Tasting Alert: Albino Rocca at Vintages Belmont, MA


Coming this Friday, June 10th to Vintages in Belmont, MA is a free tasting of wines from Albino Rocca. Angela Rocca himself along with his daughter Daniela will be on hand pouring and describing their wines. It's an event not to be missed. Click here for more information about the tasting.

I first discovered the wines of Albino Rocca at a blind tasting at Adam Japko's last fall arranged by Vintages owner Eric Broege. We tasted through the following 6 Barbareschi - the ones in bold stood out to me as particularly noteworthy:

  • 2004 MARCARINI Barolo "Brunate" (La Morra)
  • 2004 ALBINO ROCCA Barbaresco "Brich Ronchi" (Barbaresco)
  • 2005 ALESSANDRIA Barolo "Monvigliero" (Verduno)
  • 2005 CANTINA del PINO Barbaresco "Albesani" (Neive)
  • 2006 SOTTIMANO Barbaresco "Pajore" (Treiso)
  • 2006 Burlotto Barolo "Cannubi" (Barolo)
I'd rate the 2004 Albino Rocca Brich Ronchi 94 points - outstanding. Last Friday in anticipation of this tasting I cracked open a 2003 Brich Ronchi:

2003 Albino Rocca Brich Ronchi Barbaresco
$68 Release Price
1,500 cases produced
Purchased at Bin Ends Wine

A massive wine of surprising depth for the region. As soon as I opened it, the room was filled with aromas of rustic fruit. On the nose I get signature Nebbiolo minerality, deep rich red fruit and menthol. The mouth feel is rich and supple. The finish goes on for minutes. An outstanding wine from a fantastic Barbaresco producer.

85 Wine Spectator
94/100 WWP: Outstanding

The wines of Albino Rocca have consistently impressed me so I'm looking very forward to attending this tasting. Too often as I'm exploring a new wine category I make the mistake of "nibbling at the low end". What better way to see if you like the wines from a certain region than starting at the high end - for free! I hope to see you at the tasting Friday.

Subscribe to the Wellesley Wine Press and I'll let you know how it goes.

Question of the Day: Have you had Albino Rocca Barbaresco? What are some of your favorite producers in Barbaresco?


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Paulina Rubio Paz Vega Penélope Cruz Pink

Wine and the Thinking Hat (Or Six of them?)

All opinions are valid, but not all opinions are correct, particularly if they’re based on incomplete thought.

Lately, this is what I’ve been thinking about as our national media de-camps into political ideology which itself mirrors our politics.  We’re in a period of time in which demagoguery has dangerously replaced the usual rhetoric.

It defies my comprehension how our political landscape has devolved to the point where winners and losers are assigned based on who gave what in the national debt negotiations.  The net result is nobody wins and everybody loses, especially tax-paying Americans who have to suffer the fools that are our elected officials.  Even more egregious, I fear we’re inured to this finger-pointing blame game as a new reality.

A respite for most people, the wine world isn’t immune to bickering partisanship.  Consider:  Critics.  Points scoring.  Parker. Biodynamics. Corporate wine. New World vs. Old World. Technology. Oaked Chardonnay. The three-tier system…

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The wine world is no better than the national political conversation when it comes to taking sides and discarding rationale thought.  On wine issues, opinion acts as an article of faith, facts be damned.

But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Recently, this site was named the most influential wine blog out of 3,000 drinks-related blogs. In spite of this, I don’t carry a burden of responsibility to use that supposed influence in any particular way.  However, if I could do one thing in creating influence (of the outwardly positive sort) it would be this: Urge all wine enthusiasts engaged in wine conversation online or offline to be empathetic and look at a situation and an opinion (that may be counter to your own) from 360 degrees.  Doing so doesn’t always lead to answers, but it does lead to pragmatic enlightenment.

And, we need more enlightened people (to say nothing of pragmatism).  Somewhere along the road of “social” associating itself with “media,” people, regular people, have subsumed the bad habits of traditional media and our elected officials and forgotten the most fundamental rules of the human condition:  “Treat others as you would have them treat you” and “Before judging a man, walk a mile in his shoes.”

Even worse, for all of the benefit that interactivity and social media has wrought for “conversation” and “dialogue” and the exchange of ideas, a whole lot of nothing has ever reached concurrence.

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Can it be that social media might be good for citizen uprisings with attendant violence, but poor for aligned progress?  Does ease of communication inspire our more savage instincts? God, the early returns aren’t great.  Yet, what’s the point of the exchange of ideas and information if it’s not to come to a place of mutual understanding?

Instead, too often it seems, we’re all stuck in the mud and Exhibit A would be the recent online wine points score debate that is the same debate that has been going on in the same material fashion for the last decade.  Yawn.  Wake me when somebody comes up with something better.  Then, there’s a real conversation to be had.

While my own naïve idealism isn’t enough to create a ripple in the pond, there are frameworks of change that can be adopted, even if incrementally.

I recently began exploring a paradigm for critical thinking called the “Six Thinking Hats” created by Edward de Bono.

Six Thinking Hats is as simple as it is beautiful and it offsets the fact that as we’ve perverted the Socratic method of thinking by combining its opposing viewpoint debate with feelings and emotions, losing dimensional thinking that leads to logical conclusions.

The Six Thinking Hats seeks to provide a holistic method of analyzing a situation or a problem.  Where our current thought process is typically duotone, the Six Thinking Hats is a full color picture.

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Think of a recent meeting at work. You were discussing a topic of some importance or consequence in outcome.  Chances are good it was a mud puddle of confusion amongst varying viewpoints that went in circles for an hour before you adjourned with a weak-kneed action item.  Or worse, interpersonal dynamics had the outcome yielding to the dominant ego in the room.

It’s hardly a recipe for success.  And, it’s repeated millions of times daily in the exchange of information on a subject.

Yet, the Six Thinking Hats is not about who is right or who is wrong, it’s about the way forward.  Instead of rewarding ego, the Six Thinking Hats rewards profundity of well-rounded thought – it requires an individual to look at all sides of an issue, moving away from habitual thinking styles that can run narrow and linear.

Represented by the metaphor of six differently colored hats, each hat represents a different aspect of thinking that can (and should) be used in the exchange of ideas to come to an essential truth.  In a group setting, a group would each symbolically assume the role of one hat color at a time to examine an issue to agreement.

The hats are:

White hat:  Facts and information.  With this hat, the focus is on what is known and what is available to be known.

Red hat:  Emotion, judgments, intuition.  Gut reactions.  With this hat, the focus is on instincts.

Black hat: Caution, faults, problems, issues.  This hat focuses on why something might not work.

Yellow hat:  Optimism, positivity, benefits and constructive.  This hat focuses on the value and benefit of a decision.

Green hat:  Creative, out-of-the-box and crazy alternatives.  This hat focuses on innovative ideas.

Blue hat: Guiding, facilitating and managing the process.  This hat acts as a calibrator for thinking about thinking.

As you can see, most people tend to skew towards one or two hats, but not all of the hats in totality.  However, what a difference a conversation might be if a group of people were committed to looking at a subject with all six hats.

Perhaps Biodynamics wouldn’t be considered voodoo to a percentage of the population.  Parker wouldn’t be a bogeyman.  Corporate wine wouldn’t be a scourge… A level of common ground could be found in conversation amongst differing viewpoints…

I don’t presume that everybody is going to download the PDF linked below and really absorb the notion of the Six Thinking Hats, particularly in the realm of wine issues, but in the future I will be creating a thinking hat outline for topical issues that seem to be particularly rancorous in the online wine discussion – if for no other reason than to save us from ourselves on the next go around of debate about the 100-point system.

As a final thought, it should be noted that Six Hats Thinking is taught to pre-school and kindergarten students as a thinking tool-set for their pliable minds.  Perhaps the kindergartener in all of us that plinks on the keyboard should pay heed to what four and five year olds can comprehend. 

Six Thinking Hats download

Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/wine_and_the_thinking_hat_or_six_of_them/

Paris Hilton Patricia Velásquez Paula Garcés Paulina Rubio

Value Alert: 2007 Ruffino Modus

Italian wine - Buy 6 or more bottles and get 50% off shipping with code "grape70"

A couple weeks ago we were discussing a $25 wine Spectator rated 97 points - the 2009 Carlisle Sonoma County Syrah. After appearing in a Wine Spectator Insider email, the wine evaporated from the market as quickly as any I've ever seen. Sometimes it's like that - where a rating comes out of nowhere and the wine has been on the market for a while. Other times the rating has been around for a long time before the wine comes to market. That's been the case with the 2007 Ruffino Modus Toscana.
The $35 Modus received a 96 point rating back in the fall of 2010. There was considerable speculation it might become Wine Spectator's Wine of the Year. (Interesting side note on our Scoop the Spectator contest - the winner recently had a piece of writing published by the magazine - very cool!). The metrics were all there - especially the production level. 7,000 cases of the wine were imported to the US.

The wine ended up with a respectable showing finishing in the Top 25. When a wine has favorable QPR metrics but then ends up not making their Top 100 list it makes me think it didn't show very well when tasted across a wider audience. I liked the 2007 BV Tapestry (93WS/$50) and thought for sure it would make the Top 10. No such luck - it didn't make the Top 100.

The point chasing wine deal hound market hasn't received the 2007 Modus with the kind of enthusiasm the Carlisle garnered. I have a few theories why:

  • The 96 point rating the Modus received kind of came out of nowhere. They've been making the wine since 1997 and the best Spectator rating a prior vintage received was 91. It makes one wonder whether the bottle Suckling tasted got lucky.
  • Speaking of Suckling the rating come out right around the time he was leaving the publication to start his own thing. There was also some conjecture Spectator wouldn't feature the wine favorably to bring attention to a wine he rated.
  • No other major publication rated the wine as highly as Spectator - if they rated it at all. This lack of a second rating reinforced the concerns Spectator's 96 was a fluke. By the way, if the idea of having 2 or more major publications favorably rate a wine appeals to you check out the Wine Blue Book.
  • The wine wasn't on the market when the rating dropped. After a while I kind of forgot about it and I think other deal hounds did too.
  • The Modus is a much higher production wine. Scarcity makes people go a little nutso sometimes and what's more readily available is less precious. Perhaps there's just as much demand for the Modus but there's less supply for the Carlisle so the Carlisle is the hotter wine.
Perhaps there was some intentional delay on the part of the distributor in Massachusetts to sell through the 2006 vintage before releasing the 2007? Of course that didn't stop Costco from trying to leverage the 96 point rating for the 2006 in the mean time. I enjoy shopping at Costco but beware of their shelf talkers - they can get rather shady with them. The rating was crossed out in this shelf talker but the tasting notes were still for the 2007 while Costco has been selling the 2006 the past few months:


A couple weeks ago I tried the 2007 for the first time at the Wine Spectator Grand Tour stop in Boston. I thought it was quite nice but the context of 200 other wines it was hard to say for sure what it would really be like to drink a glass with a meal.

I got a chance to do just that La Famiglia Giorgio in the North End last week. We were in a bit of a hurry so table-top signage was effective in making our decision:


They poured each bottle through an aerating funnel into a decanter. Pretty nice treatment for what the waiter called one of the more expensive bottles. $46 at a restaurant is a very nice price point. And I thought the wine was great.

The wine is 50% Sangiovese, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, and 25% Merlot. Ruffino positions Modus as "modern interpretations of historical territory". I'll go along with that. Tons of fruit. Not austere at all. Some acidity. Nicely balanced. Call it 90-93 points?

I spotted the 2007 Modus for the first time at Costco in Waltham, MA yesterday. $22.89 (and no tax in MA). There were only 6 bottles in the bin and the cashier said they didn't have any backup:

Update: As 10:00 am Saturday morning Waltham is out of Modus. I hear they have 100 bottles in Danvers.


If you're in the area and interested in buying some it might be worth giving them a call or stopping in. If not there are plenty of retailers in the country that have it for a little more.

Strictly from a numbers perspective - 96 points for a Tuscan red you can buy for $25 vs. 97 points for a California Syrah that's nearly impossible to find at this point makes this Modus a no brainer for the point chaser. And all kidding aside I think it's a really nice wine for around $25.

Related Links:
CellarTracker
Wine-Searcher

Question of the Day: Why do you think the market reacted so differently to the 2007 Modus compared to the 2009 Carlisle?


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Marisa Miller Marisa Tomei Marla Sokoloff Marley Shelton

What The Google Algorithm Change Means To Wine Bloggers

Yesterday, Tyler Colman posted an interesting bit of information on his blog that connected the dots in both my business and wine blogging worlds. Since much of what I do in my business is web-related, and search is the main way people find information online, I have been closely following the changes to Google’s search [...]

What The Google Algorithm Change Means To Wine Bloggers originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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Lauren German LeAnn Rimes Leeann Tweeden Leelee Sobieski

Announcing WBW 71: Rhones Not From The Rhône

The theme for WBW 71 is, "Rhones Not From The Rhône." Pick any wine made from a variety best known in The Rhône but not made in that famous French region. It doesn't matter if the wine is white, pink or red; still, sparkling or fortified. Whatever you choose just needs to be made from primarily a Rhone grape and come from a region not in France.

Announcing WBW 71: Rhones Not From The Rhône</a> originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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Monet Mazur Monica Bellucci Monica Keena Monica Potter

Access Granted

Last week’s Access Zone activities at the 2011 London International Wine Fair (LIWF) were not only great fun and a way to spread the word about social media in wine, but they seemed to strike a chord with the wine trade present. Gabriella, Ryan and I were very pleased with the buzz around the fair [...]

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Stacy Keibler Summer Altice Summer Glau Kate Moss