I’ll be honest.  I didn’t mean to buy this wine. I was picking up a Zen of Zin, and didn’t notice that this was misplaced in its rack until I had already paid for it. No worries – worth trying, right? In a normal jurisdiction with sane wine laws, the Clos Du Bois is a $12 wine. In mine, it isn’t. No matter.  How bad can it be?

The Clos Du Bois label is promising – raspberry, strawberry, cinnamon – sounds great right? In some measure the label’s promise does deliver. There is good fruit flavor and a reasonable amount of spice, giving a fairly reasonable flavor profile that you would expect from a Zin.  Unfortunately, this flavor is also accompanied by a watered down feel that might be the inspiration for Ravenswood’s “No Wimpy Wines” slogan – more than anything this particular Zin example just feels weak.

Zinfandels in this price range are not known for being… good. The Clos Du Bois is no exception. While it exhibits the characteristics you would expect in a Zin, they’re just not there in bold enough fashion to make you happy with your purchase. For a similar (or even cheaper) price, the Zen of Zin I wanted is a far superior wine.

Score: 80

A trip to Jeff’s house almost always comes with some interesting wine, and my most recent visit was no exception. Though I feel a bit like I might be adopting Lisa’s method of traveling to places for good wine instead of simply visiting my local store, I’ll certainly take a good bottle any way I can get it: and the Lake Sonoma Winery 2006 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel certainly counts.

Color-wise, there’s little to support the fantastic reviews that this vintage receives from various publications – a deep red, sure, but with a sort of thinness usually reserved for something a bit more industrially produced. A smell will leave you feeling a bit more optimistic: not much fruit, but plenty of the spicy notes you would expect from a good Zinfandel.

On your first sip, you’re greeted by everything – and nothing – at the same time. That may be a bit hard to understand, so let’s back up and say it this way: this bottle has everything you could want from a Zin, from fruity notes of black cherry and plum to nice and fresh spicy overtones. The problem – if this is one – is that everything is incredibly well controlled. Nothing feels out of place, but nothing really stands out. The end result is something that is fantastically easy to drink, but, at the same time, is rather uninteresting. When you combine the fact that we rather enjoyed this as a sipping wine with the near-bargain price, you have something that we would certainly purchase again.

This Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel may not stand up to a few of its high-class ratings, but don’t let that keep you from enjoying a bottle.

Score: 89

Those of you who’ve been around here for a while might remember that our last Seven Deadly Zins experience was less than pleasurable. It was, simply put, the worst Zinfandel we’d tried collectively, which seemed odd after several positive comments we’d heard about it. For starters, it was a 2005 Zin, which was widely regarded as a terrible year, and frankly I’m not so sure it wasn’t a bad bottle on top of it all. None the less, I’ve been loathe to spend over $15 to try another wine I’ll be disappointed with. Looking through the discounted bin at the grocer, I noticed a severely discounted bottle, and decided to give it a try.  After all, how bad can it be?

Seven Deadly Zins is not the best Zin I’ve ever had. In some ways, it’s not like traditional Zins with over the top and complex or complicated flavors. There’s none of the characteristic spiciness associated with most Old Vines, and much more of a dark fruit profile than the light and bright profiles you generally look for in a Zin. Throw in a little vanilla sweetness and this is a wine that’s not close to being traditional, but not bad either. What Seven Deadly Zins does have going for it, however, is excellent balance. It’s perfectly controlled, and really pleasant to drink.

As so many times on this site though, the question comes to value. This bottle can sometimes go for north of $17, which to me seems too much. Even at closer to $14, this really isn’t a bottle that’s going to take a place on my most-purchased list.

Score: 86

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Kendall-Jackson is a respectable label that is available almost everywhere wine is sold. Producing a tremendous number of varietals, KJ wines are usually a safe pick at restaurants and grocery aisles. We recently tackled the Chardonnay, and seeing as how we do a heck of a lot of Zinfandel reviews around here, it seemed criminal that we wouldn’t have reviewed one of the most widely available Zins in the country.

Starting off, this isn’t strictly an Old Vine Zin, which does cut down on the complexity a bit, nor is it a single origin Zin (in this case, Mendocino and Sonoma Counties). The blend of grapes certainly does bring flavors to the KJ that are not common in a Zin, while still maintaining that fruity punch you expect. If I had to sum it up on one word, I would say “different”.  Slightly sweet but still very fruity, with a very creamy mouthfeel and slightly woody finish, the KJ is certainly a unique wine, and an enjoyable one.

But is it really what I want? I’m just not convinced. I think this is a good bottle of wine. I will finish it and not be displeased at all with my purchase. For me, it’s not that the KJ Zin is complicated, as much as that it’s difficult to understand. With most Zin’s, I feel like I understand the wine – where it’s going, what it’s doing. Even if I don’t like it, I feel like I can appreciate it. With the KJ, there seems to be some spiritual connection that I’m missing. Perhaps it’s an artifact of its wide availability – I don’t know. All I know is that if I were at a restaurant and needed a Zin, I would probably not take the “safe” choice, but try my luck for something that reminded me of an old friend.

Score:86

We have somewhat of a thing here for Old Vine Zinfandels, as you might have recognized.  After rewatching Oz and James, I decided to pick up a bottle of Cline Cellars Ancient Vine Zinfandel, and at $12 dollars a bottle. While they didn’t try the Zin precisely, they did have reasonably good things to say about Cline’s wine, so it seemed worth a shot.

From the start, this is not your typical Old Vine Zin.  It’s base is formed by a rich chocolate sweetness that mingles with the cherry fruit to form a complex, if un-Zin like character.  There is a reasonable, though not excessive amount of spice and a lingering, but somewhat bitter finish.

The Cline is subtle and smooth, not only for a Zin but for a wine in general.  It doesn’t stand up and shout or try to draw attention to itself, but it none the less remains interesting.  It is approachable without being boring, complicated without being confusing. All in all, it’s a wine I would purchase again.

Score: 88

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: this is not an expensive wine.  At around $6 a bottle, this lands at the absolute bottom of the Zinfandel price range.  The bottle claims this wine scored 90 points and a Gold Medal in the 2007 California State Fair wine competition, but that may say more about the 2007 California State Fair than it does about this wine. No year on the label means that your mileage may vary somewhat, and in our case, it varied quite a bit from the ponce’s at the State Fair.

Barefoot’s label claims “inviting flavors of ripe cherry and wild raspberry” and “aromas of vanilla and spice”.  Let me be perfectly clear:  this must have been a different wine than the bottle that made it to my local grocer.  For a Zinfandel, this wine is overpoweringly sweet, and not necessarily in a vanilla sense.  While there are very subtle fruit and spice notes, they are hidden behind a powerful layer of sucrose that is in many ways overloading to your senses. In this regard, what it tastes like, pure and simple, is your standard bargain basement wine – grape juice with sugar, water, and vodka thrown in to give the illusion of wine.  To be fair, though, it is much better done than the standard cheap wine, but from first impression to last, there’s no doubt at all that you’re drinking something in the sub $8 price range.

I think Lisa’s assessment is close to spot on: “This tastes like a boxed wine in a bottle.”  As with so many of the less expensive wines on here, to me the question comes to value.  There are several better values for only a dollar or two more (Gnarly Head comes to mind), and some even within the same price point (Pepperwood Grove).  This, then, is a bottle to skip, regardless of how tempted you might be.  Gold medal or not, there are certainly better alternatives.

Score: 76

We are generally lovers of Sebastiani, so let’s start with that.  When I saw that my brother had a zinfandel, I was quite intrigued, first, because I had never seen such a thing, and second, because how could such a thing be bad.  All of that said, this wine probably had a high score before we opened the bottle.

But then we opened the bottle.  And we weren’t sure if it was supposed to taste like it tastes.  There was some discussion as to whether or not the bottle was actually a good bottle or if it was a ruined bottle that we had the misfortune to end up with.  The flavor is, well, strange.  It has a severely tart flavor, with none of the deep fruit tones that normally come out in a well balanced zin.  The overall experience is sort of painful, and neither of us really wanted to finish our glasses.  It’s sort of watery, and gives the impression that somewhere the batch of wine was cut with something to make it go farther.  Nothing too memorable (that is, in a good way) or notable about this one.  In fact, I don’t know what we will do with the rest of the bottle (I type as my brother pours the rest down the drain…).  We did find it to be slightly better with food, which the label mentions that it goes well with, but not enough to save the wine.

Hopefully this was a bad year for Sebastiani, and maybe the general unavailability of this in stores is a sign of what we have recently learned – stay away from this one.  Sorry Sebastiani – we still love you, but you really need to work on that zin a little.

Score: 78

2005 is, quite widely, regarded as a bad year for California Zinfandels – a fact that I tend to remember well, as I learned this not long after finding a fantastic deal on a 2005 Zin at my local grocery store. Still, with Jeff in for a visit and white wines on the agenda, a red to break the monotony was certainly not a bad idea. To that end, Jeff brought this 2005 Sacramento Trail Zinfandel as a counterpoint to the whites we would face for the rest of the weekend.

So, then, let’s start with the basics: this is quite an affordable bottle at less than $9. It is richly and distinctly aromatic, smelling strongly of smoke and tobacco. Somewhat surprisingly, though, this strength does not extend far beyond the smell: the wine itself did not seem as sharp or forceful as one would expect from an initial whiff.

The most noticeable thing about the taste of this bottle, then, was something it was lacking: the typical sharp spiciness that one usually associates with Zinfandels is completely absent, and, in fact, it would not be a stretch to call this particular Zin quite mellow. It’s not that this is bad, and, in fact, both Jeff and I found this quite interesting – something unexpected like this is always a plus, doubly so when it works as well as it does here. The lack of sharp and spicy flavors does not mean that Sacramento Trail is flavorless, however, and the flavors are really quite unique. While maintaining the complexity of a red, the fruit flavors are more tart and citric – something that really reminds us of the Chardonays we are also reviewing this weekend more than the archetypical Zinfandel. The combination, although it seems unruly, is really quite interesting: not so impressible that we’d buy it every week, but certainly something that was an interesting diversion in the world of usually cookie-cutter cheap Zins.

Score: 86

Zinfandels always seem to confuse me – as a grape, it seems to have all the elements for an interesting wine, but a few early bad experiences really tainted my opinions. The 2006 Sausal Private Reserve Zinfandel (older brother of the Family Zinfandel we reviewed at the same time) promises to help me put my misgivings aside with an impressive set of credentials: it is a limited production Estate Zinfandel from Sonoma made from vines with an average age of over 90 years. With a resume like that, I was excited to get tasting.

The most notable element of this wine, on first taste, is its spiciness – one would, of course, expect a zin to be spicy, but this bottle is even spicier than you might expect. This is not to say that other flavors are not there; in fact, every flavor commonly found in a zinfandel is present, and all in equal, blown up proportions: A nice, fruity base, for instance, does a good job of backing up the very bold spicy overtones.

The problem with the Private Reserve Zinfandel, then, is this overabundance of flavor. It really is an odd thing to have to review, since this seems like something that would not be such a problem: Jeff even noted that when reviewing beer, he almost always will go for the one with the bigger, bolder, more forward flavors, but in this case the excess just seems a bit unnecessary. Having so much flavor constantly tossed towards you, even if it is expertly balanced, does not make for an ideal drinking experience.

All of this, however, seemed to change when we made one small change – the Sausal Private Reserve Zinfandel is a fantastic companion to spicy food. When paired with similarly bold flavors, the amplified taste of the wine started making sense. Everything remained perfectly balanced, and none of the elements that seemed too brash when tasted in isolation appeared offensive at all. Thus, the end result of this review seems to be a bit dual-layered: in isolation, the Private Reserve is an interesting wine, but its excessive boldness means that better options exist (and for cheaper). I am not sure, however, that I have ever had a wine that worked better paired with spicy food.

The score here reflects the exact same principle that we used to score the Sausal Family Zinfandel: in this case, though, something that seemed almost excessive, brash, and unnecessary at first glance completely changed character solely based on the context in which it was placed. A wine that we originally appreciated but did not compleltely enjoy became, in the presence of food, something wonderful that we both agree we would buy again for a meal that need a powerful companion to stand up to stand up to its robust flavor. More than that, we both agree that pairing the Private Reserve Zinfandel with spicy food was one of the best food and wine experiences that we’ve ever had. Because of this, we feel that the Private Reserve Zinfandel did genuinely offer us a new and interesting experience, and deserves to be rated with the select group of wines that change our perspective on what wine can be.

Score: 93