Kicking it at Kick Ranch

On Day 1 of the Wine Blogger Conference, if you arrived early enough before the first “official” event, you had the opportunity to head out to Kick Ranch Vineyard for lunch and a tasting. The tasting consisted of 12 wineries who source grapes from Kick Ranch pouring some of their current selections. I originally thought this would be an event where each winery would pour the Syrah they make from Kick Ranch grapes, for example, but instead, the wineries seemed to be pouring lots of stuff from both Kick Ranch and from other vineyards. The owners of Kick Ranch provided a delicious lunch for us, which I went straight for, having not eaten a thing but 2 slices of toast when I left Murphys way earlier in the day! I only managed to taste my way through what 8 of the wineries had to offer, I ran out of time and needed to head back to Santa Rosa in time for the “speed dating” tasting, which I already wrote about here.

As it turns out, and as dhonig kindly pointed out, four of the wines I tasted garnered 89 points from various wine media folks! So I've cross posted those 4 wines here, and you can read about the whole Kick Ranch experience here.

2006 Pax Cuvee Christine: Syrah. Bright red fruit, flowers, berries, vanilla, toast, violets, slight chocoalte, spice, pepper, dark, tannic.

2006 Lynmar Russian River Valley Pinot Noir: Smoke, leather, earth, strawberry, raspberry, nice red fruit.

2006 Enkidu Kick Ranch Syrah: Black cherry, floral, spice, toasted oak, brown sugar, tannins earth.

2005 Enkidu Fazekas Petite Sirah: Dark chocolate, black fruit, vanilla, dark, slight red fruit on the edges, tannic. I loved this wine!

Of these, my favorite was the Enkidu Fazekas Petite Sirah. I can't believe this only got an 89, I found it to be gorgeous, and if they were selling it there, I would have easily tucked some into my take home cases. Then again, we all know I adore Petite Sirah, so that may just be my bias showing through! ;)

Short Post on a Tasty Petite Sirah

Hello all-my first cross-post to the 89 Project! Dhonig alerted me to the fact that one of the wines I posted about in my Petite Sirah posting today scored an 89 from the Wine Enthusiast. Perhaps they just aren't enthusiastic about Petite Sirah, because this was an excellent wine. Of course, it's now 10 years old, so perhaps the reviewers would have a different opinion after tasting it with 10 years of age!

Among the great line up for the Petite Sirah Tasting with the PSychos on Friday night was the 1998 Stag's Leap Petite Sirah from Napa. The wine needed quite a bit of time in the decanter, but eventually opened up to be a great wine. Given the time it needed, I imagine it has quite a bit of age left in it.

The wine had a classic Petite Sirah nose, blueberry, cream, vanilla, smoke and licorice. In the mouth it showed more vanilla, some licorice, lots of blueberry (I underlined it 3 times to make sure I remembered!), milk chocolate, and some other dark fruit. We had the wine with both bitter and dark chocolate, which really made the flavors come alive.

You can read about the Stag's Leap, and the other Petite Sirahs in the evening's line up in my post, here.