We still don’t think of ourselves as wine experts. We do, however, know a few wine experts. But since we have collected 60 or so bottles in our recent visits to California, we seem to have developed a reputation for knowing a bit about wine. We suppose it’s somewhat true, but we are far from experts: we simply know what we like.
So for our Valentine’s Day post, we’d like to recommend a few of the wines we’ve gone out of our way to mark as our favorites; only if your tastes are similar to ours will this actually mean anything to you, of course. A sidebar note: as we started buying lots of different wines last year, we found it increasingly difficult to remember and keep track of the gems and the duds alike. The iPhone geeks that we are, we evaluated a few wine tracking apps and settled on a great one: Vivino. Not only does it allow you to rate and track your wines, you can shoot a picture of a label and it does a fairly decent job of looking up the wine in question. You can rate and write reviews of the wines you try, and it even has some social features: if you decide you like the Vivino app, look us up and friend (follow) us…just search for Chuck Ros.
Now, on to our top wines list. It’s easy with the Vivino app: I’m just opening the app on my phone and starting from the top.
Five stars (the top rating). We only have 3:
- Saddleback Cellars 2011 Rutherford Napa Valley Sangiovese
- Simi 2011 Cuvee 1876 (the only white wine on our list)
- Kenwood 2010 Jack London Zinfandel
- Hook & Ladder 2010 Russian River Valley Merlot (actually the only Merlot anywhere on our list)
- Ravenswood 2010 Rancho Salina blend
- Klinker Brick 2008 Old Vine Zinfandel
