Friday Find, December 27th

Each Friday we highlight a wine from the Northwest that we think is a real "find." By find we might mean that it's a steal, as all of these wines we'll feature weekly are at or under $20. We might also mean "Hey, you really need to go find this" and it might be a wine that we feel not enough people know about. In any case, with the weekend pending we're hoping to help you "find" a wine to kickoff the weekend right. We'll tell you a little bit about the wine and try to help you track it down here in the Northwest. 

Happy Holidays from the good looking folks at the Anthem. I hope that your holidays are filled with good food, friends, rest or whatever it is that recharges you. For me, it's not necessarily rest. While I'm not one for resolutions, I do have a bit of an odd holiday tradition by most standards. Each year for the past three I've participated in the Festive 500. The Festive 500 is a "virtual event" if such a thing makes sense sponsored by Rapha, makers of ludicrously high end cycling clothing, and Strava, an online fitness app, which I use for cycling. 

The goal is to ride 500 kilometers or just about 311 miles between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. This is a ridiculous thing to do, I admit. I do it for a couple reasons. As a competitive cyclist my race season ended a few weeks ago as the cyclocross season came to a close. I won't race again, until March at the earliest, or maybe April. That is a long time between races. The Festive 500 is perhaps one last chance to push myself a bit harder or in this case for longer, than I'm comfortable before shutting that part of my cycling self down for awhile. It also keeps the winter weight off like a champ.

I see the Festive 500 as kind of the opposite of that resolution phenomenon that those of you who are unlucky enough to belong to a gym get to experience each new year. It begins in January and lasts until about the end of February. The gym's awfully crowded, new faces, folks who've resolved to get in shape this year. I used to belong to a climbing gym and it was the same routine each year. The gym was nearly unbearable until mid-February and it was almost always back to normal by the end of that month. I don't go to a gym anymore but I cannot imagine this phenomenon has gone away at all. Remember, it's not how you start, it's how you finish.

Rather than resolve to "get in shape" maybe you should resolve to drink more wines like this week's Friday Find. Pinot Blanc, which I've long been touting as one of my favorite whites from the Willamette Valley might be the way to go for the new year. Maybe resolved to shift your "go-to" Oregon white wine from Pinot Gris to Pinot Blanc, or if you've been drinking more Pinot Blanc than Pinot Gris, maybe do the opposite? Switching it up is what I'm advocating. This 2011 Pinot Blanc from Torii Mor is chock full of fruit aromas pineapple mixed with lime zest, and it concludes with a crisp citrus finish. For $15 it's a nice wine to pair with a coming new year. 

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Extending the Olive Branch in Pinot Country: The Oregon Olive Mill

Along the road to some of the Dundee Hills' most well known wineries you'll come across the Oregon Olive Mill. The mill is part of the Red Ridge Farms complex, owned by the Durant family who came to this part of Dundee in 1973 looking for land, perhaps a nut orchard. Valley floor property was expensive then and so the Durants bought what they could afford on a ridge that over looked the valley. You may have heard though that the hills and ridges along the Willamette Valley have turned out to be a pretty good place to grow Pinot Noir? Let's just say it's worked out fine.

The olive groves that Ken and Penny Durant eventually planted came out of Penny's original designs on a nursery. One with a focus on medicinal and culinary plants. Ken though, honed in on the olives and they selected a handful of olive varietals that would potentially do well in the cooler climates of the Willamette Valley. Their son Paul is now the general manager for the entire Red Ridge Farms operation (which includes the mill, wine label, nursery and a retail operation). There were some hard lessons originally, harsh winter events in 2008 and then again in 2009 wiped out a fair portion of their 13,000 trees. They've rebounded and replanted but because of the cooler weather the estate groves are still fairly low producing. At this point their yields of the estate olive grove is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 tons. That doesn't allow for an awful lot of olive oil, but the Durants were able to find some growers in Northern California they could partner with. Each harvest they truck in about 58 tons of olives from California.

The olives are milled on site, Paul does the milling, in a state of the art Italian olive mill, the process itself looks a fair bit like crush in a winery. However olive milling smells so much better than crush, it's not even comparable really. Olives are ground, pits included into a paste, and that paste is pressed using a centrifuge to separate the water from the oil. The resulting oil is then collected and bottled. I should mention, it tastes wonderful.

The Oregon Olive Mill is the largest commercial milling operation in the Pacific Northwest and each November they harvest, mill and bottle olive oils that are comprised of fruit from both their estate groves and olives from Northern California. (12,000 375ml bottles to be exact.) Estate fruit only comprised about 3% of the total oil produced. There are two "single varietal" oils a Spanish Arbequina, perhaps the most approachable and popular olive oil, as well as a Greek Koroneiki. In addition a Tuscan oil is produced from a blend of  three olives.

Libby Clow serves as the Oregon Olive Mill's resident guru, she's sort of like a sommelier but for olive oil. Her role, and hope is for guests to begin to see olive oil as many people have come to appreciate wine. Different varieties have different characteristics, and olive oil has it's own sensory experience. Like wine, olive oil, particularly olive oil that is well made can enhance a meal and bring out or highlight a food's flavors or textures. And olive oil, like wine is sensitive and should be stored properly. Light and especially heat can be damaging to olive oil turning it rancid. It's still safe to eat, but the experience is shot.

Libby led me through an olive oil tasting, very similar to a wine tasting to highlight the signatures of the varieties and differentiate between them. Similar to tasting wine, you breathe in the oils aromatics, and aerate it in the glass, as well as in your mouth to bring out those characteristics. There is also vintage variation, for example cooler vintages typically lead to a heightened pungent, peppery character in the oil.

It should be noted, these are higher end oils, and so you should be thinking about them with an appetizer, warm bread or to finish a meal, drizzling on soup, risotto or meat dishes.

Arbequina, the Spanish varietal and probably most common olive oil in use is kind of the "Merlot of olive oils." It's one that's familiar, comfortable and very approachable. The Arbequina is very clean aromatically, imagine cut grass, and the flavors tend towards nutty and buttery character with a mild spice. $19

The Koroneiki is a Greek varietal that gives off aromas you might associate with the leaves of a tomato plant, flavors of green banana and sweet hay and a bit more spice on the finish. $19

A Tuscan blend (Frantoio, Leccino and Pendolino olives) is the final of the three flagship oils, and it's the one with the most kick. Aromas of pine nut, beeswax and mushroom and a dollop of peppery spice to finish out. $19

As it turns out the oils produced at the Oregon Olive Mill are delicious, and they mark another place to pay attention to where our foods are coming from. While the olives themselves are not 100% local, in terms of buying both local, and fresh oil, you're not going to do any better here in the Northwest. There are a litany of complicated issues with imported oils, too many to elaborate upon, but I can tell you that fraudulent olive oil is "a thing." And there are nefarious labeling practices when it comes to olive oils coming out of Italy.

For the Durants, Libby and those singing the praises of locally milled oils (count me among them), its really a matter of time. As Ken Durant put it "We're where we were with wine about forty or fifty years ago. It's a matter of palate training, and culture." America doesn't see olive oil as a necessary table side companion, but Italy for example doesn't even make enough olive oil to feed the nation's own consumption. This despite being the second largest producer in the world.

While we may have a ways to go in terms of creating a domestic palate for olive oil, you don't have to go nearly that far for a delicious quality finishing oil, just to Oregon.

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Friday Find, December 13th

Each Friday we highlight a wine from the Northwest that we think is a real "find." By find we might mean that it's a steal, as all of these wines we'll feature weekly are at or under $20. We might also mean "Hey, you really need to go find this" and it might be a wine that we feel not enough people know about. In any case, with the weekend pending we're hoping to help you "find" a wine to kickoff the weekend right. We'll tell you a little bit about the wine and try to help you track it down here in the Northwest. 

Friday the 13th. Look out. Kane Hodder might get you. Who? Kane Hodder is the stuntman who is most associated with the role of Jason Vorhees, he played him four times. And Jason Vorhees is name you're probably much more familiar with. Most people just call him Jason. He's the kid who drown at Camp Crystal Lake. His mother went on a murder spree to seek revenge on the camp's counselor staff. She was the cook. Jason himself doesn't actually show up playing a role until Friday the 13th Part 2. The hockey mask doesn't show up until Part 3. 

The early versions of the film were certainly formulaic. Young teen counselors are killed off one by one. Jason never actually breaks a walking stride but is able to chase down everyone running for their lives. He can't be killed, etc. However they were among the first and most memorable of that formula which has lived a long, long time. And, most of the good stuff, before it got too crazy and he ended up going to Manhattan or fighting Freddy Kruger was before the 80s even came to a close.

Today's bizarro movies like Saw, and others I won't bother watching owe a fair bit of thanks to the Friday the 13th series, along with the Halloween films.  Those of you who are in to those films owe it to yourself to check out the original article. 

Today's Friday Find is quite an original here in both the "New World" as well as the state of Washington. The Bartholomew Winery Aligoté . What's an Aligoté you ask? Good question. Aligoté is a uncommon variety any place, let alone here. It's often thought of as one of the lesser white varieties of Burgundy and can commonly be found planted on what are thought of as lesser vineyards. Far from a leading man or lady, Aligoté shows up in the sparkling Crémant as well as in white blends from the region. As we've found though odd and unique varieties can certainly make for interesting wines in their own right. This is no exception. 

The Aligoté is super fresh, with tangy stone fruit aromatics, green apple and honeydew. The palate boasts more of that snappy tang. Flavors of early season fresh cut peach and a lively acidity to the finish. Think about pairing it up with oysters or grilled fish, if you're one of those grill in the rain types. That acid will also cut heavier fare so bring a bottle of this to the next holiday meal you're invited to, it'll make the perfect companion to go alongside some well paired reds. You can get this direct from Bart he's in the Old Rainier Brewery building for $19. He'll ship it to you as well. 

   

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A Pair of Pinot Gris

The 2012 vintage was a warm one, and a far cry from the two proceeding it, it was downright robust in terms of sunshine, heat units and nice dry weather that led to ripe fruit and rounder wines across the board. While the 2012 Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley are just now beginning to see the light of day in terms of their release, we do have the white wines to draw conclusions from.

With a warm vintage you typically see in general ripeness, higher sugars, lower acidity and this often results in higher alcohol levels in the finished wines. There are upsides to a warm harvest for growers and winemakers, as well as wine drinkers. Reliable ripeness, fewer issues in the vineyard, whether that's nasty wet weather, cold or as the season goes late, birds. 2010 was a cool vintage and as growers kept the fruit hanging to achieve ripeness there were many bird related grape casualties.

It is an oversimplification to call any vintage, "easy" but relative to 10 and 11, 12 was, well, easy. Warm vintages are popular with the industry because while stressing the vines makes for wines of distinction, stressing the growers and winemakers can make them crazy. The downside to a warm vintage is that you can see flabby wines, round, ripe certainly but possibly lacking in the necessary acid that makes Oregon wines such standouts.

David Lett, no surprise, was the first to plant Pinot Gris in Oregon and it is  now the largest planted white variety in the state. This is due in no small part by the success that King Estate has found with the wine. They are the world's single largest Pinot Gris producer, in... well, the world. Oregon Pinot Gris has long stood in the shadows of Pinot Noir, but has largely developed a "style" all it's own. Known for being medium in body and a bit weightier than their California counterparts which are often found under the Italian "Grigio" pseudonym. Pinot Gris ripens early and so higher sugars can often point to a bit higher alcohol wines.

2012 Raptor Ridge Pinot Gris is sourced from four different vineyards and has a dollop of old vine Gewurtztraminer thrown in for good measure. The wine is super pale golden and and gives off almost warm aromatics of ripe green apple and sweet hay. The palate definitely shows the Gewurtz with spiced pear, under-ripe peach and honey dew melon. The acid is present but not overtly persistent and there is a wet stone element that climbs in at the finish. The wine opens up over the course of an hour or two and goes from rounder fruit to a bit more grassy character, and hints at an Old World style with a bit of astringency. $20

2012 Seufert Winery Pinot Gris Eola-Amity Hills AVA The Seufert Pinot Gris is darker hued of the two, medium gold to lighter copper in hue. The aromatics leap out at you, there's a note of sweet ripe cantaloupe beeswax and lemon grass. On the palate you get ripe pineapple and wet stone. The Seufert is a study in contrasts, it lacks the astringency and tends towards a ripe roundness but it maintains a ripping acidity that takes you into a citrus packed finish.  It's possible that this wine spent some time on the yeast, or lees, but that's just me guessing.$16

Neither of these wines are flabby, or boring and both would make for a nice food pairing, The slightly lower acid levels open up possibilities from spicy dishes to grilled or baked fish dishes as well. As we wait for the 2012 Pinot Noir from the Willamette to start hitting the shelves we can find in these wines that the future looks good. Acid levels are sufficient and Pinot Gris as opposed to Pinot Noir would have been at greater risk for over ripening. In speaking with winemakers I know, folks are very happy with what 2012 has given them and excited about the wines to come. In addition we can only guess at what kind of vintage 2014 will be, it hasn't even technically begun. My biggest hope is that the brutal cold snap of this past week does  not leave behind significant vine damage.

These wines were provided by the wineries as samples.

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Volcanoes, Glaciers and Pinot Noir: Fire+Flood Oregon

from guest blogger Renae Henderson:

Historic Downtown Newberg, OR recently welcomed Fire + Flood, Oregon at the end of September, a new tasting room by Chapter 24 Vineyards with a vision to showcase everything the Willamette Valley has to offer. While still new, the plan is to build up to pouring wines from 10 to 15 local guest winemakers featuring two wines from each in addition to their four Fire + Flood label Pinot Noirs.

The Fire is in reference to the volcanic soils, iron red in hue that are found largely within the Willamette Valley's Dundee and Eola/Amity appellations. The Flood refers to the glacial cataclysms that resulted in the Missoula floods which have come to form the Valley and leave behind it's mark in today's rocky soils.

The guest wines will be from winemakers who don’t have public tasting rooms due to their small size, giving tasters the chance to sample incredible wines they wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to experience. The idea is that eventually you’ll have the unique choice of a fully customizable tasting flight by selecting a few wines from the 20 to 30 available. With this format, you won’t just be sampling from one particular sub-AVA, but wines from all over the valley. Because Fire + Flood, Oregon has a love for the story behind the wines of the Willamette Valley, they’ll be adding in an audiovisual wine wall this January. This wall will allow tasters to hear the stories behind the wines from the winemakers themselves. If you’re going to taste in the Willamette Valley, this will be an experience you don’t want to miss as clearly this isn’t just another tasting room.

Chapter 24 Vineyards is a three-fold partnership between Mark Tarlov, Mike D. Etzel, Jr. and Louis-Michel Liger-Belair. Mark Tarlov, a film producer, founded Evening Land Vineyards in 2005 and launched Chapter 24 after leaving there in January 2012. Mike D. Etzel, Jr. is a native Oregonian and the son of Beaux Frères’ winemaker, Michael Etzel. The younger Etzel worked at Brick House Vineyards and WillaKenzie Estate prior to becoming the winemaker for Chapter 24 Vineyards. Louis-Michel Liger-Belair comes from Burgundy where some of the world’s most renowned Pinot Noir is made. He’s looking forward to seeing how his winemaking techniques will do with the vineyards of the Willamette Valley as he serves as the winemaking consultant for Chapter 24 Vineyards. The idea for him isn’t to make a Burgundy style Pinot Noir here in Oregon but to make amazing Oregon Pinot Noir. The winemaking of the pair is an old-world style with minimal handling and spontaneous fermentation. The grapes are allowed to infuse as whole berries at a moderate temperature, in an oxygen rich environment until pressed.

The tasting room is currently featuring four 2012 Pinot Noirs from the Fire + Flood label as well as a Riesling and a Pinot Noir from Matt Berson’s Love & Squalor. The four 2012 Pinot Noirs available under the Fire + Flood Label are: Two Messengers, The Fire, The Flood, and The Last Chapter; four unique Pinots with their own personalities.

The Two Messengers Pinot Noir provides a nice snapshot of the valley with multiple vineyard sites blended containing volcanic as well as sedimentary soil types. The wine is 100% de-stemmed and offers notes of cherry, floral, and earth. $30

The Fire showcases the volcanic soil of the region blending 6 volcanic vineyards primarily located in the southern portion of the Eola Hills and the remainder from the Dundee Hills. This wine is red-fruit driven with soft tannins and notes of baking spices. $60

The Flood showcases the sedimentary soil of the region blending 6 vineyards from the Chehalem Mountains, Yamhill Carlton, and Ribbon Ridge sub-AVAs. This one is more earth and dark-fruit driven. $60

The Last Chapter ($90) is the beautiful convergence of the best from The Fire and The Flood highlighting all that this diverse wine region has to offer. In all, Chapter 24 Vineyards produced approximately 4,200 cases of Pinot Noir from the 2012 harvest. Fire + Flood, Oregon and Chapter 24 Vineyards are creating a new tasting room experience and fantastic Pinot Noir with a unique focus on soils.

-Checkout Renae's blog Pass the Pinot where she shares her impressions and experiences with wines and wineries of California, Washington and Oregon and follow her on Twitter at @passpinot.

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Friday Find, December 6th

Each Friday we highlight a wine from the Northwest that we think is a real "find." By find we might mean that it's a steal, as all of these wines we'll feature weekly are at or under $20. We might also mean "Hey, you really need to go find this" and it might be a wine that we feel not enough people know about. In any case, with the weekend pending we're hoping to help you "find" a wine to kickoff the weekend right. We'll tell you a little bit about the wine and try to help you track it down here in the Northwest. 

The biggest story right now is of course the passing of Nelson Mandela, and while I feel like talking about it, I feel the man deserves better than to be the subject of a weekly wine blog post on wines for a good value. So, I'm going with something else. A book I just read.

I just recently finished reading David Walsh's book Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong. Walsh has long been the foil for Armstrong and was the one guy, well, there were others (not many) but he had the loudest mouth, who never believed the Armstrong myth. 

As an American cyclist who like most, if not all of us wanted to believe the Armstrong myth, the Walsh book is an incredible behind the scenes look at what he experienced as the Doubting Thomas of cycling journalism. Rough treatment certainly from the Armstrong camp, but also pariah status from fellow journalists. His biggest book, LA Confidentiel, I spelled it like that on purpose, it only ever came out in France, and in French. So most of us never read it, but it was the first look at many of the truths that would bring Lance down. 

The new book is a painful chronicle of Walsh's time as the one guy working at a major newspaper who was both telling, and concerned with the truth. He was sued successfully by Armstrong and his management team, and of course, the outcome of that will be revisited in court. As a reader and someone who was closely following Armstrong's Tour de France dominance, and believing much of it at the time, the Walsh book leaves me feeling guilty. Not for being duped, that's something I figured out about 4 or 5 years ago and have moved past where Lance is concerned, but feeling guilty about how Walsh found himself so maligned. 

The book is only slightly a "I told you so." I mean frankly, you have to admire Walsh's restraint, he was right, and almost everyone else was wrong, and he was so certain about it. For that, he like others who doubted the golden boy paid a dear price in terms of work, financial penalty and reputation. I recommend the book if you have even a passing interest in what happened with Lance Armstrong and his doping scandal.

Today's Friday Find is not controversial, nor will one find oneself maligned by singing it's praises, quite the opposite in fact. The Redd Brand Red Wine 2008 (a Bordeaux style blend with Cab, Merlot, Malbec, Petit Verdot, etc, all of them) from the folks at Tertulia Cellars. Their goal with this wine, there are others as well, is to give folks a quality wine at a really approachable price. In warm vintages especially there may be some exquisite left over fruit that makes it into a second label like this. This wine is certainly a velveteen red blend with smoke, dust and dried figs on the aromatics, and a luxuriant palate with mocha, toast, black fruits and pepper to finish. You'll find it in the $15 range in shops like Esquin or Wine World. The label also has some single vineyard Grenache and I believe Tempranillo so look for those as well, they're all in this price range. 

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Listomania 2013: Top 100 Wine Extravaganza!

Each year at this time there are two kinds of lists that people are thinking about, the one cobbled together by Ol' Saint Nick and then the copious top 100 lists put out by all the wine publications. There is also the concept of the "shit list" which frankly is not seasonal and is not one that anyone hopes they make it onto.  While the most cache goes to the list from Wine Spectator, the Wine Enthusiast and the San Francisco Chronicle also produce Top 100 lists.  Here at the Anthem we do not, we simple don't try that many wines in a year, we have day jobs and this blog ain't them.  That's okay though because just about everyone else does. So we have aggregated that data here for you. You're welcome.

The Wine Enthusiast
The Wine Enthusiast produces a lot of lists. Some people describe themselves as "list-makers" and so that's probably true of the editors at the Enthusiast. They've got Top 100 Best Buys, Top 100 Cellar Selections and just Top 100 "Regular" I suppose (there are also beer lists by the way). Here's the run down of Top 100 "Regular."

86: 2011 Chehalem Ridge Crest Vineyard, Wind Ridge Block Pinot Noir $50
83: 2009 Gorman Winery, The Bully Cabernet (Red Mountain) $45
75: 2011 Foundry Vineyards, Stainless Chardonnay (Columbia Gorge) $24
70: 2011 Dunham Estate, Lewis Vineyard Riesling $20
64: 2012 Guardian Cellars, Angel Sauvignon Blanc (Red Mountain) $20
54: 2012 Poet's Leap Riesling $20
48: 2011 Kevin White Winery, Fraternite (GSM blend) $20
43: 2010 Bergstrom, Sigrid Chardonnay $80
39: 2010 Maison Bleue, Le Midi Grenache, Boushey Vineyard $35
34: 2010 Pacific Rim, Wallula Vineyard, Biodynamic Riesling $32
6: 2010 Cayuse, En Cerise Vineyard Syrah $80
4: 2012 Trisaetum, Ribbon Ridge Estate, Dry Riesling $24

Notables about this list; the inclusion of the Trisaetum Riesling in the top 5 is something that I'm glad to see. I feel like the Willamette Valley does Riesling so much better than Washington and this is a nod to that. Also the Kevin White blend at #48. Kevin's wines are so good, he's such a good guy and it's $20. That's a great wine for a ridiculous price. The $80 Chardonnay is a bit over the top and not something I'd buy considering so many great Willamette Valley Chardonnay can be had for $25-30.

Also, huge gap between number 34 and 6.

The San Francisco Chronicle 
Of all the professional print wine writers, it seems like Jon Bonne at the SF Chronicle has a palate that I gravitate towards. The Chronicle does not rank their wines, they merely list the 100 best wines they sampled that given year. The list is of American wines and so it's pretty much about the wines made on the West Coast. The list is broken up by "genre" which comes off as a little strange. The Chronicle also lists the alcohol percentage of each wine, I think this is a good thing and generally they list wines with lower ABV in their top 100 as they tend more towards acidity less toward ripe to overripe fruit. Of all the lists these are the wines that I'm most likely to look for as a consumer when it comes to wines I haven't been familiar with. 

Chardonnay:
2012 Adelsheim Willamette Valley Chardonnay $22
2011 Memaloose Columbia Gorge Chardonnay $25

I feel like there's a real miss here, particularly where the Willamette Valley is concerned. The region is produce extraordinary Chardonnay and so to only see one on a list that I consider to be authoritative where what's happening with wine is concerned seems like Bonne whiffed on this one.

Other Whites:
2011 Trisaetum Coast Range Estate Dry Riesling $24
2012 Abacela Umpqua Valley Albarino $18
2012 Cowhorn Spiral 36 Applegate Valley White $28

Rosé:
2012 JK Carriere, Glass, White Pinot Noir $20 (This wine is superb.)
2012 Analemma, Atvus Vineyard, Columbia Gorge $25
2012 Teutonic, Laurel Vineyard, Willamette Valley $19

Pinot Noir:
2011 Bergstrom Cumberland Reserve $42
2011 Big Table Farm, Willamette Valley $38
2011Brickhouse, Les Dijonnais, Ribbon Ridge $52
2011 Chehalem, Three Vineyard, Willamette Valley $29
2011 Haden Fig, Cancilla Vineyard, $30
2011 Soter, North Valley $30
2011 Stoller Family Estate, Dundee Hills $25

Cabernet & Merlot:
2010 Betz Family, Clos de Betz, Columbia Valley Red $55
2010 Cadence, Tapteil Vineyard Red $45
2011 Leonetti Cellar, Walla Walla Valley Merlot $75
2010 Scarborough, The Royale, Columbia Valley Red $35
2010 Gramercy Cellars, Walla Walla Valley Cabernet $48
2010 Januik, Champoux Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon $55
2010 Revelry Vintners, The Limited Edition Reveler, Columbia Valley Red $35
2011 Andrew Will, Columbia Valley Cabernet Franc $25

Rhone Style Reds:
Not a single Washington wine? Seriously?

Zinfandel & Other Reds
Nothing here either.

The Wine Spectator
In terms of the high profile Top 100 list that honor begins and ends with the highest profile magazine, Wine Spectator. I for one do not find life to be a spectator sport but none the less "the Spectator" as it is known is the biggest of big dogs.  Interestingly they actually roll their Top 100 out over the course of a week, revealing a few each day and on the last day numero uno gets unveiled.  Overall the Northwest did fairly well including 5 wines in the top 25.

79: 2010 Ken Wright, Savoya Vineyard Pinot Noir $55
68: 2012 Chateau Ste. Michelle, Horse Heaven Hills Sauvignon Blanc, $15
57: 2010 L'ecole No. 41, Columbia Valley, Syrah $25
55: 2011 A to Z Wineworks Pinot Noir $18
51: 2012 Charles Smith, Kung Fu Girl Riesling $12
27: 2010 Spring Valley Vineyards, Uriah, Walla Walla Valley $20
17: 2010 Alexana, Revana Vineyard, Pinot Noir $42
11: 2010 Reynvaan, Walla Walla Valley Stonessence, Syrah $70
10: 2010 Quilceda Creek, Columbia Valley, Cabernet Sauvignon $135
3: Domaine Serene, Evanstad Pinot Noir $65

10 Northwest wines in the WS Top 100 up 1 from 9 the year before. 

And with that we close out another list season, except for the whole Santa Claus thing. Many of these wines, because of where they landed on these lists will be difficult to come by.  Many of them already are. 

Here's the cool kids at New York's PS22 doing Lystomania from the band Phoenix.

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