Top 10: Mood Boosting Wines
Feeling down? Let these cheerful wines turn that frown upside down. (Just in from my column at WineCountry.com!)
This time of year - and this year in particular (sheesh) - there's a laundry list of things that could be getting you down. Lost jobs, money worries and holiday stress are just a few of the icky items that could very well be a drag on your otherwise sunny mood. Happily, we're here with a list of wines known for their mood-boosting powers, all packaged into a convenient list. So, should you need them, we offer not just a few but 10 reasons to stay cheerful this wintry season.
JIT for the wintry (can you say FREEZING, anyone?) weather, I am super pleased to present my list of top holiday films, all matched up tastily with wines, natch. So you can get Scrooged while drinking some Pet, or laugh along with Clark Griswold and crew while sipping some seriously flamboyant Zin. Cheers and happy holidays from Hip Tastes! Courtney ;)
In a curious twist of linguistic fate, some decidedly frightening-sounding statements have been lately transformed into vehicles of praise. Mostly refashioned, as far as I can tell, by loquacious members of the surfer/skater culture prevalent in California, the phrases run the gamut of topics and references, but given the time of year I've singled out two that undoubtedly invoke Halloween.
Let's face it: the recession taught us many of things, perhaps the most important: you've got to appreciate the small things in life. And with 2009 drawing to a close, we can all look forward a renewed perspective (not to mention uptrending economic indicators, whew!) in the new year. To go along with this reinvigorated view of things, we offer the following ten wines that are destined to be hot in 2010. Because if another thing is altogether clear as we head out of this strange era: Wine is and always will be a hallmark of the good times. And, it's time for each and every one of us to start living the good life again.
"Wine hasn't been big in Oregon's bucolic Willamette Valley for long - in fact, it was only in the 60s that the first plantings were made in what is now considered by many to be some of the most hallowed ground for wine production in the world. With a cool, moist climate that favors Pinot Noir in particular, the region just an hour's drive from Portland has fast turned into one of the most exciting places to swirl, sip and savor your way through wine country. Read on for my top ten wines tasted on a recent visit."
"As with so many things in life, trends in food and wine come and go. One season, chefs scramble to pair Riesling with faddish new 
The dog days of summer rightly inspire sips of something so altogether light and crisp (not to mention heavenly floral and fruity) as to transport you beyond the scorching hot wherever-it-is you find yourself these HOT days. Enter Riesling. Criminally underappreciated, Riesling is a wine that - when made by a solid producer in a good region - almost always overdelivers. Oh, and the price can be quite nice. Read on for 
One of my fondest memories of an early trip to Burgundy was visiting 
As my own 
This just in from Robert Camuto, a very nice American dude who moved to France a while back and became enamored of - you guesses it! - French wine. In a blog post just up that inspired the title of my own, the good scribe writes: 
Firing, roasting, and grilling are decidedly du rigueur during the summer months, but finding wines that work well with this tricky fare can be a challenge. Just as shining a spotlight on an actor onstage brings her features into focus for an audience, these cooking methods serve to concentrate the flavors of whatever's being cooked, necessitating a wine with both strength and personality to stand up to the food.
Chere Rose, you mean the world to me. You are so pure, your flavors so balanced (More approachable than red! More filling than white!) I find myself fantasizing about you day and night. Often I picture myself, feet up at the end of a long day, meditating on your pale pink robe, pausing to savor a sip so lush it takes my breath away. 
As the 
Ah, Oscar time. Enjoy this next Top 10 List from 
If the unseasonable blooms outside (if you're in Cali, anyway) have you looking for something a little lighter in your glass, read on...
Excerpted from my recent article at WineCountry.com:
It may sound obvious to put a girl in blue jeans in an ad for wine (like, helLO, this is an advertisement for youths, duh), and therefore not that interesting, but for some reason it works. 
As a spokesperson for the 
It's almost the end of 
As a big fan of New Zealand's 
Okay, so the goose doesn't exactly make the Pinot, but 
Woop, looks like another celeb designer has gotten in on the wine design thang. Busy Italian designer Roberto Cavalli - famous for his flamboyant, figure-hugging frocks worn by adventurous celebutantes on many a red carpet - has just released Roberto Cavalli Selection, a Tuscan IGT made with the assistance of Italian wine guru Carlo Ferrini. Just about 5,000 bottles were made of the debut vintage, 2004, a portion of which come in this appropriately flamboyant box covered in leopard print used in the designer's 1996 Spring/Summer collection and...
"From Major Leaguers to major religious leaders, celebrities of all stripes are catching the wine bug these days, lending their names and likenesses to bottles, participating in the promotion of the wines and sometimes even cuing up the blends themselves. And while celebrity wines are hardly a new phenomenon, the most recent influx of offerings brings with it a surprisingly diverse mix of celebs, not to mention a fascinating blend of prices, styles and blends to boot...
Brimming with lovely aromas of toasty oak, caramel-and-chocolate-covered coffee beans, black cherries, star anise and cocoa, the full-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon delivers big on the palate, too, with delicious flavors of ripe black fruits, cocoa nib, brown sugar and blackberry jam. In spite of its heft, the wine's super-rich, almost dessert-wine-like concentration is in balance, and the finish is loooong. I scored it 92 points. One to check out, although I don't recommend waiting around for a date night - this wine will win you over ANY NIGHT. 
If a prominent French Champagne producer's putting the American flag on a bottle of bubbly isn't proof of improving French-American relations, I don't know what is. This new, limited edition single serving offering from 
Dearest readers - I'm sorry I've been away for so long. I promise to start posting lots again very soon, and in the mean time please enjoy this snap from my recent NY book release party and a Valentine's-appropriate ditty I just wrote for WineCountry.com. Cheers, CC ;)
There's nothing like a crazy winter storm to make you crave a deep, dark bottle of wine that's as brooding as what's happening outside. After waking up Friday to the biggest storm I've seen since moving here and an eerie all-day power outage (rumor has it some San Franciscans are still without power), I've been contemplating a wine that matches my mood. As luck would have it, I was recently sent a bunch of samples of Madiran wines - inky, wonderfully brooding reds from southwestern France that perfectly fit the bill.
In a curious twist of linguistic fate, some decidedly frightening-sounding statements have been lately transformed into vehicles of praise. Mostly refashioned, as far as I can tell, by loquacious members of the surfer/skater culture prevalent in California, the phrases run the gamut of topics and references, but given the time of year I've singled out two that undoubtedly invoke Halloween.
My grandmother from Colorado - of all people - just sent me a newspaper clipping about Kobe Bryant's Cristal binge at the recent opening of 
It's not the first time I've written about boxed wine in this blog, but it's still a memorable occasion for me. The reason is that this marks the first time I kept right on drinking a boxed wine until it turned - which means I found it pretty decent! I bought the 
I was asked to do a 
Geeze, louise - I've been gone for so long everyone probably wonders if I've dropped off the face. Hardly! Just been wrapping up the Hip Tastes book (why didn't someone send me the "your book will take you WAY longer than you expected" memo?!) and taking some much needed R&R as that chapter of my life wraps up. As I'm coming up for air I thought I'd check back in and share with everyone a little 411 on the most AMAZING Pinot I've had in a long time - definitely one of the best ever. It's stolen my heart, that's for sure, Bon Jovi style. What's it called? Thought you'd never ask...
Leave it to the renegades over at 
I'm currently enjoying a pretty wine from Germany's northerly Ahr region (sorry for the silly title; just be glad I didn't go with the pirate thing), where a unique strain of Pinot Noir called Fruhburgunder makes mega light reds that have been compared to light Burgundies. I actually find this one more similar to a Beaujolais Villages, but no matter: it's always a treat to find a wine I've never tried before, and it's even better when it's surprisingly tasty.
I know, you're going to feel really sorry for me. Today when I made a routine visit to my mail box down the street I found - much to my total delight - this absolutely fabulous - no, beyond fabulous (is there a word for super fabulous?) - magnum of vino. Ta da! Guess who's the proud new owner of a magnum of 2004 Sea Smoke Southing Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita Hills? That's right - a MAGNUM of Sea Smoke! For those who're wondering just what the big deal is, Sea Smoke is consistently rated in the top 100 Wines of the Year by Wine Spectator (the '02 Southing made the list not long ago with a score of 93 pts) and has received countless other insanely high marks and praise from the wine glitterati of the globe. 
"I think I smell a soupcon of cat's pee in this wine."
If I had a dollar for every time I tried a new Gewurztraminer - the varietal popularly held to be "the spicy white" - and didn't find it even remotely spicy I'd be quite a bit better off than I am now. The fact of the matter is that Gewurz, which literally means "spice" in German, isn't usually all that spicy. It's super aromatic, to be sure: I almost always detect pronounced aromas of lychees, flowers and canned fruit syrup, amongst other things, but rarely the token spice I'm looking for. So imagine my excitement when I came upon what I've affectionately dubbed a Gewurz's Gewurz - one that tastes and smells exactly like the varietal's supposed to! Even better yet: this beauty hails, of all places, from little-known Tasmania. 
A couple of Saturdays ago my sister and I took an impromptu trip to Santa Cruz. It was one of those Saturdays where you find yourself, surprisingly, with some free time on your hands, and so we thought "why not?!" I'd been itching to check out the area, and harvest time seemed the perfect time to do it. All I can say is that we had a simply fabulous time, particularly at very laid-back 
Alright, alright, so it's not what you think! For those in the know out there, Chateau de Beaucastel, one of the most famous estates in France's southern Rhone Valley, is known for having enormous stones in its vineyards. 
Everyone, meet Rodolphe de Pins, current winemaker-owner at Chateau de Montfaucon, a southern Rhone estate that's been around for just about a Millenium. Davis-educated, world-traveled, and totally down-to-earth, de Pins is in the process of rejuvenating his family's ancient estate and turning out some really excellent wines. In the process, he's beautifully marrying new methods with old locations and philosophies, as evidenced in his outfitting the estate's 500-year-old winery with new equipment and barrels. The result is a totally functional and appealingly harmonious coming-together of old and new, all situated just beneath his family's 1000-year-old chateau on the hill. 
"It is a very good day. We got a new tractor and the cicadas didn't start singing until 9AM." 
Things got off to a very good start today after I disembarked from my red eye from NYC. Amazingly enough, my good pal and travel partner in crime 
I've always thought of wine as the ultimate interpreter. As interpreter par excellence of place, of people, of culture. I think there are other things that also capture time and momentum and the spirit of of an era. Film and music come to mind as the clearest examples of this ability of one thing to encapsulate so many different things cultural and temporal. 
I visited cult Cab producer 
Tired of aimlessly wandering the aisles of your local wine store like a bargain hunter at a played-out sample sale? Know your Two Buck Chuck from your Opus 1, but everything else in between seems...the same? 
As an English major in college I was prone to long windedness. Fortunately, they looked fondly on that so long as you got your message across at the same time. Detailed descriptions, colorful but precise verbs and well chosen metaphors were preferred to, say, just saying something. Although a simple phrase like "The woman wept" may have been completely true, penning it as such would never get you Latin Honors at graduation. Instead, you might say something like "having cast off her youthful naivete and accepted that her love would never be requited, the lonely woman wept; in doing so she demonstrated both her vulnerability and her transition to the hard but all-comprehending world of adulthood." 
My sister called me the other day more upset than I'd heard her sound in a long time. "Dude," she said to me. "Yes?" I replied. "I've got viral pink eye." Doh! I thought immediately, Homer Simpson's catchall bummer phrase perfectly appropriate. You see, Claire's bday was coming up, and this pink eye thing put a major monkey wrench in her plans. Apparently pink eye - in both eyes nonetheless - is seriously contagious for at least 5 to 7 days' time. Her birthday is this weekend. She's had to cancel all celebrations and revelry. And, worst of all, she can't even see anyone for fear of transmitting the virus. Homegirl can't even go to WORK. It's sort of like solitary confinement, except that your boss still expects you to electronically transmit your work from your prison cell. 
Capri Suns are SO last year. 
I recently checked in on the mysterious Cain Vineyard & Winery on the same trip that took me to Smith Madrone on Spring Mountain above Napa Valley. I say "mysterious" because, although I've heard a lot about the winery's famous Cain Five Cabernet Sauvignon-based blend, until I was at the winery I'd never actually SEEN a real live bottle of the stuff. It was the much-lauded-but-never-seen wine. And it's bloody expensive. So, you know, I find it mysterious.
oh so compact cube!
I recently had the great pleasure of visiting one of the best estates on Napa's Spring Mountain, Smith Madrone. I'd connected with the two brothers who own and run the operation, Charlie and Stu Smith, through Stu's wife, Julie Ann, with whom I recently became acquainted. Julie Ann said that if I was ever in Napa looking for a good spot to visit and taste, I ought to consider her husband's place. When I planned a trip earlier this month, I reconnected and made an appointment. Boy am I glad I did! In going to Smith Madrone I felt like I took a step back in time. 
His name's not Jim, but 