This month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday post has me very excited. Not only does David McDuff’s Passion for Piedmont installment fit in perfectly with my February 28th Italian food and wine event, it has allowed me to get away from New World wines, and hopefully introduce some of my wine blog / wine vlog friends to Italian wines. While I have done a blog post or two about Italian wines, I’ve really never discussed Piedmont and it’s wines.
Lynn, Thea, and Liza
My favorite part of twitter has most certainly been meeting the people that I’ve connected with there. I have met over a dozen people, from FL to CA, and many points in between. I was even able to fly out to California, meet Jeff Stai from Twisted Oak Winery, enjoy a dinner for the release of their Spaniard wine, meet Thea, Liza and Lynn, and well, just have an amazing time with wine and twitter friends.
Grocery Store Zinfandels
If you tuned in live to the TTL 05 event, you know that after the Hahn Estates wine tasting, I went on to my own Grocery Store Zinfandel tasting. My idea was to find 4 zinfandels in the grocery store, all under $20, and taste them live with you. A lot of people look for cheap, or at least inexpensive red wine, and I though Zinfandels would be fun for that.
The wines i selected were:
Zen of Zins 06 Old Vines Zinfandel (Ravenswood) $10.50
Cline Ancient VInes 07 Zinfandel $16.50
Estancia Paso Robles 05 Zinfandel $13.50
7 Deadly Zins 06 Old Vines Zinfandel (Lodi) $18.50
The Hahn Red Wines
You may remember my discussing the Bloggers Take Over Twitter Taste Live event and the fact that we were going to enjoy some Hahn Estates wines and then some “Grocery Store Zinfandels” back in November. I broke the event up into two sections and will add a wine blog post specifically for the Zins later on this week.
Wine Blogging Wednesday 52 is upon us, and I couldn’t be more excited. This installment of WBW is hosted by Tim from Cheap Wine Ratings. Tim asked us to taste, and write about, inexpensive Chilean red wines. I happen to love cheap wine, when it’s good, and cheap Chilean red wine often is too good to pass up. You can find Tim on twitter. WBW founder Lenn of Lenndevours can be found on twitter as well.
The Lineup for Twitter Taste Live #04
If you missed the event, Thursday October 23rd was the 4th official Twitter Taste Live wine tasting event. It was organized by Craig from Bin Ends Wine, who finds a way to bring wine and twitter together each month. Twitter users (Twitterers?) will obtain the wines, and taste them together. We then tweet our tasting notes using a search tag #TTL. That tag allows you to use twitter search and find the wine tasting tweets (and some other #TTL tweets) to see what the results were. I’ve captured all of the #TTL tweets from this event here, and Craig puts them on the Twitter Taste Live home page! When using the link for the tweets, I start at the oldest tweet, so click “Newer” to see the night progress.
A Good Time With Wine Bosco Montepulciano d'Abruzzo
Tonight, we went to Italy for dinner. While we didn’t actually FLY there, we did have a fantastic lazagne, some garlic bread, and of course, a nice Italian red wine to compliment the meal. I did not take a lot of time picking tonight’s wine out, and went with something that was inexpensive ($10) and being demoed in the store.
I selected a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo from Ca’del Bosco, their 2003 vintage. Their wines are aged in oak 12 months, and then bottle stored for 3 years before release. Although not to be confused with a Vino Nobile Di Montepulciano, Italy’s first DOCG, it seems to adhere to the Italian law which requires such aging.
Thorn-Clarke 2006 Terra Barossa Shiraz
I am so glad you stopped by to see my review of Thorn-Clarke’s Terra Barossa 2006 Shiraz. It’s been an interesting video to shoot, complete with technical glitches, multiple tastings, and some fun discoveries. That is what I love about wine, not only are there differences from grape to grape, but within the same grape varietal there are differences, and further within the same bottle there are differences depending on the situation. This interesting red from Australia sure brings that point home.
