WBW #44 Loire Lovefest...or not.

Wow! This WBW comes on the heels of a Wine Blogging firestorm concerning the sudden appearance on the scene of meta-wine-blog spoof WINE-ING 2.0. Efforts to ascertain the identity of the mastermind behind the site carried on throughout the weekend and into Tuesday amidst swirling accusations. Earlier speculation seemed to point to our own WBW Founder, Lenn Thompson but, the exposé turned out to be another red herring. At the time of this writing, it is not clear if any further investigation is being pursued as wine bloggers began to realize late Tuesday that they might prefer not to learn the author's true identity.

In light of recent developments, I’m sure I’m not the only member of the wine blogging community who found it difficult to get off social-networking app turned real-time newsfeed, Twitter and get down to the business of writing up a kick-ass WBW post that would show well beneath the glow cast by Wine 2.0 Brand Giant, gary vay•ner•chuk. Powered by Viddler

Another thing that made this WBW difficult to write is the fact that I couldn’t find many nice things to say about the wine I selected. Gary is such a positive person, and I really wanted to echo that positivity. Gary gives so much and I wanted to return the flow so, to that end, I put together this collage to salute our famous WBW #44 host.


Sorry about Corky Gary. You understand I don’t think it’s too late for him I just thought this might be what you needed to see right now to help avoid such a fate for potential Killer App, cork’d™. (For anyone not familiar with Tenacious D & the POD, the evil-looking green horned thing actually symbolizes the magical quality that transforms mere mortals into Rock Stars)

Now for the wine which was a Jean-Marie Raffault Les Galuches Chinon 2005. This wine actually would be really good in a blend. I could see blending a barrel of this wine with say, sixteen barrels of Cabernet Sauvignon and 3 barrels of Merlot; that would be good. It would also be okay to use this bottle, which retails around $13-$18, in a stew. Other than that, the best thing about this rather unattractively labeled bottle of Chinon is the photo I took featuring my Pysanky eggs.

It was very difficult to find a Loire red wine in my area and this was actually the only bottle available in the 4 wine shops we visited. I wish we could have found another one to compare it to. We have had good Cab Franc but it was from Long Island . I wish we’d had time to buy the WBW Sampler Pack from Domaine547 [ "ripping cute!” –gary vaynerchuck, WLTV]. We sampled this wine three different times over the course of three nights. We tried it paired with lamb, with chicken, with hard cheese, with steak. Gary? Was this French Cab Franc theme your April Fools joke? The wine tasted like burnt strawberries: If you took a piece of unripe fruit and completely carbonized the outer layer, that’s what this wine tasted like. Was the wine corked? It didn’t have the musty aroma or vinegary flavors that I would normally detect in a corked bottle. Actually, out of curiousity, I looked up some tasting notes from Wine Advocate: “beef broth” (yep) “iodine” (yep) “faintly saline on the palate” (mm-hmm)... This was not the worst bottle of wine I’ve ever had. It was simply the worst bottle (IMHO) that I’ve ever had to post on my blog.

Thanks again to our affable host Gary Vaynerchuck for bringing the Thunder to this month’s WBW. It was fun! We don’t have a WLTV badge link to Wine Library TV on Smells Like Grape for the simple reason that everybody else does. However, I'll make an exeption in honor of this momentous occassion.