The Ten Spot at Vons

Now that we live up in the Santa Monica Mountains, the last-chance grocery store is a Vons on the Pacific Coast Highway. They have a full four aisles devoted to wine at this particular store, with a 10% discount on purchases of six bottles. This brought the wines down towards the "Six Spot" price range. 

Readers of this blog know that a "critter" on a wine label is sometimes a warning in and of itself. Many marketers of el cheapo wine are certain you'll be swayed by cute animals of some sort on that label. Are you? I decided to buy in and find out:

     1.  Goats do Roam Rosé  (South Africa, 2006) - $4.50

Winner! In this case, the frolicking goat on the front label is meant to be a Fairview goat from South Africa. This bone dry rosé is a kitchen-sink blend of five different red grapes:  cinsault, pinotage, grenache, merlot and gamay. It offers notes of strawberry and hay with just a hint of green herbs. It's an easy-drinking, great-value wine for picnics or parties.

    2.  Rex Goliath Chardonnay  (Central Coast, CA - 2006) - $5.99

Yucky. This wine is a stinker, made with fake oak flavoring. It's that one with a 47-pound rooster named "Rex Goliath" from an old Texas circus legend on the label. It's ubiquitous these days and it's airplane chardonnay. And I don't mean that as a compliment, since most of us fly coach and are sentenced to those tiny, crappy chardonnay bottles while trapped on the runway in Chicago for eight hours.  (True story.)

    3.  Smoking Loon Viognier  (California, 2005) - $5.88

Undrinkable. This is the second label wine from Sebastiani, and while the cigar smoking duck on the brightly-colored orange label is very recognizable, the wine inside just sucked. Still, the brand has been a runaway hit for them, but the merlot from Smoking Loon is a much safer bet. The viognier was bitter and tasted like burnt peanuts at the ballpark--not even certain this was viognier in the first place, folks, but whatever they did to those innocent grapes was just criminal. We poured it down the drain.

     4.  Red Guitar, Tempranillo/Grenache  (Navarra, Spain - 2005) - $9.43

Yum! This label featured a Picasso-esque stick figure playing a red guitar whilst a bull and some other stick figures dance around. It's a good label, easily recognized with some artistic aspirations that reference Spain. The Navarra region in Spain offers some great values, so I was pleased to see that this was one of them. It came in under $10 and tasted great. Old vine tempranillo and garnacha tinta (grenache) combine in equal parts for some bright cherry zing with hints of warm earth. Easy-drinking red that I genuinely enjoyed. ¡Tesoro!

    5.  Herding Cats, Merlot/Pinotage  (South Africa, 2006) - $5.99

Not terrible wine, but very unremarkable. Just blah. The cheetah-spotted, screw-top closure didn't lead me to expect much. On the back label we are told to "be the cat's meow" and that we'll "just pour and prrrrrr!" South Africa's indigenous red grape called pinotage tastes remarkably like a bloody Band-Aid. Here, they're adding lots of merlot to sort of disguise it. In other words, they're finding a way to get rid of pinotage juice that is so hard to sell in the US.