Last weekend, I had the pleasure of checking out Jeff Cohn Cellars’ tasting room in Oakland along with my friend Peter, the man behind Bung R. Cooper’s wine blog. Jeff Cohn, a renowned winemaker, spent a decade learning from and crafting Rosenblum wines before starting his own winery in 2006.  He’s also a genuinely nice
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This is the first of several posts covering my experience at the Wine Bloggers Conference (WBC14) held in Buellton, CA, last weekend. I’ll feature one per week, likely through August, and why not start with what’s most important to me? Naturally, that’s the wines themselves. Over the course of the conference, I tasted around 70
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Trader Joe’s Grande Reserve Carneros Pinot Noir 2011 Napa, California I tasted this wine before purchasing it at Trader Joe’s, and I’m glad the sample convinced me to get a bottle. Its rich, medium-bodied boysenberry digs into me and won’t let go. The nose has a fleeting burst of fig newton, but is otherwise lackluster.
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Martine Galhoune Moulin 2010 Pinot Noir France Nectarine. The nose of this wine is full of nectarine. It’s thin-bodied, fun to drink, and a welcome shift from the overly dry wines I’ve had lately. I’d call this one medium dry. It has vanilla, spice, nectarine, chocolate, and cherry all balanced well together. The MGM 2010
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Arrow Creek 2009 Pinot Noir California It’s on the browner side of red for a wine, mudlike in color. I smell rhubarb, plum, and tobacco, and the plum sticks with me when sipping. It or some other stonefruit is prominent. There are a lot of tannins, and the wine tastes dark with coffee and tobacco
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Tisdale Pinot Noir (vintage free, yo!) Modesto, CA This wine looks thin, watery, dark brown, and plum. It smells of bitter chocolate and currants. As expected, it tastes very thin and watery. Fleeting cocoa powder comes first followed by the currant and overripe figs with some apricot notes. Then the cocoa powder rushes back in
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Redwood Creek Pinot Noir 2009 Modesto, California, bottling of French grapes This pinot has a nose of blueberry, teriyaki, vanilla, and cardamom, and even though I don’t like blueberries, it smells like it’d be a great sauce for duck or a thick steak. When sipping, the element of spice is the most pronounced. The cardamom
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Jujube’s Semler Wine Dinner There are few things I like more than wine dinners at Jujube. For $42 per person with four courses and four glasses of wine, they really aren’t a bad deal at all. Tuesday night, I went to one with my husband and a pair of foodie friends that was hosted by
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Wine: Red Bicyclette Pinot Noir 2008 Region: Languedoc-Roussillon, France The nose smells of chocolate and berry. It tastes like biting into a packaged cherry danish that has been dipped in chocolate donut glaze. Both the spice and the texture are rather thin. I don’t like the chocolate aftertaste (shocking, I know). It’s an adequate wine
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Wine: Turning Leaf Pinot Noir 2007 Region: Germany This pinot noir has a vibrant nose of Saint Anne’s cherry.  Until this glass, it had been a long time since I’d had a bright, light-bodied wine that didn’t make me pucker.  It’s very tasty, with plenty of mildly tart cherries to plop in your mouth.  Have
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