Author: Seth Barlow

Shamrock Selections is a monthly subscription service that brings you the best wines from around the world. Each month’s selection is carefully chosen by sommelier Keegan Sparks and his team. He keeps a keen eye out for wines that are unique, rare, and new to our market. Shamrock Selections is ideal for enthusiasts and explorers who delight in finding hidden gems and trying new, exclusive vintages. Each month, you can join us on a journey of sampling and learning about some of the greatest wines in the world. Each selection of wine comes with detailed tasting notes and food pairing suggestions from our team.

As much as I love to wax poetic about the beauty and artistry of wine, there are days like today in which I’m reminded that wine, at its core, is an industry in which hundreds of thousands of people the world over are employed. Today, even as I write this, fires are raging over the mountains that frame Napa and Sonoma valleys. The fires are still largely uncontained, but early reports show that several wineries were destroyed along with several hundred acres of prized vineyards. This is, of course, to say nothing of the 11 deaths that have already occurred and the thousands that have been left homeless.

Earlier today, at a large industry wine tasting hosted by one of our distributors, the mood was somber as we realized that the property whose wines we were drinking was among those that were destroyed.

So, in lieu of grand overtures about art and humanity when you drink this month’s wines, I instead ask that you remember that at every point along these bottles path to your home, they were touched by human hearts and hands and that today those hearts are hurting.

When you have this bottle in your hands, I want you to try something. See if you can find the wine’s vintage. The trick, of course, is that there isn’t one. This wine, like most sparkling wines, is what we call a “non-vintage wine” or “NV.”

What does that mean? Well, it can mean a few different things, but in this case, it means that the grapes that were used were picked from different vineyards in different years. The wine is majority Cabernet Sauvignon, with Merlot, Petit Verdot, and Malbec to round out the blend. And each of those grapes was picked in different years, made into their own wines and then blended before bottling. Research tells me that the Malbec and some portions of the Cabernet and Petit Verdot were harvested in 2011, while the Merlot was picked in 2012, and the rest of the Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot was harvested in 2013. While each grape and vintage made a fine wine, blended as a whole, they really begin to shine.

The winery was founded in 1978 by California native Chris Bilbro who handed over the business to his son Scott several years ago. The winery is named after Chris’ aunt Marietta. Their goal has always been to make approachable wine that didn’t carry any of pretension that other, more exclusive bottlings had. For several years, Scott focused his winemaking efforts on non-vintage wines, exploring the best possible blends of Cabernet, Zinfandel, Syrah, and other grapes.

The Armé, named after Marietta’s husband, is Bordeaux in style, with dominating red fruits and savory spice notes. When I first tried this wine, it was freshly opened and quite tight. I know I say this every month, but this wine will greatly benefit from decanting. When trying this wine a second time, three days after opening, it had blossomed into a rich and broad wine. It gave me the feeling of standing on a high cliff and seeing the landscape stretch out below me: it’s a bottling that, when allowed to open, showcases a vastness of flavor.

Pair it with any sort of meat stew, but most importantly, give this wine time. Open it a day or so before you plan to drink it. Not doing so is like going to the Grand Canyon with your eyes closed. Yes, you’re still technically there, but you’re not experiencing it the way you should.

When I took my first trip to Napa Valley in the early spring of 2015, I had a list of large, well known producers that I wanted to visit. I also wanted to get away from the famous wineries and visit some smaller producers as well. This led me to Green and Red. Many of you may have tried their Syrah before, but their Zinfandel, made from a small vineyard at over 1,700” elevation, is their flagship wine.

Driving to the winery, I was sure I’d get lost. Located deep in the mountains to the east of the valley, cell service was miles away, and I was doing as I had been told: driving until I was to turn right onto a dirt road. When I found my turn, I thought I had missed something – yes, there was a road, but it was a dirt road that went almost straight up a cliff face. I wasn’t sure my little rented Prius could handle it, but knowing there was great wine to be had, I put the car in gear and slowly crept up the mountainside. A few agonizing minutes later, the road leveled out into a small homestead, with a house, barn, and pond, all surrounded by vineyards.

There I met Jay Heminway, who’s owned the property since 1970 and planted the first vines in 1972. After a quick tour of his winery and aging cave, we loaded into his truck to visit the Tip Top vineyard. After a drive up another impossibly steep gravel road, we came out of the forest onto a mountaintop that had been shorn of trees and planted with gently curving arcs of vines.
With 11 acres of Zinfandel in the vineyard, the wine he produces is burly and strong, a far cry from the flabby Zinfandels that ruin the grape for most drinkers. Jay’s wine is pointed in focus, with exacting notes of stony earth, cooked plums, and cocoa nibs.

You can pair Zinfandel with almost anything, but personally, it’s my favorite thing to drink with pizza, especially Hawaiian pizza (sorry if you’re one of those people who think pineapple on a pizza is sinful!)

Want to join Shamrock Selections? There’s still time to subscribe in order to get next month’s selections. Use the link below to subscribe!

Shamrock Selections is a monthly subscription service that brings you the best wines from around the world. Each month’s selection is carefully chosen by sommelier Keegan Sparks and his team. He keeps a keen eye out for wines that are unique, rare, and new to our market. Shamrock Selections is ideal for enthusiasts and explorers who delight in finding hidden gems and trying new, exclusive vintages. Each month, you can join us on a journey of sampling and learning about some of the greatest wines in the world. Each selection of wine comes with detailed tasting notes and food pairing suggestions from our team.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but there is just something about the wines of France that have kept me spellbound for years. With almost every new producer, new region, or new grape I encounter, it’s like experiencing a great work of art for the first time. Each bottle is the result of hundreds if not thousands of years of agricultural work and knowledge combined with the labor of a winemaker, or often several generations of winemakers from the same family.

It’s that generational approach to winemaking that we’re celebrating with this month’s wines. As you enjoy them, keep in mind that these aren’t just examples of their respective vintages, but the result of one man’s decision hundreds of years ago to plant a vine and see what happened. In that way, you’re not only drinking history but one man and one family’s legacy.

Though his family had been farming grapes and making wine in Sancerre for 200 years, the family profession didn’t always appeal to Daniel Chotard. Daniel worked for several years as a high school teacher before fulfilling his winemaking destiny.

Sancerre is generally considered one of the best places in the world to grow Sauvignon Blanc, and in the hands of Daniel, the grapes show a unique character unlike those grown even just down the road. The uniqueness of Daniel’s wines stems from two key steps in the winemaking process: the harvest date and lees aging.

Daniel chooses to harvest his grapes later than most other growers in the region, an action that results in less acidity than one might expect from typical Sancerres. After fermentation, he ages the wine on its lees until bottling, resulting in a rounder feeling on the palate.

The final wine is a softer, more svelte Sauvignon Blanc than you might be expecting. Aromas of white peach, quince, and gooseberry are obvious upon uncorking; on the palate, the flavors skew towards the savory: thyme, anise, chervil, and lime peel.

Most resources will tell you to pair this with salads and shrimp, but I think a wine like this can handle and even deserves a more substantial pairing. Try herb roasted chicken or some herb crusted fish. This is a wine that wants to play with all of the most rarely used options in your spice rack. If all else fails, just grab some crackers and some goat cheese and live your best life.

It’s hard to find a château with a longer winemaking history than that of Château Coutet, where Roman artifacts are still regularly uncovered during vineyard plowings. The château as we know it today was founded at some point in the 1400’s (even today, no one is quite sure exactly when) by Sir François Coutet. Over the next several centuries, the château changed hands several times before eventually becoming the property of the Beaulieu family for the last 400 years.

Currently, three generations of the family live and work at the château doing everything from managing the vineyards and making the wine to marketing and hosting visitors. The château is also unique in that chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides have never been used on the property at any point in its history, a rarity in Bordeaux where demand for wine has often lead growers to inundate their crops with harmful chemicals. Instead, the Beaulieu fertilize their vineyards the same way they have been for hundreds of years: a team of plow horses that live on the property.

The wine itself, like all red wines from Bordeaux, is a blend. The base of the blend is Merlot (the vines of which are over 100 years old), with Cabernet Franc adding in wonderful floral aromas, Malbec giving the wine its dark color, and a small dose of Cabernet Sauvignon to give the wine its backbone of tannin. The result is classic Bordeaux: red fruits like cherry and raspberry swathed in vanilla, oak, and clove. The wine is soft and almost velvety in texture, yet still broad and soaring on the palate with a tannic structure that obviously has many years left should you choose to age it. Pair this with pork, lamb, or beef. Duck would also be a wonderful option, and if you hunt, I can’t think of anything better to pair with venison.

Want to join Shamrock Selections? There’s still time to subscribe in order to get next month’s selections. Use the link below to subscribe!

Shamrock Selections is a monthly subscription service that brings you the best wines from around the world. Each month’s selection is carefully chosen by sommelier Keegan Sparks and his team. He keeps a keen eye out for wines that are unique, rare, and new to our market. Shamrock Selections is ideal for enthusiasts and explorers who delight in finding hidden gems and trying new, exclusive vintages. Each month, you can join us on a journey of sampling and learning about some of the greatest wines in the world. Each selection of wine comes with detailed tasting notes and food pairing suggestions from our team.

Spann Vineyards might be familiar to many of you. We’ve carried many of their wines over the years and, when possible, have tastings with Peter Spann, the winery’s owner when time allows. This month’s offering, his 2013 Syrah is typically only available at the winery, but through a little string pulling (and some begging and pleading), we managed to secure a few cases for you all.

Like so many of Peter’s wines, this is actually a blend, in this case of Syrah and Viognier (95/5%) in the style of the great wines from France’s Cote Rotie region of the Rhone river valley. The Viognier, a white wine, here actually adds color and body to the wine. How does a white wine make red wine darker? When the two grapes are fermented together the white grapes pull more color out of the red resulting in more color and flavor extraction.

I recently asked Peter about his propensity for blends, and why he makes them almost exclusively. “We started our winery during the 2001/2002 recession,” he said.  “The dot-com bust happened, followed by the 9-11 attacks and wine consumption dropped dramatically…Chardonnays, Cabernet Sauvignons and Merlots [were selling] at half price so we decided it would be foolish to make the same wines that the market already had too much of. Betsy and I grew up on French wines, most of which were blends so we simply made the style of wines we knew and enjoyed.”

(you can check out my full interview with Pete here) 

I highly recommend decanting this bottle for several hours. It’ll bring out the wonderful gamey and earthy aromas that make it so special. When I first began drinking this wine, I was overwhelmed by the “rustic” aromas that came to me: desiccated summer grasses and dried earth. Once it had time to open up it showed the most intriguing aromas of smoke, truffle, and ripe blackberry. For being a Californian wine, the fruit here is decidedly subtle, a fact that makes this stand out among Peter’s other wines.

This is an ideal wine for the grill – I feel like I’ve said that about most of the wines we’ve shared with you this summer, but I think there is no better wine that goes with grilled meat better than Syrah.
If, after you try your bottle, you think you’d like some more for aging (and this could easily age a decade), please let us know. We’ll have a few extra bottles that weren’t allocated to Shamrock Selections, but they won’t last long.

We just couldn’t let summer end without another rosé. This one, like the Spann Syrah, is a limited release that we’re happy to be able to share with you. A rosé of Cabernet Sauvignon, this bottling comes entirely from vineyards on Howell Mountain, one of the most prized growing sites in Napa Valley. It’s rare to see fruit from a site of this renowned being used for rose (with many Howell Mountain Cabernet running north of $100/blt, it’s understandable why many winemakers would choose to focus solely on their red offerings). But not Denis ‘Denny’ Malbec.

Denny grew up with wine. His grandfather was the winemaker at Bordeaux’s famous Chateau Latour and his father was the winery’s, Cellar Master. Eventually, after stints in Bordeaux and Champagne, Denny began making wine in northern California. As a shop, we’ve been carrying his wines for quite a while, most notably his Alienor Syrah and the beautiful Alienor Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc.

Unfortunately, Denny passed away in April of 2016, leaving many vintages of unreleased wines. These wines allow Denny’s spirit to stay with us as we enjoy the fruits of his final years of winemaking.

This rosé is unlike almost any other rosé I’ve tried. It’s age and fruit quality give a depth of flavor that is so different from the Provencal style of rosé that most people are used to. Though the wine is completely dry, I immediately picked up the strong candy-like aroma of cotton candy. On the palate, it reminded me of the milk left over from a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. It’s okay to serve this chilled, but you don’t want it too cold. An ice bath would dull the intense fruit flavors (though we fully support drinking this in the bath…). Pair this with food a little heavier than you otherwise would for rosé. Mushroom risotto or pasta come to mind.

Want to join Shamrock Selections? There’s still time to subscribe in order to get next month’s selections. Use the link below to subscribe!