Tried these two last night w/ TraderJoe's fare:
1. Ridge Calif Zin PasoRobles (5% PS; BenitoDusiRanch/PasoRobles/SLOCnty; 14.8%; Bttld: Sept 2010; Drk: 7/10-7/15: EB) 2009: Dark color; some vanilla/oak very intense blackberry/framboise/boysenberry/Zin big fruit slight earthy/dusty lovely nose w/o straying into the overripe/jammy side of Paso Zin; light vanilla/oak/coconut very strong blackberry/Zin/boysenberry lush/ripe flavor w/ soft tannins; long very strong blackberry/Zin/framboise/spicy bit tannic light vanilla/oak/coconutty light earthy/dusty finish; loads of ripe Zin fruit w/o being overripe or Smuckers jammy; much more interesting than the SweetBerry and a pleasure to drink. $28.00
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2. Sweetberry Sweet Red TW PasoRobles (13.5%; www.SweetberryWines.com); P&B by Sweetberry PasoRobles 2010: Med.dark color; very ripe/PR jammy boysenberry/blackberry/Zin rather intense grapey/framboise bit volatile nose; fairly sweet (3%-4% RS??) intense boysenberry/PR jammy/blackberry/Zin Smuckers blackberry jam soft very ripe bit earthy light tannic flavor; long very strong/intense PR jammy/boysenberry/blackberry/Zin slightly sweet bit tannic soft finish; speaks strong of the PR terroir; should be suitable for fatty braised short ribs w/ a somewhat sweet sauce; probably speaks more of the PR terroir than the Ridge; not nearly as revolting as I expected it to be. $5.00
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A wee BP:
1. Sweetberry: On SteveHeimhoff's blog, several posts have been over what he labels as "bottom shelf" wines...cheap sweet wines that appear on the bottom shelf at large retailers, an area he seldom bothers to look at, an area populated by (often) sweet wines for the unwashed masses. I, like many other serious wine geeks, are big fans of sweet wines. So I was puzzled by his disdain for the bottom/entry-level wines.
I was doing some last minute shopping at CostPlus World Market yesterday morning and wandered over into their wines section, an area I seldom venture into (almost never find anything of interest). I was staggered by the number of inexpensive/blatently inexpensive sweet wines that populated the shelves...Sweet Chardonnay/Sweet Cabernet Sauvignon/Sweet Shiraz/Sweet Moscato. Several of them bore the SweetBerry label. Turns out that this is a special label, probably for WorldMarket, made by DaouVineyards in PasoRobles. The URL takes you directly to the Daou website...but nary a mention, that I could find, of the SweetBerry label.
Given Heimhoff's ragging on these sweet wines, I was expecting it to be utterly revolting. Surprise/surprise, it was not. It was not nearly as interesting as the Ridge, but revolting?? Not in the least. It had a strong expression of PasoRobles terroir and, after all, isn't expression of a wine's terroir the ne plus ultra that any great wine can hope to achieve?? It had that indelible character that any wine that has gone thru RO or spinning cone expresses. So much for the claim by the wine poobahs that RO destroys terroir.
The wine was fairly sweet..so got a little boring after the first glass or two. But in the right context...this is not a bad wine...Heimhoff's thoughts to the contrary.
Just call me a bottom feeder if all those wines down there are that good.
Tom