Cycles Gladiator

Cycles Gladiator 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon... YUCK! If you wanna see the naked lady on their label then click here. I should have poured it over ice and drank it with a splash of cranberry juice. Listen, I even poured out everything after choking down the first glass. If you know me...this is SO not me.

Dynamite

Dynamite Vineyards 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon from the North Coast. Yahoo for the second bottle. Even better when given as a gift. Why bother going to the store at all? Hit up their web site and have it delivered to your home.

Monterra

Monterra Cabernet Sauvignon 2004. Monterra means "my land". From our land to your glass....yah ok well the rule of thumb is that if it lands in my glass then mostly likely I'm gonna drink it.

Paired with snacks and friends 3 stars.

Fish Eye

Fish Eye

Cabernet Sauvignon

2004 - California

I paired this kick ass, good for the money, wine with mussels in garlic and tomato sauce. I sprinked fresh parmesan and parsley over 'em. Princess made a homemade onion bread that was out of this world. A few sharp cheddar and swiss cheese cubes - well needless to say....this is what a meal is all about. This wine is neither dry nor "non fruity", however it was still great. 4 stars because I'm such a damn smart cook.

Pity the poor merlot.

Wine fanciers sour on merlot as bumper crop ripens
By Guy KovnerNew York Times News Service
Article Last Updated:10/08/2006 05:53:23 PM MDT

Pity the poor merlot.
Once an ascendant star in the California wine universe, the red wine grape with roots in Bordeaux is now an albatross, literally hanging - unsold and unpicked - in some North Coast vineyards.
In desperation, growers are selling merlot for as little as $400 a ton - a third or less of the spot market price early in the year.
Some merlot will wind up rotting on the ground, some vines will be yanked out and some grafted to another varietal.
"Merlot right now is kind of the four-letter word in terms of getting people to buy it," said Glenn Proctor, a grape and wine broker for Joseph W. Ciatti Co. in San Rafael.
Merlot and cabernet sauvignon, longtime mixing partners, share the unenviable consequences of overplanting, overproduction and falling prices in a competitive global wine market in which supply and demand are increasingly difficult to balance, wine industry experts say.
"The market is a little out of whack right now," said John Enquist, president of the Mendocino Winegrape & Wine Commission.
Consumer demand for cabernet, the crown prince of California red wines, is growing, offering hope for eventually draining away the excess supply now sitting in winery storage tanks.
But merlot, following an upward rush in planting and price in the 1990s, is now reeling from flat demand compounded by three straight years of uncharacteristically fulsome harvests, Proctor said.
Wine industry officials in Sonoma, Mendocino and Napa counties say that while cabernet is in a rough patch, merlot may be in dire straits due to market vagaries and celluloid influence.
Just six years ago, merlot passed cabernet as America's best-selling red wine, but the 2004 hit movie "Sideways" body-slammed the varietal when the cranky oenophile Miles declared: "I am not drinking any (expletive) merlot."

Red Knot

Red Knot 2004 Shiraz. McLaren Vale, Australia. Get Knotty. My cheeks went all tart with the first two sips. The third sip was smoky. This is a good wine. I might pair it with a blt. Shut up. 3.5 stars.

Get knotty with Zork. "ZORK - the revolutionary wine closure that seals like a screw cap and pops like a cork." Ok people 1/2 the fun of drinking the wine is opening the bottle. FUN FUN FUN. It looks like wax.