Zinfandel

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Afternoon at Venge Vineyards

March 29, 2010 in Travel, wine by traveleatlove | 8 comments

One of the highlights of our recent trip to Napa and Sonoma was our visit to Venge Vineyards. Venge was a recommendation from Chef Robin White and since they don’t hold public tastings, it was quite the special experience. It was certainly unlike any other tasting experience I have had before, and it definitely spoiled us for crowded public tasting rooms!

Venge recently moved to a new location on the Silverado Trail in Calistoga, CA. Up a long driveway flanked by vines and beautiful greenery, Venge’s tasting room actually used to be a private home. When we arrived, we weren’t sure if we were in the right place! It is a breathtaking view from the top, and because it is set up from the road, it is very quiet. The house is sunny and sparkling inside, immaculately clean and comfortable.

We were welcomed by Lin, the Director of Hospitality for Venge, and I took a few photos while we waited for the other couple tasting with us.

A long wooden table was set for the tasting, complete with cheese, crackers, and grapes.

This was the view from my seat.

Through the wine glasses

Some of my notes on food pairings for the wines that we tasted

The lineup of wines we tasted with their lovely, varying label designs

Venge makes small amounts of high quality wines. Several of their wines have been given 92 points or higher by Robert Parker. All of the wines that we tasted were spectacular, but I enjoyed the following the most. Venge is such an interesting winery that I have copied some information about each wine from their website. If you are interested in wine at all, I would definitely suggest visiting their site for more information.

2008 Maldonado Vineyard Chardonnay, Dijon Clones (Source)

The Maldonado Vineyard has produced wonderfully again this vintage. 2008 was a bit cooler and longer, ripening nearly two weeks later than in 2007. The longer season combined with the Dijon Clone of Chardonnay has attributed fantastic nuances of tropical citrus notes with and undertone of barrel toast and vanilla creaminess.

I LOVED this Chardonnay. It felt like the wine that I should be drinking, looking out over the valley on a hot and sunny day.

2007 Gladys’s Vineyard Syrah

We could speak for hours about our adornment for this property’s owner, Gladys Boyd. This is not just 2/3rd acre of Syrah vines. It is a piece of her adored garden. She knows nearly every vine by shape or by name. She has a warm heart, a great story and a small and wonderful East sloping Syrah vineyard in Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma that she calls home. It is our privilege to make her grapes into wine. The vines had no problem reaching optimum maturity with excellent hang time. Gladys’ small acreage yielded a mere 1.81 tons; this represented a very balanced crop for the 2/3-acre planting. The concentration and focus of this wine takes benefit from such low yields. Muhlner Vineyard provides the rest of the Syrah from Napa Valley and the Viognier comes from Baranek Vineyard, Clarksburg.

2007 Late Night Harvest Zinfandel (Source)

This sweet-dessert Zinfandel will entice all of your senses. The deep, alluring color pulls you in with inviting visions of black and blue. The aromatics are very ripe with dried currants, vibrant blueberry and blackberry liqueur. Later in the nose arrives scents of barrel vanillin, campfire and a touch of bacon fat. The flavor speaks entirely of chocolate dipped coffee bean and viscous black cherry. The tannin of this wine is very integrated and can be perceived for many lasting moments in the finish. It is both a seductive and exciting bottle of wine!

A little smoky, rich, sweet, and heady, this Zinfandel is the ultimate dessert.

Lin was extremely hospitable and knowledgeable about Venge wines, and her warm personality and humor made everything even better. The other couple in the tasting were wine club members and had more experience with Venge wines than we did, so it made for a fun dynamic. We talked about wine, life in California, TV shows, and movies, and I laughed harder than I had in awhile. We were very lucky in that Venge does ship to Massachusetts where some wineries do not. I was the happy recipient of several bottles of Venge wine this past week, including Gladys’s Syrah and Late Night Harvest Zinfandel.

Tasting at Venge was like drinking outstanding wine in a friend’s beautiful hillside home, and I was honored to have had such a rare and special opportunity on my birthday no less! I can not wait to return to Venge and will hopefully get to meet winemaker Kirk Venge on our next visit.

Important news- my raffle to raise money for The ALLY Foundation ends on April 1, and I will randomly pick the winners then. The prizes are great and include a $100 gift card to Williams Sonoma, a winery tour for 10 at Westport Rivers, and a case of wine. For details please visit http://firstgiving.com/meghanmalloyteamally . ALL proceeds go to The ALLY Foundation.

Tags: California, Calistoga, chardonnay, cheese, Food, Napa, Napa Valley, Sonoma, Syrah, Venge, vineyards, wine, wine tasting, Zinfandel

Dry Creek Valley

November 14, 2009 in Food, Travel, wine by traveleatlove | 9 comments

Happy weekend! I only had three days of work this week, but I was certainly thankful for the work week to end. Going back to work after an amazing time at the Foodbuzz Festival and in wine country was very difficult. I do however, have a new work philosophy. At the end of the day, when I leave work I am just letting it go, not even making the time to talk about the work part of my day. So far this has worked well and has helped me to avoid reliving the frustration that talking about work brings. When I last left off on our wine country journey, we were leaving Hook & Ladder after a tasting of reds, including a great Zinfandel that we purchased to ship home. We were going to head straight to Yountville to check into our hotel, but we had some time and decided to drove a bit past Healdsburg. Venturing off of 101, we found ourselves on a bumpy side road with a narrow old railway bridge. The scenery, as it was everywhere in California, was a sight to behold. Everyone says that Fall in New England is beautiful, and it is, but this was just such a different perspective on the season. I couldn’t get enough of it, and I can definitely see myself living there.

We were about to turn around to head back to the main highway when I saw a sign for Bella Vineyards and Wine Caves, a winery recommended to me on Twitter by Sonoma Wine Guy. As useless as Twitter sometimes seems, it was helpful in this case! Pulling up to Bella reveals their wine caves which include the tasting room and events space.

The wine tanks are also visible to visitors.

Taking photos inside the cave was difficult, but it was a cozy, warmly lit place, and I was excited to try their Zinfandels and other offerings.

Their wine glasses had a cute tractor, the same one parked out in front of the cave, etched on the glass. 🙂 Zinfandels definitely won again. We tried and enjoyed both their 2007 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel and their 2007 Big River Ranch Zinfandel. The standout was the Big River Ranch, though we liked them both. This is a big, tannin-y wine with a deep opaque red color and a burst of juicy berries on the palate. Yum. Tasting in the caves was a lot of fun. Bella offers not only tours and private tastings in their caves, but they also have a jeep tour that takes you up to Lily Hill, where the grapes for the Dry Creek zin are grown. I didn’t contact them in time to book any of the tours, but the next time we go to Sonoma I will definitely make sure to book in advance. Their website offers information on the tours so if you will be in the area, check them out! After leaving Bella, we were definitely heading back to the highway to get lunch and find our hotel for the night. But then we saw the sign for barrel tastings at Zichichi Family Vineyard and literally backed up and into their parking lot. Neither one of us had done a barrel tasting and really wanted to give it a whirl.

Our tasting was delayed slightly when I looked out on to the covered back deck of the tasting room and saw this, my new, nine week old Swiss mountain dog puppy pal:

Obviously I had to go out and play.

It was love at first sight. And love at first sip once I went inside!
The 2008 Old Vine Zinfandel from the barrel was incredible. It offers the perfect amount of the big, jammy flavor characteristic of Zinfandels. It is not even being bottled until January, and we will receive our shipment in March, just in time for my birthday, hopefully. I can not wait to see what a couple of months of aging in the barrel will do to the flavor of this young wine. Something to look forward to for sure! At this point we were more than ravenous. A quick drive over to Geyserville brought us right in front of Diavola Pizzeria. After a good amount of water and some thin, chewy, cheesy breadsticks, we were served our lunches. For me, the wood oven roasted hearts of romaine with shrimp and Caesar dressing and for my hubs, a thick BLT panini teeming with thick, salty, smoky bacon and, red pepper mayo, lettuce, and ripe tomatoes. I will admit to sneaking a few bites of this sandwich, and I can understand why it was his favorite meal of the entire trip. It was a perfectly made sandwich, complete with chewy focaccia bread. My lunch was great too with perfectly cooked shrimp, and a creamy parmesan laden dressing over slightly grilled lettuce. Just what we needed to finish our journey to Yountville.

Next up, Yountville, Domaine Chandon, dinner at Bouchon, and more. For now I am off to go running with a group of Boston bloggers, then to walk some of my favorite dog friends at the shelter. They have been there for so long 🙁 I am not sure what the rest of the weekend will bring, but I know I will be blogging! Have a GREAT day my friends!

Tags: Bella Vineyards, Dry Creek Valley, Food, Healdsburg, Sonoma, Sonoma County, Travel, wine, wine tasting, wineries, Yountville, Zichichi, Zinfandel

From Rocky Seas to Fields of Gold

November 11, 2009 in Travel, wine by traveleatlove | 10 comments

When we woke up on Monday morning, the sky covered the sea in a light gray blanket, and the smell of wood burning stoves was in the air. I won’t lie, it felt like an Irish morning, and I loved it. The in room coffee at Timber Cove Inn was SO good. I can not remember what the brand was, but after another bad night of sleep, it was just what we needed. Recaps of breakfast at the Timber Cove Inn, along with our Sunday dinner, will be up later tonight. In the meantime I will skip to our drive from the coast inland to the Russian River Valley of Sonoma, aka Heaven In mere miles we went from the beautiful, rugged Northern California coastline to forests full of massive trees.

Tree hugger, that’s me 🙂 Without much warning at all, the landscape changed from dark forests to fields decorated with grape leaves in their full autumn glory.

Our first wine country stop was DeLoach, one of my friend Jill’s favorite Sonoma wineries and one of the “can’t miss” spots on my list.

While we tried several wines at DeLoach, our absolute favorite was the 2007 Forgotten Vines Zinfandel. DeLoach’s tasting notes say: Offering aromas of cherry compote laced with exotic spices, this Zinfandel exemplifies the vibrant elements that old-vine wines are known for. Notes of orange rind and black currant engage the palate as cranberry flavors mingle with clove and cardamom spice. Sweet oak and elegant tannins lend lush mouthfeel to this wine for a lingering finish. For me, the definite spice in this wine really made it stand out. Not overly jammy like some Zinfandels, this one is really a lovely journey through layers of flavor. Our bottle is en route to New Jersey at the moment, as we could not ship to Massachusetts from Buffalo Bill’s Shipping Post (more on this later, truly a godsend if you want to buy wine from various wineries and ship it home altogether). After snapping a few photos at DeLoach, we moved on to Hook & Ladder, a winery I had heard about through Su Chang’s wine dinner back in September when I tried their Gewurtztraminer. Our visit to the winery, however, was all about the reds. The tasting room itself is vastly different that the one at DeLoach but has a ton of character and firefighting memorabilia representing the background of their founder.

Zinfandel won again. Hook & Ladder’s estate grown 2005 Gambogi Ranch Russian River Valley Zin, to be specific. Here is what they have to say about it: Bring on the BBQ with this dark purple red “zin-fully” delicious Russian River classic. A nose full of blackberry, vanilla, sandal wood and spice accentuates the bright berry flavor of this hearty old-vine Zin. Aged in American oak for 11 months, only 470 cases of this hand-made, open-fermented, single-vineyard Zinfandel were produced. I would like at some point very soon to host a wine dinner using some of our California purchases. Planning the menu and blogging about it will be fun. . . finding the time to actually get
people together will be more of a challenge! Next up. . . the Dry Creek Valley and my husband’s favorite meal of the trip!