The last few months, I’ve been sampling wines from every end of the financial spectrum – starting with an eight-dollar wine and drinking my way to a $69 bottle (it was a special occasion). Overall, I found satisfaction in almost all of the wines, which were all sent for review.

2009 Seghesio Rockpile Zinfandel ($37.99 at Total Wine)
This chewy, cheeky wine proudly displays how a high-alcohol zin can play nicely by keeping its alcohol firmly in check and balanced. Still chock-full of ripe, black fruits – so ripe the wine practically turns your fingers black through osmosis on the glass, but still well-integrated, well-balanced and well-enjoyed. At $38, it’s a more expensive zinfandel, but is delicious with some juicy meat. I’d enjoy this again if someone else was buying and I’d likely hide the bottle in a kitchen cabinet if I discovered it at a party.

2006 Raymond Generations ($69.99 at Total Wine)
I saved this bottle for months and finally opened it on my boyfriend’s birthday. At $69, it’s quite a splurge. First thing I noticed was how much sediment it threw. It’s got a complex, interesting smell of smoke, tobacco, sweet and ripe fruits, plumbs, black cherries and some alcoholic heat that emanated. Blessed with nice legs and a long finish, it also carried firm, unyielding tannins. Unlike many cabs, it didn’t coat my mouth with thickness and, while it smelled incredibly fruity, it tasted a bit older-wine style. We enjoyed the whole bottle but I have to say at $69/bottle, I think there are other wines I would buy first OR wait to open this for maybe 10 more years, when it will probably be a very different wine. Read the full story

On September 1, the Swirl Girls celebrated Cabernet Day with friends around the world by cracking open a few bottles of cabs and toasting the regal, noble grape.

Started last year, Cabernet Day always falls on the Thursday before Labor Day and is simply a day to gather your friends and open a bottle of some sort of cabernet (cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc or a blend). In other words, an excuse to celebrate! We received the Caymus, Jordan and Flora Springs as samples.

Once again this year, we gathered at Casa de Sweet and brought food and wine. And this is what we drank…

We started the night properly with the 2008 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon ($69.99 at Total Wine), a sample we received last year. It’s been aging beautifully while waiting for us to be opened and for many of us (including me) this was the favorite cab of the night. Filled with rich, ripe fruits and fresh berries (raspberries, blackberries) it “tasted like a hug” as one girl put it. It was absolutely delicious and universally loved. Within minutes, every glass was empty. Read the full story

Three world-class winemakers, all born in France and currently making wine in California, attended a winemakers’ dinner at Paradisio Ristorante in Lake Worth last week and managed to make time for a roundtable chat. We discussed everything from differences between growing wine in California and France, California foodies and why they all stayed in the United States.

Philippe Langner, of Hesperian Wines, grew up in Africa. His interest in plants and agriculture led him to UC Davis, where he received a bachelors in agronomy and a double masters in Agronomy and Agricultural Economics. He was going to pursue working for a non-governmental organization in third-world agriculture development, but after working for a stint at Chateau Clarke in Bordeaux, he got the viticulture and winemaking bug. He returned to California in 2001 (after working crush in South Africa in 2000) and worked for Sullivan Vineyards. In 2004, he started making wine from Coombsville in Napa Valley and making Hesperian cabs. Since 2006, he produces about 1,000 cases of cabernet sauvignon. Recently, he bought land in Atlas Peak, where he looks forward to stressing his wines and creating a more intense cabernet.

“It’s great to be able to consume the product you grow,” Langner said.

Cecile Lemerle-Derbes, co-owner and winemaker of Derbes wines, was born and raised in Champagne, where she grew up helping her mother in the vineyards. She was going to be a doctor, but switched to Viticulture and Enology studies. “I wanted to be something else. But I went back to the source,” Derbes said. Read the full story

Chappellet wine holds a very special place in my heart. It’s the first winery I ever toured. The first place I touched a grape leaf, sipped a glass of sauvignon blanc while walking through the vineyard, feeling blessed and blessings. It’s one of the first wineries I toured with my boyfriend, where I fell a little bit in love with him over their Pritchard Hill cab.

So imagine my elation when I learned our annual visit to Napa coincided with a Chappellet Wine Dinner – held at the farm-to-table Farmstead Restaurant in St. Helena. Read the full story

Despite working a late shift this summer, I’ve managed to squeeze in my share of summertime sipping and here is a round-up of what I’ve been sampling. All bottles were samples sent for review.

2009 Montinore Pinot Gris, Wilamette Valley ($16 available online at montinore.com)
After loving the Montinore Borealis as much as I did, I was champing at the bit to try their pinot gris, and I was not disappointed. It smells like lemon meringue pie, apples, limes and a bit of flowers. It has a beautiful weight and body (I know, it sounds like I’m describing a woman here) that coats the mouth in a silky voluptuousness. It was blessed with a green apple crispness and finishes with a zip and a skip. It was lovely. I served it with sautéed scallops in a pinot gris beurre blanc and was not disappointed. Buy, taste and linger over this wine.

2009 Estancia Pinot Grigio ($9.99 at Total Wine)
I am pretty much the only Swirl Girl that consistently likes pinot grigio. Half of this love affair has to do with my equally big love affair with ceviche, but that’s another story. This pinot grigio from Estancia is a solid standard or grocery store pick. It’s got a refreshing smell of lime, lemon zest and freshly cut grass and has a nice, crisp acidity. It’s light and pleasant and embodies spring. The high acidity practically cries out for food. And hot weather.
Read the full story

Amelia Ceja met her husband while picking merlot grapes in the famed To Kalon vineyard – the same vineyard then owned by Robert Mondavi, who she also met that same day.

It was her first Saturday in Napa Valley, in the United States, and for the first two hours, she didn’t pick a single grape but popped them all in her mouth. She was 12.

Later, she told her father, who was a vineyard foreman for Oakville Vineyard Management Company: “I’m going to have a vineyard of my own someday.”

These were just dreams of a young girl who was suddenly so far away from home and was aching for her Mexico, for her village’s familiar foods – local, seasonal, fresh food from her grandparent’s farm (this is important for later in the story).

But that’s where the story starts, when she and her family joined her father in Napa Valley where he (and her future husband’s family and her future winemaker) all started out picking grapes. She learned English in six months and at the age of 14, she went to a prep school back in Mexico near the town she grew up in. She attended an academically fantastic high school, which her parents paid for, though she didn’t have the money for her to visit them back in Napa. Instead, she matured and grew and bloomed on her own.

“That was the turning point for my life,” Ceja tells me. We’re relaxing in her tasting room in downtown Napa trying her wines and chatting the afternoon away. “Having to rely on myself and living alone – I was so proud of what I could accomplish. I learned so much about my own culture; it gave me the confidence that I feel today.” Read the full story

We came. We swirled. We ate. We talked wine and we swirled more wine and we ate some more. (And then some more and some more.) And between seven-courses and three hours, we made 25 new friends and saw 5 old friends. It was yet another successful, wonderful Swirl Up at The Bistro Thursday night. Please check out our photo gallery online here!

I recently tried the 2010 Montinore Borealis, a lovely white wine that absolutely tickled my fancy. First, it’s July in Florida – drinking white wine is as natural as drinking lemonade. Second, the winery is: “firmly rooted in the values of a well-lived life, one that includes the enjoyment of food and wine with friends and family,” according to their web site. Food, wine, friends and family. I like that.

I liked the wine quite a bit, too. It’s a white blend made of 34 percent Muller-Thurgau (I’d never heard of that grape either), 34 percent riesling, 17 percent pinot gris and 15 percent gewürztraminer. Its alcohol is 11.5 percent and costs $16. It has a lovely smell of pink grapefruit, ripe peaches and apricots, blooming flowers and lime. It comes from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, one of THE wine regions in Oregon to know and seek out.

It’s a very interesting, pleasant wine – it starts out sweet then finishes crisp with a whimper of acidity at the end. This wine is tasty and delicious, clean and pure and extremely enjoyable. At $16, it is a great value that would make a great gift, an elegant addition to a dinner party or a weekly summer sipper. Highly recommended. This wine was received as a sample.

Find it online at Montinore Estate.

Sometimes when she blends wine, she hears music.

Perhaps it’s just the Chopin nocturnes or a few measures of Bach’s cello sonatas that haunt her days in the blending room. But somehow, as the notes spiral to a crescendo in her head and the grapes ferment at her fingers, Chimney Rock head winemaker Elizabeth Vianna writes a symphony each time she makes wine.

Blending wine is an act of creation, much like art and music are created.

“The only place where art really comes in (winemaking) is blending – it’s unpredictable and not formulaic. It’s like art. Art on a canvas or improvising on the piano,” Elizabeth said at the Four Seasons, where she was hosting a wine dinner earlier this year. “I instinctively think of music, because it’sI one of the first languages I learned.”

She didn’t start out aspiring to be a winemaker, nor did she grow playing in the fields of her parent’s vineyard. Instead, Elizabeth was born in Sao Paolo to an El Salvadorian mother and grew up living both in Brazil and the United States. “My parents were obsessed with keeping us tri-lingual,” Elizabeth said. Read the full story

Forgive us readers, for we have zinned.

It’s been way too long since we have properly embraced, praised and respectfully paid our dues to the wine as American as apple pie. It’s big and bold and bad to the bone and we have utterly fallen in love with it.

To zin fully, we solicited some help from wineries in getting a great variety of zins (all but one available in Palm Beach County!). And armed with a spit cup, we tasted through them all, intent on bringing you the best of the bunch. And then, because we had gallons of zin left, we invited the Winettes over, threw a bunch of meat on the “barbie” and made a party out of it. It was epic.

2008 Sobon Rocky Top, Amador County: The crowd favorite ($16.99 at Total Wine)
This has a beautiful jewel color with a hint of orange highlights and a rich nose: red plum, raspberries, toasted wood, vanilla, caramelized fruit. The longer it stayed open, the more milk chocolate came out like a chocolate-covered cherry. It has a beautiful weight, heavy enough to anchor you in our chair, but not too heavy that it’s going to squeeze you to death. After a few hours of being opened, it was soft, smooth, and offered layers of complexity. Read the full story