Happy New Year!

Staff Picks Tasting

#1 Selling wine of 2009!

Jaume Serra Cristalino Cava Brut - $8.99

(50% Macabeo, 35% Parellada, 15% Xarello; Cava, Spain)

Unless you're unswervingly devoted to $30-and-up French nonvintage brut Champagne, you should be buying this by the case now. Very Champagne-like in its racy, minerally bouquet and yeasty, well-delineated fruit, and very un-Cava like in its total lack of dank mustiness on the finish, this will have Francophiles checking the bottle to see if it's from Epernay or Reims. Indeed, after researching local yeasts, the winery took the extraordinary step of importing their yeast from Champagne, France in order to impart the finest quality to their Cavas.

1,332 bottles/111 cases sold

Steininger Gruner Veltliner Kamptal 2008 - $12.99
(100% Gruner Veltliner; Kamptal, Austria)

Regular MSWS wine tasting habitues will recognize this wine and may ask themselves, “Best of 2009?” Well, no, but I chose this wine because it represents what was best about 2009 for me. I began the year by going on my first wine trip outside of Virginia, to Austria, and I fell firmly in love with the country, it's wine, the Gruner Veltliner grape, and with the Steininger family, who showed me the true meaning of hospitality. I admit that I often love a wine for reasons beyond how it tastes. So was this the best wine I had last year? No, but it is a perfect example of what was best about wine for me in 2009. - Toby

Four Sisters Sauvignon Blanc 2008 - $12.99

(Sauvignon Blanc; South Eastern Australia)

Four Sisters is the creation of Trevor Mast of Mount Langi Ghiran, world famous for its Shiraz. Named after the winemaker's four daughters (Ineke, Anja, Sophie and Daliah), this beautifully executed white delivers drinkability and jazzy appeal. Fruit driven and fresh, it shows passionfruit, gooseberry, and guava. The Four Sisters are perfect with all fare, and as with all good sisters, they make the most charming company.

La Cappuccina Soave San Brizio 2006 – $14.99
(100% Garganega, Soave, Italy)

Located in northern Italy’'s province of Verona near the town of Soave, La Cappuccina is named for the small, restored 15th century chapel of Capuchin friars. The grape is Garganega. The wine is So-AH-vey. “Real” Soave, not “grocery store” Soave, showing aromas of white flowers, citrus, yellow apples, & hazelnuts. Its classic Soave mineral character combined with a vibrant acidity make it the perfect wine to drink in the evening at Harry’'s Bar in Venice. This bottling, “San Brizio,” was fermented and aged in barrel which makes the wine richer and more complex. La Cappuccina is a family affair: Pier Antonio, Sisto, Elena, and their father Lorenzo Tessari. - Robert

Primitivo Quiles "Cono 4" 2008 - $11.99
(100% Monestrell; Alicante, Spain)

This wine is one of my top recommended (and consumed but who's counting) wines of 2009. The under $15 dollar crowd can start to seem like a mass of generic "ripe and easy to drink" types, spanning the horizon. Taking up every inch of available space. Looming large like a giant black cloud. Sucking up all the available oxygen before the more dynamic and individual wines even get a chance. Well, that's a bit dramatic but it can get a bit boring, to say the least. This wine is a fabulous combination of the old and the new. Due to some extra racking (a tradition in old style Spanish reds and also because Monestrell throws a lot of sediment) and storage under ground, what you don't get is a giant fruit bomb from a hot region. What you do get is a wine with ample fruit and also some of the qualities of a slightly older wine. Hints of raisin and port. Super good. Word up. - Sian

Jacquet de la Grave Bordeaux Rouge 2005 -$12.99

(52% Merlot, 46% Cabernet Sauvignon, 2% Cabernet Franc; Bordeaux, France)

We loved this petit Bordeaux when Pamela Margaux brought it by to taste. A ready-to-drink right-bank red Bordeaux, it shows a good bit of soft, pretty Merlot fruit underpinned by the firm structure of Cabernet. The winery lies in the village of Moulon due south of Libourne. They blend Merlot 52%, Cabernet Sauvignon 46%, Cabernet Franc 2%.” Beef Bourguignon anyone? (picked by Liz)

Clos de Noi Samso Vinyes Velles 2008 – $16.99
(100% Cinsault; Montsant, Spain)

My favorite new wine is Clos de Noi Samso. It's from Catalonia. Spiritually, I'm from Barcelona, too, for what it's worth. A rich, medium-bodied wine that we shared with in-laws during the holidays... big flavors of cherry and something pleasingly herbal. We drank it with a supper featuring one of our house favorites... our take on the C&O's Steak Chinoise. Samso, carignane, carinina... the grape is in good hands from the winemakers at Clos de Noi. - Michael

Familia Mayol Bonarda 2007 – $14.99
(100% Bonarda; Mendoza, Argentina)

This wine is 100% Bonarda, the second most commonly grown grape in Argentina after Malbec, which Familia Mayol also makes well. I've sold this delicious, dry and subtly fruit forward wine to tons of strangers, and I still don't even know why I like it so much—maybe because this is the first Bonarda from Mendoza I ever stained my teeth on, maybe because it's such a good deal. I recommend it decanted and poured into very small antique wine glasses; that way it won't seem like you're drinking so much of it! - Sam

Black Wing, Shiraz, 2006 - $9.99
(100% Shiraz; Australia)

Wine of the Week On Sale $5.96

America’s other wine guru, Stephen Tanzer of The International Wine Cellar, says: “Red and dark berry scents are elegant and precise, with complicating notes of sexy vanilla and baking spices. Jammy blackberry and blackcurrant flavors are gently lifted by fresh acidity and a hint of cracked pepper. Finishes silky and sweet, with good length.” Stop in at ether store and try it before you buy it.

Victor Hazan's Italian Wine (1982) is my favorite book on that topic. Hazan writes brief, poetic pieces that distill the essence of a particular wine and the land from which it comes. On this wine he writes:

** Soave ** (D.O.C., VENETO)

(His Poetry)

"Soave is such an inoffensive, good-natured wine that to reproach it for not having a bolder personality seems peevish. Its role is to soothe, not to arouse.

I like to drink Soave from a carafe during one of the most deliciousty inconsequential moments of an Italian summer afternoon: the late lunch by the pool at the Cipriani in Venice, keeping equally abreast of gossip and the procession of antipasti, painlessly bridging the gap between a midday swim and the predinner nap.

I like to drink it again in the evening at Harry's Bar, when one's attention is divided between watching the coming and going of beautiful women and choosing the most tempting of the day's risottos.

I like to drink it at the shore, where what I am really drinking in are the smells of fish grilling and of the spiced sea air.

I like to drink Soave best when I have to think about it least. But not because it is a poor wine. If it were, its defects would be distracting. Soave balances firm but unobtrusive fruit with a neat measure of acidity, wrapping it up with a tart yet not emphatic aftertaste. It is clean-tasting and refreshing in a pleasingly self-effacing way. These are the qualities that have made it popular and at the same time so adaptable to large-scale production."

(His Prose)

"Soave is produced on primarily flat land midway between Vicenza and Verona. The luxuriant vineyards, from which very large yields are permitted, are plainly visible from the superhighway that runs parallel to them. The more desirable portion of a now greatly enlarged zone is the traditional production area around the pretty town of Soave. Wine from this area bears the qualification classico.

Soave is a blend of two grapes, garganega and a local variety of trebbiano called trebbiano di Soave. The latter is a lighter and more delicate trebbiano than the varieties referred to elsewhere in these pages, in descriptions of Tuscan whites, Frascati, and Trebbiano di Romagna. The ratio of garganega to trebbiano is approximately 80 percent to 20 percent. The two grapes are widely cultivated in the Veneto and in neighboring Lombardy, where they are used in varying proportions, or so;nctimes just one or the other grape is used alone, for other white wines.

Soave Bolla, which some people think is one word, has earned its vast market through its soundness, reliability, and uniformity. Like all virtues, these too have their dark side. In the achieving of a never varying standard of taste, charm is blurred and those small peaks of character of which even Soave is capable are flattened."