I am not going to talk about the film with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, nor the last film that starred a future winemaker.  I was at the Fine Wine Source in Livonia, Michigan tasting some wines.  I am sure that I make a pest of myself when I am there, as I am hastily writing some cryptic notes and trying to capture a photograph of the wine and the label.  I am that guy that makes other people groan when they are trying to taste a wine and having fun.  I also try not to monopolize the conversation, not because I am so knowledgeable, but because I want to learn as much as I can, in a short period of time.  I figure that what I don’t glisten at the moment, I hope to find additional information on the web and help someone else out.

I was tasting a wine from Atlas Wines called Omen Red Blend 2016.  To be candid, if I was just out shopping for something new, I may have passed this bottle by because of the rather prosaic name.  I am so used to wineries coming out with an exotic name for a blend, that Red Blend is rather boring, but when I look back, that is exactly what the label describes.  Here was a wine that was fifty percent Syrah, twenty-seven percent Barbera, sixteen percent Petite Sirah and seven percent Zinfandel.  The wine carried the Sierra Foothills AVA and I have had some other wines from that area.  The wine was aged for nine months in French Oak, of which twenty-five percent was new and there were only eight-hundred-twenty-five cases produced.  Even though the tastings are done using the Coravin system, so the wine is basically fresh from the bottle and one has to swirl it a bit, before the tasting, I could tell that it was a full-bodied wine and a pretty wine as well.

What really geeked me, and I guess that I am a wine nerd to a degree, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be sharing information every other day.  While the wine carries the Sierra Foothills AVA, the first three varietals were actually grown in the Fair Play AVA, and if I had read about this district before, it did not register with me and I had to do some research.  I like wine, but I also, if possible like to speak with some basic knowledge and who knows how often in Michigan I would find another wine with Fair Play AVA.  Fair Play AVA is entirely found inside of the El Dorado and Sierra Foothills AVA’s.  It is only thirty-six square miles in size, which in Michigan is how big original townships were platted, as I can tell you, that I live in a former township, now a city that still has the original six by six square miles.  Fair Play is currently having three-hundred-fifty acres planted with additional two-hundred more acres in the planning stage.   This is the esoteric information that I like to carry around with me and it is amazing what one can learn from tasting a wine.