this wine pretty much owns you life

[Guest]

Golf Clap to I C. Very nice. I do enjoy wine, though mostly through trial and error. i have recently drank and enjoyed bogle vineyards merlot, as did the girl i drank it with. And... what was that old vine zinfandel it was a red as well. I am not into the whites very much anymore.

I tend to look for women drinking the beringer white zin. It usually means they are sluts trying to be classy. Or even kendall jackson.

[Guest]

I've had the Bogle 04 Merlot, would drink again, but not one I'm actively pursuing.

Yeah, California old vine zin is one of if not my favorite varietal right now. See there is no such thing as a white zin in the civilized world, so its just zin, which is red in color. There is a lot of variation with zin, particularly old vine. Zin vines can survive in the Sahara and in an arctic tundra, and the older a vine gets, the stronger the fruit structure. The most stress the vine gets, the more intense the grape, unlike most other varietals.

So when you consider that the Old Vine designation is for 80+ year vines, those decades of stress and whatever else produces a unique flavor. All old-vine zins are different, and one reason I enjoy them so much. Old vine zin is prevalent in California because of prohibition when everyone switched over to raisins, and zin consistently produced fruit regardless of weather patterns. I've literally seen a petit verdot lot of raisins next to a lot of zin grapes amid a picking crew.

I like the old vine zins because each one tastes different, even among year to year / vintage to vintage, big fruit, typically off-dry, and affordable.

this is a typical vine (cab franc i believe)
[IMG]http://i29.tinypic.com/24q679d.jpg[/IMG]
and this is an old zinfandel vine (with the head pruned:
[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3037/2564464679_1ee4526032.jpg[/img]

if anyone has questions keep em coming. Lots of people on the lair ask me about wine when I see you guys out, but I never really have a chance to talk about it. Winemaking is one of the oldest, most gratifying arts. One day a big bag of money is going to fall out of the sky, and I'll move up to Washingtong and buy some grapes and become a mad scientist.

[Guest]

oh, and you'll come back around to the white wine. I came back to them and really enjoy Washington style sauv blanc, chenin blanc exclusively with shellfish, and Burgundian and Sancerre whites. Frankly, there is no white wine in this world that's going to top a laTour Puligney Montrachet, or Cessagne Montrache...and you can get bottles for $28. Then you can go to stuffy wine dens and tell people you have a lott of assorted laTours, and subsequently a fan club.