Wine: Homewood Winery Carneros Pinot Noir Queen's Cuvee
Grape: Pinot noir
Region: Carneros, Calif.
Vintage: 2006
Price: $9.99
In the glass: Homewood Pinot is a deep velvet-red color with a semi-opaque crimson core and slightly tinged purplish rim definition and huge viscosity.
On the nose: The wine comes right at your olfactory senses with a great deal of deeply concentrated cherry fruit, blackberry juice, boysenberry sorbet, creamy vanilla notes, creme de cassis, hints of smoke, phenolics and warmish buttery minerals.
On the palate: The wine simply elopes with your taste buds, producing rich extracted red and black fruit concentrate with crushed ripe cherries, black licorice, wild marionberries, toast points, spicy underlying minerals and sloe juice. It has a well-defined midpalate that is rich with references of vanilla and vine-ripened red fruits, going into a solid and nicely concentrated finish, loaded with licorice root and zesty minerals.
Odds and ends: Homewood Pinot is the perfect Thanksgiving wine. Not only will it work exceedingly well with a turkey dinner, it is light on the pocketbook at just less than $10. To boot, it comes from a great vintage for pinot noir in this small, but top-producing winegrowing region just south of Napa Valley. Whereas classic pinot noir from Burgundy, France, will be too delicate with many of the Thanksgiving table's accouterments, this is a good hearty American pinot and there's nothing more patriotic than that.
Gil Lempert-Schwarz's wine column appears Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89016-0749, or e-mail him at gil@winevegas.com.
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