I took a quick inventory of the wine at home.
Here are 2 selections from it.
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The first is a Grand Reserve from Rabbit Ridge Winery. I bought it at the Healdsburg tasting room, perhaps in 2001. I no longer remember, but I believe it was a wine with solid fruit. This Grand Reserve is no longer available even if you visit the winery.
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The other is a wine from Balistreri Winery, located right in the middle of an industrial district in Denver, Colorado. Denver is too cold to grow decent grapes under ordinary conditions, so they force the issue with innovations such as burying heat pipes underground to warm the soil. All processing is done by hand: the grapes are pressed with weights and fermented using only their natural yeast, which also keeps naturally derived sulfur compounds extremely low. When transferred to barrels, the wine is moved by siphon so that it is not heated by a pump; bottling is handled the same way. It is not filtered, and no antioxidants such as sulfur dioxide are added. They do not blend multiple barrels either. Wine from another barrel is added only occasionally to replace what evaporates during aging. It is a hobby winery that pursues its methods with remarkable thoroughness. I was the first Japanese person to visit, and naturally I was probably also the first to bring its wine into Japan. Wine from a good barrel is astonishingly smooth. I had never particularly liked Merlot, but this made me love it at once. (Wine from a bad barrel, however, is appallingly bad. Well, one simply need not buy it.) The Chardonnay is also powerful—the kind of wine that makes you exclaim in surprise. Wonderful. If I ever have another opportunity to go there, though I probably will not, this is wine I would definitely like to buy again.
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