was Saturday night (after Ortman) and jump straight into our Sunday tastings. However, I would be remiss not to mention where we ate dinner on that Saturday night, a fantastic place called Villa Creek, right in the heart of downtown.  Since this is a wine review site for the poor, I won’t go into too much detail concerning the meal. I will only mention three things:

1. My wife had the rabbit, which was outstanding.

2. I had the brisket-stuffed poblano chile, which was for some reason even better than the rabbit.

3. I spilled an entire glass of wine on myself (If you remember where we left off last time, we were at Ortman and I’d lost my sense of taste. Add a visit to a nearby pub to that just before dinner, and it was really partytime).*

Cut to the next morning. A brilliant start at Margie’s Diner (also near downtown) with the biggest plate of breakfast I’ve ever seen, and it surely did the trick. This place was serious. There had to be like an entire bag of potatoes on that plate. Anyway, onto the wines!

Pomar Junction Winery

This was a great place. A former railroad junction (go figure) the place boasts a great old tasting room, and out back you can climb into an authentic caboose car and admire the view of what was once a fairly busy California crossroads of sorts. Besides Pomar’s awesome website, they had some pretty good stuff for a new winery. Their under-$20 standouts are as follows:

Pomar Junction Syrah Rose

COLOR: A nice strawberry juice. Dare I say that it looks like a hearty white zinfandel?

NOSE: Strong strawberry, metal, cheese rind. All good signs of a great rose. A good nose for a cool summer wine.

TASTE: Here come the strawberries again along with the the cheese rind. The metal dissipates among a strong mid-palate of hard candy and a hint of marsala. Absolutely delicious and unfortunate that this has to come in the form of a rose when such a wine is difficult to market to the general public with their current perceptions of rose.

WITH FOOD: Like I said, a good cool summer wine with barbecued chicken and a strawberry salad.

WHERE TO BUY: $12.00 from the winery itself.

Pomar Junction “Picnic” Chardonnay – Canvas Series

COLOR: Pale. Almost too pale. Usually I look for at least some semblance of straw color, but this looked like a Sauvignon Blanc.

NOSE: Green apple, caramel corn and a nice shot of minerality.

TASTE: Good mouthfeel. Rich for a Chardonnay at this price. Good acid, strong finish, a little empty on the mid-palate, but the green apple is there for the most part throughout the whole movie.

WITH FOOD: Honestly? Keep this solitary. No sense in pairing this with food that will most likely destroy it; even lemon chicken. It’s on the cheap side, so treat it as such.

WHERE TO BUY: $12.00 from the winery itself.

So we had soaked our stomachs in the first wines of the day with Pomar Junction, and now it was time on to some even more serious wines.

Wild Horse Winery

We were lucky to have stopped at mostly wineries I had never heard of before or seen on store shelves. Wild Horse was the only exception. You will recognize the label immediately and I think I have even seen some of their wines in grocery stores. While everything we tried here was absolutely delicious, take note of the “Unbridled” Merlot and the Cheval Sauvage, there were only a couple that were under the $20 mark, and among those there was one standout:

Wild Horse 2008 Malvasia Bianca

COLOR: Rich gold but not to the apple juice level. Looks very calm in the glass. What did that even mean?

NOSE: Strong, strong aromatics here, even though it was chilled. Once you plow through the initial honeysuckle smells, you get into some tangerine and cantaloupe and some ruby red grapefruit juice.

TASTE: The melon is strong with this (*cue Darth Vader breathing*). Great lychee flavors (go out and by some, their nuts) support a very rich mouthfeel and strong honey flavors. It feels like it would be too rich for even a hot day, but once you get to the finish, which stays but doesn’t really make it’s presence felt, you will know that this stuff will be good all summer long. Plus, I should point out that my brother bought an entire case.

WITH FOOD: This is a tough one, but I can’t see anything wrong with fish or even some spicier foods. It’s not going to really cut through the buttery dishes, since the acid is not the lead here.

$20 from the Wild Horse Winery

And finally, we reach the grand finale of our trip, wherein I experienced the best California red wine I have had thus far in my life. This will be a tough one to beat because the flavors were wacky and the varietal is Italian.

Bella Luna Winery

This place was the spitting image of an Italian home, right down to the half-dead dog in front and the custard paint. Run by two old fellas, both veterans of the Vietnam conflict, named Kevin Healy and Sherman Smoot. Kevin served us that day in the “tasting room” which was basically their enormous garage. The most interesting thing, other than the taste of the wine I’m about to go over, is that their Sangiovese vines are head-trained, meaning no trellises (those T-shaped things you normally see holding up the grapevines). this makes the vines grow, well, everywhere. Sort of like your lazy neighbor’s bushes.  Also interesting is that all of their fruit is dry-farmed, meaning no water unless it rains.

Bella Luna 2008 “Lot One” Barbera – San Benito County

I’m not going to go through the whole spiel here since this isn’t an under-$20 bottle, so I’ll give you the gist of my thoughts on this wine.

BUY IT IMMEDIATELY, EVEN IF IT IS $38

Basically, if you like red wine or have even the slightest interest in Italian varietals, this is a wine worth checking out. The fruit is definitely there but it doesn’t explode, and there are strong vegetal characteristics like asparagus, broccoli, green beans, and green bell pepper. Great firm tannins that don’t muscle their way in. Everything is perfectly, PERFECTLY balanced. I can’t wait to open this thing again. I even asked Mr. Healy for another try of it at the tasting room, which I’m not used to doing.

$38 at Bella Luna Winery

So that concludes our little Paso Robles Wine Country adventure here at Wine Welfare. Other trips are coming, including a number of trips up to the Edna Valley region, Santa Ynez, including Los Olivos, and a trip up to Napa, so stay tuned. AND LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THOUGHT OF THIS SERIES IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!

Remember to subscribe to get all the latest reviews from Wine Welfare!

Cheers!

*My wife will probably repeat that I have obsessed over this embarrassing accident since it happened nearly three weeks ago.

Related posts:

1. Paso Robles Wine Country Pt. 2: Denner, Ortman and I Can’t Remember
2. Paso Robles Wine Country: Justin Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc Review
3. Wine Review: Ventana Dry Rosado 2008

The only problem was, Denner is not home to many cheap wines. Couldn’t find a single bottle under $20. Oh well. After eating a perfect homemade lunch (prepared by my sister-in-law), we went in to taste. Since the focus here is cheap wine, I’ll just briefly recommend two Denner wines that you should absolutely splurge on:

Denner Vineyards 2008 Theresa (Roussanne and Viognier)

Holy crap, it’s like a pina colada mixed with french toast. $27.35 at WebWine.com!

Denner The Ditchdigger 2006 (Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre and Cinsault)

This wine will destroy your face. That is all that needs to be said. $39.90 at WebWine.com!

I cannot describe this country to you due to the overwhelming chances of my failure in doing so. My wife and I have now explored a great deal of California’s central region, and its landscape is always beyond jaw-dropping. Endless rolling hills, some clotted with gnarled trees while others are vast, brushed with wildflowers of orange, yellow, purple and support only one stoic, paint-worthy tree per hill every mile or so.

The landscape is so stunning that the one thing that keeps recurring in my mind whenever I see it is, “Is this really in the same state as Los Angeles?” The contrast is planetary in scale.

Then it was off to downtown and Ortman Family Vineyards, home of one of the best Pinots I have ever had: Ortman Santa Rita Hills 2006 Pinot Noir. My brother and his wife had given it to us for Christmas.

I will be blunt: At this point I could not taste anything. I was smashed. I remember tasting the wines, I remember them tasting like something, I remember asking/slurring a request for the 06 Pinot Noir I’d had a month earlier, but I failed to remember the name. The pouring dude took pity on me and poured me a reserve Pinot of theirs, which was almost as good despite being more expensive. I even remember buying a bottle of the Syrah after my wife’s emphatic endorsement: “And it’s only $22!”

Still, $22 is too high to do a somewhat more intimate review of a wine here on Wine Welfare, so I’m going to go with another wine I tried at Ortman:

Ortman Cuvee Eddy 2007 Rhone Blend

COLOR: Nice purple but with some clarity.

NOSE: This was what I remember most about this wine. Nice big blackberry and plum smells with a little bit of licorice. After a minute or so it started to give off some of that gold ‘ole grandma’s basement scent.

TASTE: Not the most balanced wine in the Ortman portfolio, but at less than $20, you could really enjoy this anytime. Good black fruit again and even more licorice, but it kind of lags towards the end, leaving you with only the heat. Just a good, solid Rhone blend. Nothing leaning too far one way or the other.

WITH FOOD: You could enjoy this on it’s own or with pizza, red sauce or even a steak. It should hold up fine. Don’t get to crazy with the fancy foods and multiple ingredients. This thing asks for you to keep it simple.

WHERE TO BUY: $15.99 at KLWines.com!

Denner Vineyards

Ortman Family Vineyards

Paso Robles Wine Country Information

Stay tuned for more wines from Paso Robles wineries!

Remember to subscribe to get all the latest cheap wine reviews from Wine Welfare!

Related posts:

1. Paso Robles Wine Country Conclusion: Restaurants, Pomar Junction, Wild Horse and the Best California Wine I’ve Ever Had
2. Paso Robles Wine Country: Justin Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc Review
3. Wine Review: Vina Robles Cabernet Sauvignon 2006

Unlike Napa, the douchebag factor is low in Paso Robles (though there are still some nesting there) and you can really find some fantastic bottles of juice for under $20. I hit about seven wineries on my weekend jaunt and was able to come up with a pretty solid list of under-$20s, most of which are available online. I’m going to go through all of them in this series of posts and hopefully not bore you to tears.

So here we go.

Justin Vineyards and Winery

My first royal tasting room. It’s a pretty high-end place to mention on a cheap wine review site like this, but Justin was a beautiful location and one that I definitely want to return to. However, it did have a few “unusual” charms. As we drove up to the entrance, I noticed we were not slowing. “That’s the entrance for the regular customers,” said my brother and his wife.

We continued a bit further before stopping at a rusted, wrought-iron gate straight out of Eyes Wide Shut. A code was entered by my brother and the gate screeched open. We drove up and I half-expected to see a masked and be-cloaked gentleman make his way down the steps of the structure with a naked woman linked to his arm. “Password, please?” Instead it was a basic parking lot.

The stucco building towered like a Masonic temple, and I don’t doubt that a few of the owners/workers/members indeed based a lot of their branding on that secretive lot. An atmosphere of privilege and creepy ritual emanated from the property. I felt I did not belong.

Inside it was geometry-chic. I say that because Justin’s logo and label iconography is based on geometric shapes and principles. Marble fireplace, chrome and glass tables, opulent sofas and chairs, well-dressed people chatting as a very kind French gentleman (we would meet him later, though I forget his name) poured them their next taste. Plates of cheese, chocolate, crackers, and of course numerous vintages of Justin wine were scattered about. It was warm, but I felt like I had to be a member of Mensa just walking in.

Directly through this lounge was a pair of enormous double-glass doors that led into a giant limestone cave. This was their barrel room (cellar, if you will). I learned that years ago, when they decided to expand and be more green-friendly, they had blown out the entire side of the mountain to be used as their barrel room. After all, nothing says environmentally friendly like blowing up a mountain.

It required no heat or air conditioning. Naturally climate controlled, no matter what the weather outside. Hundreds of barrels lined the floor and several catechesms leading deeper into the mountainside seemed untraversable what with the staggered barrel stacks.

We were even privy to a barrel sampling by the previously-mentioned French guy whose name still escapes me. It was great to actually taste the latest vintage of a particular wine straight from the barrel and be able to compare it to it’s older, vinted and bottled brother. You notice things like more tannin and fruit since the younger wine has not found it’s balance or calmed down yet. The wines were over-rated and over-oaked but fascinating thanks to the legend the Justin Winery has created for itself. To look at the gorgeous vineyard, the educated experts working the tasting room (all from various parts of the world, including France) and the general buzz within the exclusive tasting room, you would think that Justin was a century-old chateau. In reality, you’re still in beautiful little Paso Robles, drinking wines from a house that only released its first vintage in the mid-eighties. 1980s, that is.

Justin Vineyards 2007 Sauvignon Blanc

COLOR: Lemon water, but it darkens a bit towards the rim, making it look like something more than…well, lemon water.

NOSE: Not bad. Lot’s of grassy, rosemary scents along with some honey and caramel.

TASTE: Delicious all the way through. According to the Justin people, the wine “never touched wood” (heh heh) yet the flavors suggested that there was oak involved. It was caramel-ly and somewhat creamy, not too acidic. Most Sauvignon Blancs are supposed to be acidic enough to cut through buttery white foods like cream sauces and fish, but this one was big and had a heavy mouthfeel. A lot more rosemary came through along with some melon. Very, very well made, and at this price, a white wine this structured should not be passed up.

WITH FOOD: Like I said, while the acid is there, it’s not taking the lead, so don’t expect this to cut through super-rich foods. You may think differently once you try it, but lemon chicken or simple white fish might be best.

WHERE TO BUY: $12.79 at DrinktheGrapes.com!

LINKS: Justin Winery and Vineyards

Paso Robles City Site

Stay tuned for more wines from Justin and other Paso Robles wineries!

Remember to subscribe to get all the latest cheap wine reviews from Wine Welfare!

Related posts:

1. Paso Robles Wine Country Pt. 2: Denner, Ortman and I Can’t Remember
2. Paso Robles Wine Country Conclusion: Restaurants, Pomar Junction, Wild Horse and the Best California Wine I’ve Ever Had
3. Wine Review: Vina Robles Cabernet Sauvignon 2006

The Peachy Canyon Petite Sirah is a beast. We’ve done our fair share of wine reviews here at Wine Welfare, but holy crap. This was like opening a can of blackberry jam. It’s not often that I need a sip of water between tastes, but my tongue felt like it had been lifting weights after this. There is so much fruit packed into this that it makes you never want to swallow. And at this price, you should not pass it up.

Basically, I’m saying it was good.

COLOR: Thick. Do things get darker than black ink? Oil? The ocean at night? Tiger’s marriage?

NOSE: Ok, this is where the real ridiculous aspects of this wine begin. At first it has absolutely no scent. Nothing. Then, after a few minutes, it’s like a hand holding a wad of blackcurrant, blackberry, plum, black preserved cherries and mushy figs comes rocketing out of the glass and smashes into your face.

Subtle.

TASTE: The hand with all that fruit is now punching you in the face repeatedly, particularly in the mouth region, thanks to all of this fruit. To top it off, it’s also on fire because there is a smoke quality to this that makes it even more enjoyable. You’re basically being destroyed. It is out of this world good. Despite your mouth being a WWI battlefield after drinking this, you should find a way to gum the following: “More, please.”

WITH FOOD: Uhhh, in case you didn’t read the above parts, drink this on its own. This stuff could overpower a raw buffalo. There’s no point in pairing food with a wine that is the equivalent of a baseball bat made of fruit bashing your face.

SCORE: 8/10

WHERE TO BUY:$16.98 at WineLibrary.com!

Check out our other Petite Sirah reviews!

Remember to subscribe to get all the latest reviews from Wine Welfare!

Related posts:

1. Wine Review: Bogle Petite Sirah
2. Wine Review: Vina Robles Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
3. Wine Review: Bocage Merlot 2005

As far as we can tell, this wine is pretty much only available at BevMo stores. We assume that you might be able to find it at some smaller, independent wine shops, and at their winery, but we can’t be sure. If anyone has seen it anywhere else, let us know in the comments.

Color

Good thick ink. Exactly what we would expect.

Nose

Vanilla, tobacco, plums, dark cherries and some coffee.

Taste

Silky and smooth. Great vanilla (probably from too much oak, but we liked it this time) and dark fruits: Prunes, stewed cherries and some fig. Meaty and full-bodied. The acid is low, but the tannins kick in fairly well. The coffee on the nose appears on the finish, but it really depends what you eat with it. All in all, a good buy at the BevMo sale, but after that, there are better Syrahs at lower price points.

With Food

Grilled pork, coffee-crusted steak, and game. Don’t drink it without food.

$16.99 for 2 at the BevMo 5 ¢ Wine Sale!

Check out our other Syrah wine reviews.

Remember to subscribe to get all the latest suggestions from Wine Welfare!

Related posts:

1. Wine Review: Hahn Syrah Central Coast 2003
2. Wine Review: Qupe Syrah 2006 Central Coast
3. Wine Review: Francis Coppola 2007 Syrah

Color

Nice cherry red. Not overdoing it in terms of inkiness, but rather a very pleasing shade. Normally a Cabernet this young will seem rather light in color, but this one still looks sturdy.

Nose

Dark, bitter chocolate and prunes. This was unexpected being a 2006. Some fantastic pepper and ripe berries, help to muffle the heat that hits your nose upon first sniff.

Taste

A well-crafted Cabernet with great balance between the acidity and the tannins (remember, tannins are what give you that tongue-puckering sensation). While balanced, you will still be pulling a sour lemon face, bu then the fruit comes in to save the day. Very complex mix of dark bing cherry, blackberry, black pepper and loads of chocolate-covered prunes. The wine hangs on, too, with the dark chocolate really coating your tongue in the end.

With Food

Great with grilled lamb, ostrich or beef. Not sure if baked meat would do as well with these flavors. We’re tasting pepper here, so don’t overdo the spice rubs or whatever you do to dress up your meat. Hopefully it does not really have to be said (but we’ll say it anyway just in case): NO BARBECUE SAUCE WITH WINE.

$15.98 at WineLibrary.com!

Vina Robles website

Related posts:

1. Liberty School Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Wine Review
2. Santa Ines Winery 2006 Cabernet Franc
3. Wine Review: Cellar No. 8 Cabernet Sauvignon