Just wanted to give you a heads up that there are two bloggerpacks to be released imminently. They are:

Same grape/different place featuring Syrah, from Wine-Scamp
and
Summer Sippers from Sonoma, from Wannabewino, Sonadora herself

We look forward to revealing the details of these once they’re in stock. Though we’ve had a small hiccup regarding the availability of the Shiraz that Scamp had her eye on, we expect it to be resolved be soon.

We’re excited to announce that we’re hosting a wine dinner at Campanile Restaurant on June 3rd, with the esteemed Tablas Creek Vineyard. Not only does Tablas Creek have one of the best wine blogs around, written by winery manager Jason Haas, but their wines rock.

For those of you who don’t know, they are owned in part by the Perrin family of Chateau de Beaucastel in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, and they have painstakingly brought over clones of all the Beaucastel Southern Rhone varieties and replanted them in Paso Robles (see full history of the winery here). The results are incredible, and you will be able to taste through the entire line-up of Tablas Creek wines at Campanile, including their Vin de Paille dessert wine which is tiny production and usually only available at the winery. Read more…

We were visited by our friends at Chambers & Chambers yesterday, and got a chance to try a delightful line-up of wines. Having been told that they were bringing by a trio of Provencal budget wines (which we’ll write about another time), we were pleased when they pulled out two German Rieslings, just in time for WBW #45, “Old World Riesling” hosted by Tim at Winecast.net.

In the name of laziness efficiency, we’re just going to write some simple tasting notes on the two wines we tried.

2006 Dr. Weins-Prum Graacher Himmelreich Riesling-Kabinett

We were told this was from a Grand Cru single vineyard (which, shockingly, you’d never know from the simple and easy to read German wine label…). Fewer than 500 cases of this wine are produced each year. This had some really nice residual sugar, but wasn’t without acidity either. Sort of a best of both worlds situation. Lots of honey on the nose and palate (but not too viscous) and the fruit was white peaches galore, with lemon hitting you at the very end and lingering pleasantly. Only 8.5% alcohol by volume. This could be an excellent brunch wine. It runs about $16 a bottle. We’ll consider bringing this in.

2006 Dr. Loosen Riesling “BA” Beerenauslese 187ml

This Beerenauslese Riesling is pure honey. It’s got a ton of residual sugar (as would be expected) and slight lemon peel on the finish. Smooth and supple, and a pleasure to drink. We didn’t want to spit this out. We’ll definitely consider this for our shelves, though the small bottle size has its pros and cons…it makes this a good price point for those who want to try a BA for the first time ($30 or so, steep per ounce, but reasonable considering the pedigree); but it makes shipping a bit of a challenge. We’ll try and work on this one because this was really a fun wine.

Thanks to Tim for hosting this month’s WBW, and to Lenn for inventing the event many moons ago. If you’re interested in finding either of the wines above, please head over to Wine-Searcher as we don’t yet carry either of them.

People seem to post reviews frequently on Amazon, and wine seems as conducive to user-feedback as books do…but our customer review feature almost never gets used.

Partially it’s the fault of our system…it’s not the easiest to navigate, and it’s not completely obvious that you can even write a review of a wine you’ve had. But it’s something we’d hoped would see more activity. So, in general, we’d love to know whether you write reviews on any wine retail sites. In the comments, feel free to elaborate on the reasons why you do or don’t, or what you’d like to see in this kind of feature.

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