AvoidBadWine.com

Always keeping an eye out for good cheap wine, extensive field research – yeah, tasting wine – has yielded 3 red wine bargains for you to look for. These are 3 nice red wines that are priced very well. And one is a 2011 from California, so there were some good wines from that vintage. [...]

A few months ago I wrote about the shape of wine glasses. The proper shape has a definite effect on the taste of the wine. Beyond that the size of the glass makes a difference too. And as you might expect, bigger wines benefit from big wine glasses. Remember you are not necessarily putting more wine into a big glass. You are giving the wine more room to show its stuff.

Petite Sirah, not to be confused with Syrah, is a full bodied red wine. The first impression on one of big fruit flavors. It is dark, even opaque, and purple when young. You will mostly see Petite Sirah from California, although it is made elsewhere. Most do not show a great deal of mouth puckering tannin which is often seen in full bodied wines. Drinking Petite Sirah has been compared to putting on silk pajamas. That’s probably a little fanciful for me, but it is usually a wine with the right fruit flavors to go well with red meat. I had the pleasure recently of attending a tasting of 4 wines made from this grape.

Nothing is riding higher in California than the red grapes of the Rhone River area in France. These grapes are widely grown in many parts of the world. They have been made for years in California, and they are better than ever. There are more than 20 red varieties of grapes that can go into Rhone wines in France. In California you will usually see two or three of them. Most often seen is the Syrah. Next is the Grenache, and finally the Mourvedre.

A few months ago I wrote a post on the 2009 wines from Beaujolais. They are unusual because of their quality. Wines from here are usually good to very good, but rarely very good to great. Raves about the 2009 vintage have been coming in from all over. Apparently I don’t live in a place that gets the new stuff first. Yes, the wagon train did eventually make it to the general store here in deepest, darkest Central Florida, and it had what we have been waiting for.