Unfussy Wine Enthusiasts | Wine Reviews & Articles

Happy New Year to you! Check out our first, kinda - sorta 1 Minute / 1 Take Wine Review for the 2012 Ventisquero Grey Cabernet Sauvignon. We LOVE this wine. Buy It!! More to come with lots of potential variations on the format. Keep on tasting, Chris & Shannon

So our posting habits are sorely lacking these days.  We have been doing a lot more social media posting than we have blogging.  Some of that is no time to sit and write and some of that is pure laziness.  Either way if you follow this Blog we apologize for the lack of action. On to the wine... We love the value that Chilean wines bring to the table.  Great wines at great price points.  Carménère, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabs, and Chards are all good from Chile.  Chile has a number of wine regions in the country and this wine hails from the Cachapoal Valley which is a region we are not that familiar with.  Regardless, this is a great wine. The wine is very bright purple in the glass.  Reminiscent of Carménère in colour there is a very slow journey of the legs rolling down the glass.  This makes you think that it would be syrupy but it really isn't.  The interesting visual is a clear halo around the edge of the glass.  A very ...

Intriga Cabernet Sauvignon We bought this wine at the NSLC Port of Wines Festival in September.  We remembered it as a stand out and it was an award winner.  From the Maipo Valley the Intriga winery has evidently been in operation since 1865. In the glass it is a very dark wine.  The legs on the swirl are very long and show all of the 14.5% alcohol.  This is purple wine.  We could come up with a garnet or ruby but it is really just dark purple. This wine has a really warm nose with spice, black currents, and violets dominating.  There is also a good amount of oak in the nose.  When we say oak we mean oak.  There isn't any vanilla to coincide with it just wood.  That stands to reason with the 34 months the wine spent in oak.  If the nose had less of the other notes this would be a downer but as it stands it smells pretty nice. On the tongue this is a bold, very dry, very tannic wine.  The mid-palate is where we had...

This wine was an impulse purchase while buying one of our favorite American Beers here in town a while back and as for tasting this....Shannon felt like I could use a drink.  Thanks Sweetie. We had found out that Premier Wine & Spirits  was selling the Brooklyn Brewery's Beers of which their Brooklyn Lager is a fave.  Our most memorable instance of drinking Brooklyn Lager was on tap at the Brooklyn Bridge Park during a trip to NYC. We picked up this wine while buying a six pack.   Mayu  is from the Elqui Valley in Chile and comes in at $15 locally. The looks of this wine are definitely what we would call typical Carménère.  Very dark and very thick.  Swirled in the glass certainly shows there is body in this wine.  Really nice looking but it is what we would expect. The smells coming from the glass are absolutely fantastic and unique.  It has a Welch's grape juice and gym sock nose but totally in a good way.  There is tha...

That's right folks....Chilean Carménère two nights in a row.  We are sooo cray-cray.  This was another Port of Wines Festival purchase that was a late in the show selection so we wanted to make sure we were not off our rockers for choosing this one. This Carménère is from the Loncomilla Valley in Chile made by G7 Wines and is 100% from the variety.  So far so good. The wine is not as dark as last night but still has that violet hue consistent with Carménère.  In comparison again, the wine is not as thick and the legs stream down the glass a lot more quickly.  Thin is not at all the adjective to describe this wine, just thinner than last night's version. The wine smells of green pepper and an outdoors-y fresh field smell.  So, let's say vegetal with a nice subtle cherry blossom smell.  Not flowery but not overly fruity either. Interesting is the word that comes to mind.  Somewhat unique for the fact that there is some restra...

We bought this wine at this year's Port of Wines Festival and we recalled it to be an amazing flavour profile and mouth feel.  We were right.  Thank you taste buds! This wine from Vina Maipo  is from the Maule Valley in Chile and is made from 75% Carménère and 25% Syrah and, let's get this out of the way now....is delicious! In the glass this is a wine is extremely dark and that darkness is made up of that South American wine violet colour and is thick, really thick.  It hugs the glass and has very extended legs once you give it a swirl.  Nice looking wine. The nose is rich and delicious.  There is a nice boldness to the wine which has notes of spicy cherries, leather, and tobacco.  The spice is like a white pepper which perks up the nose when you stick it in the glass and give it a whiff.  The fruit is there for sure, but there is an oaky backdrop that is awesome. The taste is round and luscious with a lot of great notes cherries and ...

We picked up this number from our local wine store Bishop's Cellar  after a recommendation for a nice value Chilean Red.  We were leaning towards having the Syrah but the Merlot was the recommendation, so we grabbed it. At $18 locally we like the price point and the knowledgeable staff did not lead us astray.   Tabali Wines are from the Limari Valley in Chile. This is a big wine from the get go and makes for a nice tasting experience which is especially when paired with a nice grilled organic beef short rib.  We think this is a really great wine. The colour of this wine is very dark and prune juice coloured which is to say it is almost black.  The fringe of the wine in the glass is a grape juice colour of deep and dark purple.  The 'legs' on this wine go on for days.  It sticks to the glass like glue which is not necessarily surprise considering it is 14.5%.  We counted and it is a solid 10 count to see the legs hit the wine in the g...

This wine was another great pick up from a clearance sale at our local NSLC .  This wine retailed for $25 and we paid $19 and believe us that is a deal.  It is a blend of Carmenere, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, and Shiraz from Casa Silva Wines in Chile.  We are really loving the recent Carmeneres we have been having and this one has 45% of it so we were hoping that it was a good one. We briefly decanted it and once we poured it into a glass, the darkness of the grapes really showed up in the glass.  It is a super dark wine that looks fairly thick when you look down into the glass but doesn't stick to the glass as much as we would have expected.  However, while a clear wine it doesn't get that transparent when you swirl, it is just super dark. The nose is super interesting and to quote Shannon, "Yummy!".  There is a vegetal note in the nose that we might consider cumin or coriander but there is a good amount of dark fruit as well.  It coul...

Not our regular selection So, let us start out by saying two things.  First, Champagne for our purposes here = Sparkling Wine in all its many constituents (typing one word instead of two = lazy).  Second, our consumption of fine French Champagne consists of one glass of Dom Perignon , half a bottle of Perrier-Jouet , and a few bottles of Moet-Chandon .  Other than that we are under-educated bubbly drinkers.  We have certainly had sparklers from California, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, and Chile.  We've had Cava from Spain and Prosecco from Italy. With all that said, in all those bubbles, we have never had an out of body experience when comes to Champagne.  Don't get us wrong, the Perrier-Jouets and Moets were an experience (and a good one at that) but we haven't seen our wow-o-meter go off the charts with bubbly.  Some of it is definitely preference but putting that aside we do note that a lot of sparkling wine seems to be missing balance....

We discovered Pepperwood Grove about 7 or 8 years ago in the United States via their California Pinot Noir which was an absolutely amazing wine for being $7 USD. It was one of those wines that stood out at that price point. We picked it up at our local outlet of The Fresh Market (a chain of gourmet markets on the East Coast of the US and an amazing shopping experience if you ever get the chance...so relaxing).  But back to the wine.  We later tried to find the wine again but alas this version only able to be found a couple of more times.  The next time we saw the Pepperwood Grove Pinot Noir it was clearly marked as Chilean Pinot Noir and not nearly as good.  We have subsequently come to find out the shear size of the Pepperwood Grove brand as part of the Don Sebastiani & Sons wine conglomerate (which is huge).  The complexity of the wine belies the size of the company and its brands. The Zinfandel was something we tried in the US and remembere...

We decided to get this wine as part of our current fascination with Cabernet Franc.  We figured that the Chilean version from Junta Winery would put its own spin on things and we were right.  This wine is a crazy interesting version of Cab Franc.  It has a very interesting nose and is very dark in the glass.  The taste is much more elegant than a number of versions we have tried. The dark colour is reminiscent of Cab Sauv or Malbec.  It is has a deep colour that has a Welch's quality to it.  There is a little thickness when swirled which holds up with the body of the wine. When you smell it there is a very full bodied aroma to the wine which we really enjoyed.  It is a very bold smelling wine with a lot of vanilla which is evident from the 12 month in oak described on the bottle.  There is a dark fruit and also a little smokiness in the wine. The taste of this wine really is the star of the show as it should be.  This wine has an eleg...