Getting Converted by a California Wine Evangelist

My wine industry friend is a California evangelist. Which makes sense, since it's essentially the source of his income, but it's pretty clear that he would still heap his adoration upon California if it were not.

My point of entry in this whole wine adventure was Italy. Mia bella Italia. I have a rather wretched Italy fetish, and so with nothing else to guide me it made sense that, when I hit that wine barn for the first time, the Italian section was the first place I went out of sheer sentimentality.

So my friend was evangelizing California wine to me, and I was being hesitant and stubborn. Every time we talked, he was trying to convince me to try a bottle of this or that. My entire experience with California up to that point was cheap, mass produced white zinfandel, which I'd grown up knowing as "California Kool-Aid". He had quite a job ahead of him.

He finally managed to talk me into trying a Hayman & Hill Meritage, though. And it was good enough that the door was opened to further California experiments. ("Good enough" is understating, by the way. It was actually really good. Or, sticking to "good enough", it was good enough to buy again - which from me is a pretty high compliment since I don't often buy the same bottle twice.)

He was pushing me to look into red blends. "What's your favorite wine, again?" he asked me. It's sangiovese. "Okay, then I want you to look for one that's blended with sangiovese."

So I trolled the California aisle looking for just that. It was harder than I thought it would be. Lots of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz blends, but I wasn't finding anything at all with sangiovese. I was getting frustrated.

And then, there it was. It was perfect. It was a blend of a bunch of old school Italian varietals grown in California. Monte Volpe Primo Rosso. It felt like a little bit of a cheat, since they were all crazy Italian grapes like sangiovese and nebbiolo plus a few others I'd never heard of before, but it fit the criteria. And, of course, since it was straddling that line between California and Italy, I adored it. Big and meaty, fit for a carnivore. It made me want to dive into a juicy medium-rare steak.

When I described it to my wine industry friend, he was shocked and amused. "That's a big boy blend. I was thinking of something simpler, but damn, you went all out..."