Great wines under $20 – 2006 Incognito Rouge
2006 Incognito Rouge
by Haydn Adams | Beyond Napa Valley Wine Blog
Appellation: Lodi, California
ALC: Unknown
You can buy this wine at: lodivineyards.com/incognito.htm
Retail price: $19.95
Haydn gives it: 90pts
This has to be one of the cooler labels for a wine. There is something anti-establishment about this. No gold foil. No embossing. Yet it is enticing and a bit mysterious.
This wine proved to be a bit of a mystery. My good friend, and wine expert, Beth and I, spent a good deal of time on this bottle. The reason being was that it had no indication of the exact blend of the wine. Beth and I deliberated for a while with this bottle. The only thing we knew was that the wine was sourced from Lodi. As you can see from the label, nothing else is really known. We assume that it was some sort of blend, and thus the wager began to figure out what was in the bottle.
(If you don’t want to know the makeup and blend, I’d advise you to stop reading here)
With our friend, Berley looking at us like we were a bit obsessed (ok, so I think we are), we really got in to the wine and started picking it apart. Lodi only grows certain wines so we could narrow it down a bit when it came to specific grapes. It turns around that we were both right, as this wine is “a tango of” Mourvedre, Syrah, Petite Sirah, Cinsault, Carignane, Tannat, Malbec, Cabernet Franc and Grenache. I don’t know if that is in the order of percentages or not.
What you can pick out of this wine is a bit of pepper and smoke, making it indicative of the Rhone varietal, thus the blending grapes (Grenache, Syrah Mourvédre) were there. Yet with the smoky characteristics there were also fruits that emerged. It was as if someone smoke-dried the fruits, so they gained a different taste than from your local farmers market.
The real winner is in the price—$19.95 retail. It was a well-structured wine that probably could have been priced much higher, yet came in at an affordable price. Try this wine if you’re new to the Rhone world, as it’s made to suit normal, everyday palates yet add a bit of complexity for a twist.
Decant and enjoy!
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Haydn Adams is the author of the book, Wineries Beyond Napa Valley: Dry Creek and Alexander Valley, an insider’s tasting guide to the hidden gems region. He also contributes to the Beyond Napa Valley Wine Blog, writes for vinvillage.com, and can be found roaming the hills of Sonoma County looking for the next hidden gems. You can contact him at haydn@beyondnapavalley.com
