Peju Provence
Appellation: Napa & Mendocino
ALC: 13% (Residual Sugar 1.4%)
You can buy this wine at: peju.com
Haydn gives this wine: 86pts

Yes. I do admit that I drool over beautiful Bordeauxs. Some days I’m yearning for a wine that is more complex then a Mensa application. Other times, I want an easy-drinking thrist-quenching kind of wine. That’s were the Pjeu Provence comes in.

This is one of the most unusual wines I’ve had in a while. While the notes are surprisingly simple, the makeup of this wine is anything but. To start, it’s a blend of both red grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Zinfandel, and white grapes: Chardonnay and French Colombard. While it may seem crazy, the result is quite delicious.

To cap off the crazy factor, you’re advised to serve chilled. It’s a hard concept at first to comprehend, putting a wine blended with red grapes in the fridge to chill. But the result is great. And I can some up the feeling in one word— sangria!

You heard me. It’s basically Sangria disguised. Closing my eyes, I could easily picture big blocks of ice floating in this glass. The residual sugar would be real sugar if it were a true Sangria.

The wine has hints of bright cherry and cranberries, that make you want to smile while puckering at the same time. It’s a total fruit forward wine. Easy to drink, easy to enjoy.

For all those Bay Area folks, this wine is going to be great for those Indian summer evenings. The days when the sun starts to set sooner yet it still feels like July. It’s a great transitional wine where you can go from total whites in the summer to the luscious and full-bodied reds in the winer.

Naturally you’re going to want this with some sort of Spanish dish. Tapas, empenadas, maybe even a bit of smoked chorizo. Yet this wine can stand on it’s own and simply sipped as a starter wine.

One cool wine from one of the hallmark wineries of the Napa Valley.

Cheers,
Haydn

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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

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