Thank God for Wine Blogging Wednesday. Well, it’s Thursday — but even a day late, at least something got me to blog again. Caught up in various inspections and preparations for the brick and mortar, I’ve really not been paying enough attention to what got me in this business in the first place.

So it was perfect timing yesterday when one of my reps brought me this “Homecoming” Zinfandel from Homefire Cellars. It represents a homecoming to blogging for me, as well as a return to Dry Creek Valley. There, Doug Nalle generously took a few hours of his day, a few years ago, to usher me around to several area wineries, primarily Zin producers. Soon thereafter, my blog and online wine store were born. Since then, I admit that Zinfandel hasn’t been my favorite grape variety. It’s fairly rare that I drink it, and I don’t stock too many.

But the Homefire Ranch “Homecoming” Zinfandel is really pleasing. It’s got classic Zin characteristics, with really juicy red fruit and some spicy peppery zest. It avoids going overboard in terms of heat or body, and I’d guess this is lightly oaked. There’s nothing out of balance about this wine at all, and it makes me think that I’ll have to give Zins, and Dry Creek, some more serious consideration in the near future. I may even put a case of this on my about to be stocked racks!

Thanks to Sonadora at Wannabewino for hosting edition #60 of WBW. See you back here soon, I hope!

It’s that time…the week when the Spectator reveals its Top Ten from their Top 100 WOTY issue. Looks like decent sized production is a factor, with the 2007 Seghesio Sonoma County Zinfandel ranked at #10 (68,000 cases made, $24/bottle, 93 points) and the 2007 Mollydooker Carnival of Love Shiraz taking the #9 position (2,596 cases made, $90/bottle, 95 points).

We actually got an allocation of the Carnival of Love this year and decided not to take it, since $90 just seemed over the edge of fair. Oh well, I suppose now it wouldn’t have been an issue unloading it, but you live and learn.

On a more important note, so far there are no winners in the guessing game, with no participants having chosen either Seghesio or Mollydooker in their entries to the d547 contest.

We wrote about the 2005 Trader Joe’s Private Reserve Dry Creek Zin, made and bottled by Mazzocco of Sonoma, a couple weeks ago. We thought that for ten bucks, it might potentially be good deal; so we decided that the next time we ventured back to TJ’s, we’d pick up a bottle. That time came, that time went, and here are our thoughts. Read more…

This may be the only time we suggest you buy wine at Trader Joe’s. We have our reasons beyond thinking you should buy wine from us (tee hee!), but we won’t go into them here; we’re sure Quaffability would have a beef with our anti-Trader Joe’s stance, and for those of you wedded to doing all your shopping at the store, you should check out that blog for some suggestions.

In the meantime, we did notice a private label wine while doing our grocery shopping this weekend, and we considered buying a bottle for ourselves. In fact, we ended up leaving the store sans wine, but this has stayed in our minds for the past couple of days and that must mean something, right?

The private bottling in question is a Trader Joe’s Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel, available at the Santa Monica Boulevard/Fuller store in West Hollywood — and judging by the large supply they had on hand, at other branches as well. The price is $9.99 a bottle. Normally this would strike us as a high margin private label rip-off, bulk juice from the likes of Franzia (Two-Buck Chuck mastermind). But, intrigued by the Dry Creek appellation, we examined the back label, and sure enough the fine print indicated that this is made by the Mazzocco Winery. So this appears more like a Cameron Hughes-style bulk sell-off than Ten Buck Chuck.

Mazzocco makes some high octane Zin, not a style that’s our favorite these days, but one they handle with a deft hand. Recently, we saw a Mazzocco label Dry Creek Zin at Whole Foods for around $15 a bottle (likely more). Single Vineyard bottlings are considerably more expensive and run well into the $30s, and the Sonoma appellation Zin is listed at $18 on their site. So for $9.99, we think that the Trader Joe’s Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel (bottled by Mazzocco) is definitely worth a try; we imagine it’s the same juice as in the bottles we saw at Whole Foods. The only thing scaring us off? The 16% alcohol by volume.

Again, not our style, but we’re intrigued enough that we’ve decided to pick up a bottle when we go back to TJs. Tasting notes to follow. And if any of you have tried this, please let us know!