2005 Surfrider Red - reviewed by Kerri

The facts:

2005 Surfrider Red
Region: Malibu Newton Canyon, California
Variety: 73% Merlot, 26% Cabernet Sauvignon, 1% Petit Verdot
Aging: French oak, 18 months
Winemaker: Christian Roguenant



My take:
Upon first pour, the wine was rather red and smelled red-pink. A full glass looks purplish and smells a little jammy.

The first sip was rather surprising. I didn’t get that full, in your face, jammy sip of a California wine that I was expecting. On the contrary, it is more mellow than what I normally expect from a California wine. After reading about the wine and the winemaker at the Rosenthal Estate website, it's not that surprising. The winemaker lived in Burgundy for some time and the wine is aged only in French oak. (For reference, I make it a practice not to read anything about the wine before I taste and draft my review. I don't want to be biased or unduly influenced by what I read prior to writing my review.)

I’d call this one a good sipping wine.

I find it to be medium bodied with a nice mouth-feel. It’s not too dry (though it’s more so if you pull some air over it), but it’s also not very creamy. It’s somewhere in the middle. Very nicely balanced. The downside to this wine is fairly short and you’re not going to get a huge amount of complexity from it. Like I said..., a good sipping wine.

Price point:
$24-$29

Frankly, though I think this is a nice wine, it’s too short and not complex enough in my opinion to warrant that price tag. $15..., sure. $30...,nope. (We must have gotten this one through wine club or as a gift.) That being said, the label says, "For each bottle purchased, a donation is made to the Surfrider Foundation, a grassroots, non-profit, environmental organization that works to protect our oceans, waves, and beaches."

Hey wait, does that mean my wine tonight is tax deductible? ;)

2004 TheBlend of Poggiotondo

I’m going to dispense with my usual lead in, and get right down to business with this one. A blizzard was bearing down on us and Kerri was kind enough to pick up a random wine for us to review. Now here is the thing about random, you really have an equal choice of getting a good wine, or a bad wine. Fate wasn’t on our side with this one.

It’s a blend (40% Sangiovese, 30% Merlot, 30% Syrah), and normally when I think of blends, I imagine layers of flavor deftly woven together. In this wine blend was probably closer to the flavors you used to get as a child, when you went into 7-11 and filled you cup from equal portions of the various fountain soda taps. There are a lot of flavors in this wine ranging from the passably acceptable to “why in gods name am I drinking this”.

The nose, is equally as interesting (in the way that a twelve car pile up on the freeway is interesting) with a heavy level of alcohol mixed in with black cherry or currants.

What really killed it for us was the taste. It starts fairly fruity, and quite frankly turns to ash in your mouth. After less than a glass, I’m packing it in and putting this one down the drain.

Sometimes a $10 wine, isn’t even worth that much, this is one of those times.

2004 The Blend of Poggiotondo

Well, as you may have heard, the eastern seaboard of the US got hit with a pretty big snow storm this weekend. And while most people were at the grocery store on Friday night picking up bread, milk, eggs, and toilet paper – you know, because you never know if you might be snowed in for a day and your family of say 12 is going to eat up all of the bread and eggs, drink all the milk, and use up all of the toilet paper in the known universe in those 24 hours (oh no! we might starve and be forced to drink water, eat ketchup, and use paper in the bathroom) – I had my priorities in order and stopped at the liquor store to get gin and wine!

I know that some folks drink wine every day and as such, purchasing wines that are around the $15 price point can be a bit spendy, so I sought out a wine around the $10 mark to review. That’s how we ended up with this....

The facts:

2004 The Blend of Poggiotondo
Region: Tuscany, Italy
Variety: 40% Sangiovese, 30% Merlot, 30% Syrah

This is where I’d normally provide a photograph of the wine. In this particular case, I’m going to refrain from that practice lest you see this wine in a store, recall the photograph from our blog, and purchase it because you can’t recall what we said about it, but you know you’ve seen it before. Read on and you’ll see why.

My take:

When you first pour the wine into your glass, it smells purple, with the slightest bit of chalky pink candy. Seriously. Not necessarily a bad thing. But, it quickly turns to something strange – I’d say gray becomes the predominant color. And it tastes exactly the same way. It’s purple, gray, and chalky. When Jonathan and I were talking about the wine, trying to figure out what it was all about, I specifically said, “it tastes like gravel and ash in a liquid mouthful.”

Yeah, not a fan. And I say this knowing full well that I do not like a gray wine. However, I know what a good gray wine tastes like – there is a gray characteristic to a lot of malbecs that Jonathan likes that I simply don’t care for. This is not that same gray. This is a bad gray, at least in my oh so humble opinion.

Other qualities, just in case you want more info – it’s dry, medium bodied, a little spicy, and there’s still some purple (somewhere between grape and currant) in there, despite the ashy flavor.

This is not one I’ll be buying again. In fact, I’m not even going to drink a full glass.

Price point: We bought locally for $10.99, but an internet search revealed bottles for as little as $8.27.

2006 Chateau Lamothe de Haux

The facts:

2006 Chateau Lamothe de Haux
Region: Premieres Cotes de Bordeaux, France
Variety: 60% Merlot, 30% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Cabernet Franc


(Disclosure: I cheated and did not take a photograph of our wine bottle; I grabbed this image from the internet. Rest assured that the bottle we have is 2006, not 2005.)

My take:

I was excited to try this wine – I love a good Bordeaux blend and the color was beautiful – a nice red-brown. The nose was light, which seemed perfect to go with pork tenderloin. That’s as far as my optimistic notes are going to go.

I think I finally had what I would consider a full-bodied wine. This wine feels quite thick and viscous in the mouth. I personally didn’t care for the texture. The taste is very light up front, a bit more brown in the middle, and you get some complexity in the finish, if you pull a good amount of air over the wine. However, if you’re just sipping this wine, it’s completely nondescript. It’s very short, with little complexity or flavor. After the first glass and making some notes about it, I found myself completely uninterested in drinking more.

Don't get me wrong..., I didn’t dislike the wine, but I didn’t like it all that much either. I will say, drinking it with dinner did lengthen the wine somewhat, but I still found it thin in flavor (not texture). Luckily, dinner did not disappoint. For any food network aficionados, I made Paula Dean's apple stuffed pork tenderloin. Now that I can recommend. It was easy and delicious!

Price point:
Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps the Chateau Lamothe de Haux Blanc is better and/or more well-known than the Rouge. We got the red through our wine club and an internet search reveals lots of places selling the white, but I couldn’t find the red.

2007 Il Cuore Rosso Classico

The facts:

2007 Il Cuore Rosso Classico
Region: Mendocino, California
Winemaker: Dennis Patton
Variety: 51% Syrah, 26% Zinfandel, 12% Sangiovese, 6% Carignane, 5% Merlot
Aging: “Modest oak barrel” aging according to their website

This wine is all about mixed messages for me. The label leads me to be skeptical.



I have a hard time taking wine seriously, when it has kitschy things on the label (like the hearts, cats, etc.). But this is a blend of Syrah, Zin, Sangiovese, Carignane (for some reason in California, they add an E on the end), and Merlot. I usually like a red blend, so that led me to be hopeful.

My take:

It looks purple in the glass and upon seeing it, we both remarked, “Well this is a California wine.” It smells purpley-black to me.

The wine is big up front and a bit of spicy in the middle, but more so if you’ve pulled air over it. If you’re just sipping it, the middle kind of falls flat. It has a rather long finish (maybe 10 to 15 seconds) – longer than I’d like, actually because I’m not a huge fan of the taste.

It tastes the same way it smells – purpley-black; almost like dull blackberries, as if they were not tart or sweet, but bland. Because it's a California wine, I expected a more intense flavor, but didn’t really get it. And then the finish is a bit gray.

I’d call it medium bodied and not dry.

Now, all that being said, I went and read up on the wine after tasting and describing it. Turns out Il Cuore is Italian for “the heart” and is a tribute to the Italian immigrants who first planted grape vines in Northern California. Sheds a bit of light on the label, which was designed by Dan Rizzie, a cubist artist. All that is well and good, but it doesn’t make me like the wine any better. It’s just not my style. (I did mention at the outset of this endeavor that I’m biased toward old world style wines.)

If you like California-style wines, you might enjoy this. I read other reviews that indicated this embodies a Northern California wine.

Price point:
$10 - $13 per bottle

2006 Poggio del Falco - reviewed by Kerri

For this review, I have to start with the story, so I’ll end with the facts.

The other day, I wanted wine after work. So we opened a bottle of something (don't recall what it was and unless you want to know what not to drink, it doesn't matter) that smelled like really ripe blackberries. It didn’t taste like ripe blackberries; it tasted like jam – and not in a good way. At first, I thought, it’s okay; not my favorite, but I don’t hate it.

I tried some cheese (both manchego and a sharp cheddar) to see if that would make the wine any better. The cheese had no flavor compared to the wine! How is that possible? Seriously, how is it possible to make a sharp cheddar taste almost like nothing???

So, we poured it down the drain. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again… life’s too short to drink bad wine.

Then we opened the Italian Poggio del Falco.





OMG.... I hadn’t even taken a sip and I felt compelled to break out my laptop to start writing. The color is beautiful – that brownish red I’ve come to love. And the nose is so pleasantly sweet – like sweet tobacco. And not in a bad Marlboro kind of way (and that's not to disparage Marlboro - I've been known to smoke one here and there), but in a sweet, vanilla, pipe tobacco kind of way. And for some reason the nose reminds me of sweet alyssum, though I admit I haven’t actually smelled sweet alyssum in a couple of years.

After smelling the wine for I’d say a good 10 minutes (I could smell this wine forever), I finally took a taste. Ahhhhh, now that’s what a wine is supposed to taste like. And this is where I fall down in terms of reviewing the wine. After several tastes, I was still having trouble describing it. The only thing that kept coming to mind is that it tasted exactly like what wine should taste like! I realize that's not exactly helpful, so.... What I can say is this:

It tastes a little brown-red; definitely does not taste as sweet as it smells. The texture is that nice resting place between suck your mouth dry and coat your mouth with creaminess. It has a rather long finish. I’d call it medium bodied, though tasting notes online say it’s full bodied. I think the only thing that would make it better is if it were velvety in texture.

Important safety tip – be careful at the bottom of the bottle. There’s a fair amount of sediment and I’d venture to say you don’t want a mouthful of that.

Everyone should try this wine! Well, okay, everyone who is a fan of old-world style wines. If you prefer a full-bodied, in your face, fruit forward, hello I’m a huge wine party in your mouth kind of wine…, then this is not the wine for you.


So there's my story. Jonathan’s on vacation now and didn’t feel as compelled as I to write something up while we were drinking it, so this is a wine review - 1 way. But don’t misunderstand – he did enjoy the wine and I've already ordered 2 more bottles so he may post his take in the not too distant future. Personally, if I had the space for at least half a case, I’d order at least half a case. Maybe we need a bigger wine fridge. hmmm....

Now for the facts:

2006 Poggio del Falco
Region: Tuscany, Italy
Winemaker: Michele Barbiero of the Morazzano Estate (Turner Wine is the importer)
Variety: Sangiovese, Merlot & Cabernet Sauvignon (organic)

Price point: $15-$20