Welcome!

Another blog...
I've been a wine drinker and fan for almost ten years now. No systematic approach to it, just drinking things that look good and trying to figure out the ones I like. We drink a lot of red, and since it is a bottle every two or three nights, we try to keep it cheap. Over that time I've come to like numerous wines from France. They're a little more restrained than the fruit saturated reds from Australia and the US. I read, surf and track down $10 to $20 beauties from Minervois, Pic St. Loup, Corbières, St.-Chinian and others. There is an astonishing amount of good wine at reasonable prices coming out of these regions and reaching the US. The internet and interstate shipping have made it all readily available. Wines to drink, not to contemplate.

Along comes 2005 - reported to be the greatest vintage in some time across Europe. Burgundy, Germany, the Loire and Rhone valleys are all at their best. And then Bordeaux. I watched in May as prices for the wines sold as futures skyrocketed. I bought some, but I wasn't happy. I won't get them until 2008, and then I should hold them for around 10 years before drinking.

More reading and more surfing turned up lots of smaller properties that release their wines the year after the vintage. Now these were my kind of day-to-day wines. Ten to twenty dollars, made to drink now, and made in places I'd like to visit (and where I actually could visit). I'm so stoked by the first two I tried that I want to share. So here it is, a blog with my attempts at tasting notes on the wines I find and a place to catalog infomation I uncover that might lead to more good ones. Cheers