Reg. $29.99 / Sale $19.99 Save 33% So yes, I have a vested reason in selling this wine. But I am being perfectly honest - I have not had a better bottle of wine under $20 this year. For me, this wine hits all the sweet spots. It balances rich, lush fruit with bright acidity and fine tannins, making it well suited for a wide range of foods. I've drunk through 18 bottles so far and have paired it with pizza, burgers, steaks (hanger, flank and NY Strip), grilled chicken, pork, sushi, grilled sausages and cedar planked salmon. And a couple just sitting on the porch...
(Last night... pulled it straight from the cellar with a little chill on it... delish!) I've drunk it in one night, two nights, three nights, and once, I revisited a partially finished bottle after 7 days! Not only did the wine hold up, it actually improved with each day. (okay, maybe not the 7 day one, but it was still amazingly good!)
So, let's recap. Amazing wine. Incredibly versatile. Ability to age and improve. Great label. Great cause.
How can you resist?
Go ahead and just
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Or read on for more info!
• Made by Joey Tensley from the fruit that didn’t go into his single vineyard wines.
• 25% Colson Canyon (95 pts Wine Spectator), 25% Tierra Alta (90 pts WS), 50% Camp Four. (Newer vineyard for Joey. Not made into a single vineyard because, as he says, The juice is great, but I have too many single-vineyard offerings!)
• Awesome Corks for Kids label custom-designed for us.
• $2 per bottle goes directly to the North Carolina Children’s Hospital
• The wine bursts from the glass with loads of wild blackberry, huckleberry and boysenberry fruit aromas and flavors. Yet, despite the intensity of fruit, the wine is elegant and refined, offering juicy acidity, fine-grained tannins and underlying minerality to balance out all that luscious fruit. It’ll stay virtually unchanged drinking over a couple of days, but I think you’ll be hard-pressed not to drain it on day one!
• Only (gulp!) 225 cases made.
I am always on the lookout for a killer California Syrah. At their best, I find them tremendously compelling, offering a mixture of what I love from the grape in Australia and France. Like Australian Shiraz, the best California examples offer ripe fruit combined with ripe tannins for an immediately approachable wine. Like Northern Rhone Syrah, the best from the U.S. offer a smoky, perfumed nose and layers of complexity that is unparalleled. The problem for me is not finding the great wines from the U.S., but finding them at a price that is reasonable. Too often, I try something, thinking it’s absolutely killer… but priced twice as high as it should be.
There is one producer, though, who particularly impresses me in his ability to deliver high quality Syrah, year after year – Joey Tensley. Tensley established his winery in 1998, and has grown to 3,300 case production spread among 14 different wines. In the grand scheme of things, they are still a teeny tiny winery. If you visit their tasting room in Los Olivos, you are likely to find Joey or his wife Jennifer manning the counter! But don’t let their small size fool you – they are producing mammoth wines!
Now here’s where things start to get exciting… 2008 really upped the ante from Tensley. His Colson Canyon Vineyard scored 95 pts in the Wine Spectator, while his other Syrah offerings scored 95, 94, 94, 90 and 88 points!
Which brings us to our little wine…
Joey took some of the juice that didn’t make the cut for his single vineyard offerings and blended them together. 25% is Colson Canyon (95 pts), 25% is Tierra Alta (90 pts) and the rest is Camp 4 Vineyard. The lot was intended for a large Las Vegas casino. Unfortunately, times are tough out there and they couldn’t honor their commitment.
Being the largest Tensley account in North Carolina, we were approached by the distributor… he was going to bring in some of the wine – did we want a few cases? Upon further questioning, I discovered the pedigree of the wine and the fact that it had not been labeled. So I asked – could we put our own label on the wine?
Yes!
Okay… now things get interesting. I had them ship me a few sample bottles to try.
When I popped them in the store for the guys, the immediate and universal reaction was, “Holy crud!” (Okay, it was a bit more colorful than that. Schmitty has quite the potty mouth.) I took it home and drank it over a couple of nights. Amazing stuff… I took another bottle and opened it side-by-side with the 95 point rated Colson Canyon and the 90/92 pt rated Tierra Alta Syrah from the 2007 vintage. While not far off the Colson Canyon, it was clearly (to me) superior to the Tierra Alta.
Go ahead – do the math… somewhere between 90-95 pts in quality.
With our own label.
Allrighty… let’s talk numbers now.
This wine was slated for a $29.99 retail price.
But I offered Joey two compelling reasons to drop his price significantly. First, I would take it all off his hands in one drop. Second, it would not be emblazoned with some vanity label for my store. Nope. This is all for the kids. Corks for Kids, as I am sure you know, is my little project to raise money for the North Carolina Children’s Hospital. We raised over $80,000 last year and are gunning for $100k this year.
So, for every bottle sold, I am donating $2 to the Hospital.
I have 225 cases, meaning we are in line to raise $5400 for the kids!
And if we knock this out of the park (meaning we sell it all quickly), I think we stand a good chance of getting Joey to do it again for us next year. This time, we’ll ask him to submit it for reviews… Can you imagine what we could leverage that into for the Hospital if we got some killer press for our little blend?
Okay, last bit… what’s the wine like?
As I said above, this Syrah offers the best of what Australia and the Rhone Valley emphasize in the grape – ripe fruit and lush flavors from Down Under combined with smoky, earthy notes from Rhone. The wine bursts from the glass with loads of wild blackberry, huckleberry and boysenberry fruit aromas and flavors. Yet, despite the intensity of fruit, the wine is elegant and refined, offering juicy acidity, fine-grained tannins and underlying minerality to balance out all that luscious fruit. It’s bottled with a little bit of CO2 to maintain the freshness of the fruit and ensure long aging potential. (Not spritzy or anything. You just may notice a little when you first open the bottle.) It’ll stay virtually unchanged drinking over a couple of days, but I think you’ll be hard-pressed not to drain it on day one! With the aging pedigree, I would suggest picking up a couple of cases...
Whew… that was a mouthful… remember when writing a 1,000 word essay seemed daunting?
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