We’ve mentioned this wine before but that was the 2001 angeli cuvee which managed to hold onto for over a year. We just had a chance to try the 2005 version…which was in our possession for about a week. Some might call that an improvement…

In keeping with our desire to enjoy qualty but remain frugal/cheap/miserly we rarely break the $10 barrier in the wine department. Every now and again when the wild hair strikes we’ll throw caution to the wind and splurge on a $15 bottle – but only very rarely and only in uber special occasions…like Boxing Day…or Thursday.

Anyhoo, based on a hot tip from her Father (where he called and gloated with a “guess what I’m drinking right now…”) Julie ventured forth and thus liberated our beloved Angeli Cuvee from the wine dungeon at Fred Meyer. On sale, no less – w00t!

It may come as a bit of a shock to you to learn that we don’t really keep meticulous notes about these sorts of things but it was something like $28.

Winemaker propoganda:

If this wine were any denser it would be a solid. Almost black in color, there is a deep nose of graphite, charcoal, and ripe black fruit as well as a layered brooding dark fruit mixture, with vanilla and toasty oak overtones.

This wine will pay great dividends to cellar time and will last up to and improve over the next 15 years.

We have dreams about this wine…

Low-quality blurrycam photo...sorry 'bout that.

Okay, so now that Lyndie knows about this we can finally publish this (very silly) post

A month or two ago a cohort/murder/bevy/horde of our family descended in a raving rabid mass on the sleepy and unsuspecting village of Seaside, Oregon. Cavorting and pillaging as we went we left no citizen unsullied by our passing.

Woe be unto all who stray into our paths…

The victims of our weekend of debauchery were many.  Among them was the proprietor of a classy little wine shop who found himself relieved of the majority of his wares in short order by our wild and wily womenfolk.

Among the many treasures begotten there was a lovely gem we’d not laid eyes upon before. Avast! (I don’t know, it just started sounding all piratey)

We’ve always loved the wines from Bogle so this was an easy sell. The blend of grapes – Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, and Mourvèdre – is similar to the Marietta Cellars Angeli Cuvée (the Angeli contains Carignane instead of Mourvèdre) which we’ve always loved and rarely can afford.

As is our habit, here’s the description in (most of) it’s glory from the Bogle website. Brace yourselves:

“Three distinctive varietals combine lush berry and fierce spice into a wine characterized by its incandescence. Deeply luscious and succulent blackberries ignite this vintage of our rich ruby apparition. Aromas of anise and sweet fig are embraced by touches of black pepper. From the shadowed dark depths, subtle notes of cloves and vanilla emerge and compliment the concentrated fruit characters of this wine. ” and on and on and so forth…

And that pretty much sums it all up…

This was a very good $20 bottle of wine with an extremely cool label. Twenty bucks is normally way out of our price range but we so loved the other Bogle wines that we thought it was worth it. If you’re the type that thinks nothing of dropping that kind of money on a bottle of wine or lighting cigars with burning $100 bills or whatever then you might find this to be a pretty satisfying daily drinker.

The rest of us lowly hourly swine will save it for special occasions.

Because we’re cheap and miserly er, budget-conscious we normally won’t spring for a $13 bottle of wine ‘just cuz’. But, if it’s a Cab and it scores 87 points at Wine Spectator then we figure it’s probably worth a gander.

So when we found this Santa Julia Organica (Hey! It’s organic!) Cabernet Sauvignon at LifeSource Natural Foods we decided to give it a whirl. Argentina is producing wines that are popping up all over the place on ‘Best Buy’ and ‘Top 100′ lists and this wine is from the Mendoza region (trés popular) so we felt like it was a pretty safe bet.

We tend not to lean in a non-Californian direction very often when we go-a-shopping for Cabernet because, honestly, we’re suckers for big, jammy California wines and international varietals just don’t do it for us. Blame it on all those ‘tobacco’ and ‘mineral’ flavors if you want. Or, we could just all agree that we here at The Haute Kitchen have palates made of dusty sun-baked shoe leather, whatever.

The point we’re trying to make here is that we were branching out when we bought this wine and we deserve to be recognized and heartily praised for it. We were living dangerously. Throwing caution to the wind, if you will. Letting fly with our culinary devil-may-care attitudes come heck or high water…

Turns out that this wine isn’t all that foreign-tasting after all. It’s intensely colored and has lots of bright fruit flavors. Though it doesn’t have a ton of residual sugar to give it that ‘jammy’ quality it is nicely balanced and very drinkable (not at all tobacco-y or mineral-y). Here’s what Wine Enthusiast had to say about it:

“A really nice and lighter-styled Cabernet with bright fruit and spicy oak crawling on the bouquet. The palate is full of friendly raspberry, strawberry and plum, while the finish is round and chocolaty. For the money, this is an extremely complete little wine that offers just right balance throughout.”

We probably won’t be rushing out to buy this one again since there’s lots of less expensive wines that we liked just as well. But if you happen across it during the course of your wine travels and you’re in the mood for a little south-’o-the-border, give it a go and let us know what you think (but try to be nice to us – we haven’t been practicing wine-snobbery for very long).

We’ve been consistently loving the big, luscious red wines from Marietta Cellars for a while now. We went through a Zinfandel phase a couple of years ago, which is how we discovered them and since then we’ve had a chance to drink at least a few bottles of every year’s release of the ‘Lot’ batches and it’s always one of our favorites.

Though the different ‘Lots’ are always very good wines, the #47 is exceptional we think: wonderfully rich and a little fruit-forward with fabulous, silky mouthfeel. It’s definitely a great buy at around $13. This is the wine we drink when we’re feeling a teensy bit fancier than our regular $7 a bottle favorites can support. Read more »

Another great buy on a big, lush red wine. Read more »