Crazy wine bar

As a wino, I love wine bars. Love them. You get to try a variety of wines you might not find elsewhere or not be able to buy anywhere else. They usually have interesting cheeses and sliced meats and other small plates for munching on. And in general, you feel like an adult in one, which has become a rare commodity for me ever since my daughter was born two years ago (if we do go out to a restaurant as a family, it's usually before 6 p.m. at a "kid-friendly" place - ie - not too slick or expensive, usually with beat up wooden tables and open enough so if she complains or cries people don't get upset. Yes, I'm looking at you Triple Rock, our go-to fam-friendly restaurant with the amazing beer selection.)

But getting back to the matter at hand - when I've been allowed out of the house after dark for a dad's night out or just a drink with a friend, I've been going to Alameda Wine Co. and loving it.

The place is not for everybody. It certainly has its quirks, the main one being the owner, a willow-thin, bald woman who wears droopy sweat pants that expose a thong as she walks around behind the bar. She also seems to have a nervous breakdown every time I'm there, swearing profusely and loudly about ex-customers who didn't pay or someone who pissed her off. I'd imagine it's kind of scary for people who didn't grow up with parents who screamed a lot. (Check out the one-star reviews on yelp for a taste of the offended customers - here).

Ok, on to the positives. The selection is nice and affordable. You can get a small pour or a large pour and pay accordingly. This is super if you're like me and want to try several selections on the menu without committing to an entire glass. The variety of the selection is nice too. When I've been I've found interesting American, Italian, French, Spanish and Argentinian offerings. There's a 1977 port you can try if you want. Last time the bartender popped open a really great madeira (I think it was a Rare Wine Company Historic Series Madeira Boston Boal NV) to show me how good madeira can be - and boy was she right.

The bar is curvy and the seats are leather with backs. You can sit for hours there twirling around, creating mini-flights of wine from the menu, and pick at plates of charcuterie and artisinal cheese. If you liked something you drank, they also have a retail end of the store with well priced wines that are mostly under $20 and include a lot of small production, well made choices.

If you're ever in Alameda, check this place out.

Paul Mathew 2008 Knight's Valley Gamay Noir

Another nice find from the Wine Mine in Oakland! The Paul Mathew 2008 Knight's Valley Gamay Noir cost $13.99 (MSRP $16) and clocks in at 13.4% alcohol. It's appearance is a translucent cherry color tending toward purple at the edges. Slight nose, but in the mouth bright cherry notes (reminded me of Hi-C cherry flavored beverages) and a bit gamey. After a few days sitting in my fridge, I finished it off last night and found additional flavors of cinnamon and tobacco, which were kind of bizarre to get from gamay.

This is a great wine for the summer, it's light, fruity, and tastes good chilled. Try it instead of a rose with some lighter fare, as the acidity probably won't be as sharp as a rose.

I also like this wine because it's small production - only 133 cases produced from a 60-year old, two acre plot in Calistoga. The NYT's wine writer, Eric Asimov, had an article today about the difficulty of finding good, cheap and interesting American reds. I especially found myself shaking my head in agreement with this sentence: "In effect, then, California produces a small amount of top-flight wine along with an ocean of generic wine that seeks to imitate the top echelon, often through artifice like oak substitutes and additives. All too often, the choices are expensive cabernet or chardonnay, and imitation expensive cabernet or chardonnay."

Asimov's take mirrors my own opinion and findings as a wine drinker who mainly stays within the $10-$20 a bottle price range. Interesting and unique wines are difficult to find from the U.S. But they can be found, and some, like this gamay, can be utterly enjoyable.

The Velvet Hammer

My perusal of Charles Smith wines continues with The Velvet Hammer, a 2007 Merlot from Columbia Valley, Washington. Charles Smith is the crazy-haired guy who used to be a promoter for Danish rock bands, then decided to make wine in Washington State more than a decade ago.

I've tried and reviewed his Kung Fu Girl Riesling and Boom Boom Syrah! so when I saw this on the shelf at Farmstead Cheese and Wine in Alameda, I grabbed a bottle (for $15.99, I think).

Love the name and graphic. Also nice to see, on the back of the bottle, was this motto: "Land to Hand, Vineyard to Bottle," an ode to producing wines that taste like, well, wine, and not toasted oak and vanilla. Or as Smith says on his site: "The intent is to create wines to be enjoyed now, but with typicity with regards to variety—that is merlot that tastes like merlot—and to the vineyard—wine that tastes like where it was grown. The wines are full of flavor, balanced, and true to their place of origin."

I've largely been disappointed with cheaper American wines lately, as they tend to taste over-made. Some people criticize me for criticizing these wines - after all, why pick on a bottle that costs less than $15? Well, for most drinkers who chose to imbibe every night with a meal, this is probably your sweet spot, price wise. So why not ferret out the values, finds and nicely made wines in this price range?

It's not hard to find, if you know what to look for. Loire Valley reds, in my shopping experience, hit the mark. Washington State also seems to put out a good amount of these wines. Wine regions in California far removed from Napa Valley and expectations of being a "big massive trophy bottle" can also surprise.

Some of the things I look for on the bottle is a description of limited interaction between the wine maker and wine. Organic, biodynamic, no filtering or fining, carbonic maceration, etc etc etc. These are a few of many terms you might see on a bottle expressing to you, the buyer, that the liquid held in the bottle in your hand wasn't treated like a commodity beverage.

Now not all these wines are great. In fact they can be hit or miss, and just because the grapes were grown with limited chemicals doesn't mean it wasn't picked too ripe or stored in oak for too long. But with a sea of choices in front of you at the wine store, these are some hints as to what might be an interesting purchase.

Back to the Velvet Hammer. It was a dark burgundy in color, and murky in the glass. Slight nose of spices and dark red berries, and in the mouth showed lovely cloves, nutmeg, wild blackberries and cedar notes. This wine was mostly spice for me - cool spice - not the kind that sear the tongue, but ones that seem to chill the palate.

The winemaker's website says this of the wine: "Balanced, rich and explosive. Think red plums, bittersweet cocoa with hints of smoke and cedar. SO SMOOTH, SO NAUGHTY, AND SO VERY, VERY NICE." (MSRP: $12).

This wasn't an amazing, mind blowing wine. It didn't move me to sing it's praises like some other recent bottles I've had (like this one). But it was a nice wine, and, if you're used to too many overdone American Merlots, is a nice contrast. Plus for $12-$16 a bottle, won't kill the wallet.

Ritual Roasters Fazenda Esperança Pulped Natural, Brasil

Pulped naturals are an intriguing halfway point between washed coffees and full naturals (or dried processed). I really like naturals. They give you interesting, murky, maybe even musty sweet fruit flavors with muted acidity. Washed coffees can give you a more complex, subtle cup and lots of acidity. A pulped natural is when the outer layer of the coffee cherry is stripped off, and the coffee bean, embodied in the fruity mucus, is left to dry in the sun.

When I went in to Ritual last weekend looking for something new to try, I originally grabbed a bag of the Fazenda Kaquend, the first place winner in the Brazilian Cup of Excellence contest. It's not often you get to try a CoE #1 coffee. However, I checked out the price and decided $30 was a little rich for me right now. Trying to cut back expenses, given the depression and all...and spending that much for coffee is a little hard to justify.

However, the Fazenda Esperança caught my eye. Also a pulped natural from Brazil, this coffee was a mere $15. Deal!

I had a hard time dialing this coffee in as an espresso. The few times I tried, I got very light colored crema, blonde/tan in color and lasting a medium time before fading. In the small cup, this coffee tasted like dark chocolate and cinnamon. Nice milky mouthfeel. Now that I'm reading Ritual's description, I also recall getting malt chocolate. Whoppers-candy like.

As a French press, this coffee is all hazelnut. Almost like a Dunkin' Donuts flavored coffee. But much better. There was some vanilla notes in there as well, but this was really dominated by the hazelnut taste.

From Ritual's website: "Produced by the Souza family—João and Tiago—in Campos Altos, Brasil, this coffee is a micro-lot from their farm, Fazenda Esperança, located in Brasil’s Cerrado eco-region. These Mundo Novo, Acaia, and Catuai trees were processed in the pulped-natural manner—pulping of the coffee fruit followed by drying with some mucilage, developing natural sweetness with clean, syrupy body. This coffee is clean and syrupy with flavors of malt chocolate, toasted aniseed, and sesame."

Barefoot's "The Boss" Espresso

One of my pet peeves is people who refer to certain coffees as espresso beans, as if beans used for espresso are somehow magically different from other coffee beans. They're not. Espresso is a preparation of coffee. The beans you use to make it can be any particular type. While I wouldn't fault a non-coffee person for not knowing this, I was surprised to see that annoying commentator on Iron Chef referring to some beans during the recent coffee episode as espresso beans, and not just dark roasted beans (in general, beans for espresso tend to be roasted darker than your garden variety beans used for coffee because it mellows bright flavors that can be intense and overpowering in the small cup).

So this little rant brings me back to the original point of my post, which is a description of Barefoot Coffee's "The Boss!" Espresso. I picked this up from their Santa Clara (or is it San Jose? I'm never quite clear on that) cafe earlier this month and have been enjoying it ever since. It's a blend of Brazil Datera Monte Cristo, India Jasmina and Ethiopia Dale.

I found this blend to have a nice presence of blueberries in its aroma and taste. Crema straddles the light-dark brown line, and for me lasted well after the shot was pulled. Can dissipate with a lot of milk, but tasted great as a macchiato.

I have also brewed this blend as a coffee, and am currently sipping the results from a pour over. While lacking a body that lives up to its name, the blueberries are there bright and shiny. Again, the point is, espresso beans can be enjoyed as coffee, and coffee can certainly be pulled as an espresso with great results.

Barefoot, by the way, gives the blend this description: "Dope sweet thickness and chocolate berries con panna. Chocolatey goodness with some sneaked in spice and berry notes. Touch of citrus kiss in the finish. Thick, thick, sticky and gooey. A whole lot of good chocolate and fruit in your cup."

Portable Espresso Makers

I received a press release today from a company called mypressi that makes a handheld espresso maker, called the Twist. From the promo photos, it looks gorgeous. Apparently this device, which can use either pods or grounds, gets 9 bars of pressure, the standard required to officially make espresso. It says it doesn't require external power to work, just hot water and gas cartridges that you can find at kitchen retail stores. Don't see price information, which would be a big factor in how many of these are actually sold. It's biggest claim to fame so far is that it was awarded the "best new consumer product" by the SCAA recently.

While mypressi claims the Twist is the first portable espresso maker, I've certainly seen others advertised elsewhere.

Here's the Handpresso, a device that's currently priced below $90 on amazon.com


Reviewers seem to like it a lot.

I don't personally travel enough for this to be an issue, although when I do travel, I always try to find a third-wave cafe or roaster at my destination so this doesn't become an issue. Of course, if you're camping, then something like this, or the AeroPress is pretty cheap and easy to use.

CL Wines 2005 Sonoma Coast Syrah

Continuing, but probably getting close to the end of, my Syrah kick now that it's getting warmer out, I picked up this bottle at Farmstead Cheese and Wine in Alameda, a little shop that has some great small production wines, for about $15 (In doing some online searching about it, I see that it can be had for as low as $9.99 elsewhere).

This wine was totally pitch black in color. It had a nose of dried earth and slightly rotting pine needles. In the glass there was definitely some alcoholic heat, along with blackberries and a blue cheese flavor. There's a nice smoked paprika

Couldn't find a website for the winemakers, but did stumble across this description from WineGeeks: David Lattin founded Craven & Lattin in 1998 when he left Acacia Winery in 1998. His wife, Kendra Craven, is a trained enologist and compliments him well on the business side of the wine industry. They produce 150 to 300 cases of each single vineyard wine they make, with a focus on Pinot Noir from various appellations.

Kim Crawford 2008 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

Kim Crawford's 2008 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc was rated a best buy by Wine Spectator's April 30, 2009 edition, receiving 91 points. I haven't explored New Zealand's SBs, which it's famous for, so when I saw this bottle for $15 on sale at Safeway (normally $19) I quickly picked it up.

What I've read about these wines is the presence of a grassy flavors, which is unique, or at least stronger, than Sauvignon Blancs from other origins.

So what did I find? Well, on the nose, grassy notes and lime leaf. In the glass, I got a nice round mouthfeel, with the acidity picking up half way through and lingers on the finish. Some black liquorish notes are there, as well as pink grapefruit, tropical fruit, but this wine is dominated by lime flavors - what I would describe as lime popsicle. Really strong.

I liked this wine, and can see myself getting again some hot day this summer.

Blue Bottle Ferry Building Update

Had a chance to run over to the Ferry Building during my lunch break to check out the recently opened, third Blue Bottle location. Situated in a corner space, the cafe has two places to buy coffee. On one side, there's a little shop with some beans, machines and cups along with a glass counter containing baked items. There's also sandwiches on the counter for sale.

You can get a pour-over coffee or espresso-based drink from a three head, spring hand pulled lever here, and the baristas were pulling Blue Bottle's Retrofit Espresso blend. In this iteration, I found the scents coming from my mug more exciting than the taste itself.

Pulled slowly from the lever, my shot had nice, light tan-colored crema that didn't dissipate quickly. I found aromas of tropical fruits, chocolate and some muted spice on the nose. In the mouth, however, the espresso was more flat that I expected. It went down without harshness, but did have some flavors of smoked wood.

On the other side of the cafe, you can order espresso drinks from a more traditional La Marzocco. One of the baristas told me they're planning on offering single origin espresso shots at some future date. While some people in the coffee world prefer blends, I personally think having a choice is great because it allows people to truly see the difference growing conditions, country of origin and processed method can have on the end product.

Rosenblum 2006 Rockpile Road Zinfandel

This was one of the wines I received in my March club shipment from Rosenblum. Retails for $35, member price is $28. I have to say, I really liked it, and was surprised at the layers of complexity I tasted. Zinfandel is something of a first love for me, as it was the first varietal I latched onto a decade ago when I began drinking wine on a regular basis. It can be fun, cheap, spicy and juicy without being snobby or pretentious. You don't always need to focus on discerning its characteristics, because it's so pleasant and uncomplicated. Maybe that's why I have a hard time spending a lot for a bottle of Zinfandel (and I consider $30 or more expensive for Zinfandels).

My Zin drinking has been limited over the past few years, as there seems to be a trend of producers making their wines bigger and bigger, with high alcohol levels and high prices to match. I haven't enjoyed many Zins I've tried recently as much as I remember enjoying them years ago (this could just be a nostalgic perspective thing, but that's a psychological question I don't feel like exploring here) so I've subsequently stopped buying them.

Rosenblum is known for their Zins, so it was no shocker that I got one in my club shipment. I've been to their tasting room numerous times to taste some of the dozens of bottles they have (free tastings all the time thanks to the membership) but I haven't purchased any additional wines there because while they seem nice, I didn't feel like putting out $30-$40 a bottle for them.

Then I tried the 2006 Rockpile Road Zinfandel, and my opinion on the matter changed.

Here is a lovely wine with a nose of cedar, spice and blue and black fruits. In the mouth, I found an attack of clean tart berry fruit, which gives way to a beautiful blackberry preserve, blueberries, and finishes with vanilla spice and, on one night, seemed to show shades of grape bubblicious gum flavor.

This wine is big, but unlike lesser Zins, it doesn't devolve into a mix of unreal sugary sweet fruit flavors and vodka-like alcohol heat; instead, it ramps up in your mouth without losing its cohesion. I plan on picking up another bottle next time I visit the winery, as this zin is certainly worth the price.