Omnivore Atlanta

So, after a hiatus, I am back to drinking for a living. Sorry for the interruption.

This week’s wine find is a tad on the pricey side – I said I’d try to keep them under $20, but this one came in at $20.99. There’s a couple of reasons for that – one is that I shopped this week at the Wine Gallery and Market in the shopping center on the corner of Piedmont Road and Sidney Marcus Blvd. That place ain’t cheap! A great place to go for a really special bottle of wine, but not much that looked super appealing to me in the under-$20 range. The other reason is that I actually think this wine is a good value for the price.

Domaine de la Mordoree 2005 La Dame Rousse, Lirac, France

I’m sad to say that this wine has nothing to do with some French Lord Of the Rings evilness. The Rhone blend (50% granache, 50% syrah) is bursting with black cherry, but is medium bodied and extremely well balanced. Many wines I’ve had from the Lirac AOC tend to be quite soft, but this exhibits more boldness. It finishes dry, with some liquorish and black pepper lingering. Great food wine, great drinking-without-food wine, and far more elegant than you’d usually find a French red at this price.

Next week I’ll get back in recession mode.

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OK, it’s New Year’s Eve so I have to do a sparkling wine I guess. Not that that’s a great burden – I love sparkling wine and think it’s a tragedy that people only drink it on special occasions. I drink it as an anti-depressant. That sounds bad…I don’t mean I drink my sorrows away, but when I’m feeling down nothing lifts my mood like a glass of bubbles.

My pick this week contains a history lesson. A little over a century before anyone ever produced sparkling wine in Champagne, some monks  in Limoux produced France’s first sparkling wine – blanquette de Limoux.

Saint-Hilaire Blanquette de Limoux

$15

Available at the Capital City Liquor Store on Howell Mill Road (I’ve also seen this for a few dollars less at the Kroger in the Edgewood Shopping Center)

While this wine lacks some of the elegance of Champagne (and those of you who really know your grapes will be able to tell that the climate this far south in France is a tiny bit too warm for truly great sparkling wine), for the money it’s one of the best values out there. Toasty and yeasty with a bunch of lemon and green apple on the finish, this beats anything else I’ve found for under $20.

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I had an interesting email exchange last week after posting my first wine find of the week. Our friend Hardy over at Dirty South Wine was horrified that I would send folks to the Tinder Box in Lenox Mall – he felt as though I should be promoting local, locally owned wine merchants rather than chains that have no connection to the community. Point taken, but part of my goal here is to give people all kinds of options from all kinds of retailers. I had to admit, as much as I’d love to get to the smaller shops for all my wine, I buy a lot of wine at the supermarket – I’m there already, it’s convenient, it’s on my way home. I think a lot of people shop like that.

It was not my intention to blaspheme even more outrageously this week, but it turns out the wine I decided to feature is only available in one spot in Atlanta right now – WalMart. I know – reprehensible (since when did WalMart sell booze, anyway?), but again, I think that’s part of the problem of writing about wine without a retail component. I didn’t buy this wine, I tasted it randomly, and I wanted to write about it. If it’s only available at WalMart I’d rather say that straight up than leave you with no way to find a bottle. Next week, a local retailer, I promise…

2006 Espiritu de Chile Carmenère

$11, Available at the Howell Mill Road WalMart

Wines from Chile are some of the best deals around these days, and this one is no exception. Carmenère is a grape traditionally used in Bordeaux blends, but on its own it makes for a meduim-bodied red with soft tannins. The Espiritu de Chile would make for a great Christmas wine because it’s round and fruity but also has enough black pepper and darker accents to keep it lively and balanced. At $11 this is one of the better deals I’ve come across recently.

(Photo courtesy Espiritu de Chile)

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Here’s what always annoys me about wine writing: babbling about floral notes and up-front fruit is all good and well, but for those of us who don’t have an encyclopedic memory, it very rarely matters – not because we don’t care, but because we aren’t likely to stumble upon the bottle in question. I’ve read about wines that sounded so good I wrote them down and kept my eye out for them, but that is not the norm. What I want to know is, what great, affordable wine should I be looking for at the nearest wine shop? Where can I actually find a wine worth buying?

In an effort to address that need, I’m launching “Wine find of the week,” a regular spot on the blog where I’ll tell you exactly where you can go to get a certain, decent bottle of wine. Because my budget is limited (as I’m assuming yours is – if not, bully for you), I’ll be keeping my finds in the under $20-range.

A couple of disclaimers before we get started: while I hope to cover a broad range of wines in this spot, the wine find of the week will reflect my personal tastes a bit, which come with some prejudices. I hope to challenge many of those prejudices – perhaps there is a huge, buttery California chardonnay that I’ll come to love (I doubt it). I’m a bit of a Francophile, so be forewarned. Very bold red wines with huge tannins give me migraine headaches. I’m talking, like, after one sip. So I probably won’t be covering too many of those here.

Beyond that, I’ll try to be as broad as possible. If you have tips for me – especially if you’ve found a fantastic bottle at a local store that you think I should feature here, please email me about it: besha.rodell@creativeloafing.com. And now to this week’s find:

Chateau Cantelaudette 2006 Graves – $16

Available at Tinderbox Vino 100 in the Lenox Mall

Lord, it’s mall season – I swear, every year I promise myself I’m not going to end up at the mall for holiday shopping, and every year I do. This year, I came across Vino 100, which is in the Tinderbox store (near Urban Outfitters). The store’s premise is that they have 100 wines for under $25. I didn’t find a whole lot there that excited me, but I did find this – a white Bordeaux that’s a blend of Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. I was pretty surprised – this would be a wine to stump someone in a blind taste test. Big, tropical, almost over-ripe – it reminded me of some Australian Semillons – but then it finishes dry and almost smoky, without any unpleasant lingering oak. This is a fairly rich white, and would stand up to a lot of food, even some game dishes. If you get dragged to the mall this year, sneak away (”It’s a secret” actually works quite well this time of year) and grab a bottle.

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