The Return of the Grand Crew

Eight years in the making.
Five Wines from Five Years for Five People.
Three Primary Grapes; Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre.
One Wine Maker.
One Style of Wine.
One Good Night.
It was the Return of the Grand Crew!














and the
V T
E A
R S
T T
I I
C N
A G
L !

OK with the dramatic stuff over, a blind tasting was at hand where the vintage of each wine was to be determined.
The Vintages were; 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2003.

The wine was E. Guigal's Cotes du Rhone















I found the profile of each wine essentially the same well balanced, medium bodied with cherry, blackberry and slight spice. Although each one had a little something different, earthyness in the 1998, dustyness in 1999, pronounced cedar in the 2000, Licorice in the 2001 and herbs in the 2003. Suprisingly the newer vintages were not anymore jammy than the older ones. It was difficult to choose which ones were the older vintages and which ones were the newer vintages. The drinking window on these wines is around five years so I thought the 1998 and the 1999 would show thier age but they didn't and you can see by the results below that the most vintages guessed were 2.

Actual Order	Zep Queen	Composer	Bacon	Dude	Mistress Puffy
1998	2001	2000	2001	1998	Phooa
1999	2000	1998	1999	2000	99 or 00
2001	1998	1999	2000	2003	MothraFuckra
2003	1999	2001	2003	2001	2003
2000	2003	2003	1998	1998	98 or 03

As you can see only The Dude got the 1998.
Captain Bacon & Mistrees puffy got the 1999.
No one got the 2000 or the 2001.
Captain Bacon & Mistress Puffy got the 2003.
So all of us combined couldn't get them correct.

What I think this means is that the wine maker knows how to make consistant and tasty wines.

haphazard conscience 2

I think you get more wine in a bottle with a screwcap otherwise the air gap would be too large and lead to aging the wine quicker. Let's here it for the screwcap!

French wine to get cheaper!

Decanter reports that a new movie is in the works about the Paris Tasting in 1976. You know the tasting where Californian wines beat French wines in a blind tasting and subsequently made all California wine overpriced. The movie is good news if you are a French wine lover. This is because when the movie is released all of the lemmings will ignore french wine and only buy Californian Wine. This will cause a ripple affect increasing all of the problems the French are having trying to sell their wine, which in turn will make the price of French wine drop...You remember what happen to Merlot because of one comment from the last movie.

Rocking Alternative Wine

I recently came across this article which mentions the lead signer of the band Tool, Maynard James Keenan. He owns a winery, Caduceus, and he schedules concerts around the wineries schedule. I am not a big fan of the band but I don't hate them either. If you ever saw at a picture of of Maynard( I am pretty sure his friends don't call him that) or if you have heard the music of Tool, you would think he would be the last guy who would have a winery. Now I know I'm stereotyping him in thinking a gothic, heavy metal rocker just wouldn't be into wine, but I think it's great that to find out that someone you wounldn't expect is a wine geek.

Now I just can't get the image of these fancy wine writers writing reviews of Cadaceus wines while cganking the song Stinkfist on their Bang and Olufsen