polarbear22 wrote:I had the green dot first, and thought it was Zin. So I ruled that out for the red dot. I came up with Cab for that one.

Seems as if I was wrong on the green, and that lead me in the wrong direction.

I'm 99% sure that green was grenache.

Loweeel wrote:I'm 99% sure that green was grenache.

I will buy that. I did not have Grenache on my radar screen when I tasted it. I was able to rule out Cab and Merlot pretty quick. When the Grenache showed up in the right bottle shape, I started to wonder, but nothing left to taste.

ddeuddeg wrote:Really. I'm going to need a complete summary of what I had and what I guessed. I never thought to write it down anywhere.

The wine experiment has become a social experiment...

I need refreshing on what I guessed as well. I have notes all over the place, and can't remember what I settled on.

We know you're working on it WD - but can you give us a more detailed update?

berrda wrote:We stopped by Peter's Place a couple of weeks ago. While he wouldn't commit, he did say that my guess of merlot for the red dot was almost certainly wrong. From memory, he thought the red dot was zin.

db

PS As I had said at the time, ours was a swig and a swag.

I was with you on this one. I opened the red dot with my sis and her boyfriend (both fellow wine wooters) and we bounced back and forth between calling this a zin and a merlot. In the end we settled on merlot after reading some of the flavor descriptors on the Wellington site. Bummer if we're wrong.

MaskedMarvel wrote:The wine experiment has become a social experiment...

I need refreshing on what I guessed as well. I have notes all over the place, and can't remember what I settled on.

We know you're working on it WD - but can you give us a more detailed update?

While the results are being tabulated is there any way that we can get the "answer key" to verify on our own? I'm still in favor of posting everyone's guesses but a simple key would be very nice in the meantime.

I had a red dot and guessed Zin. My wife and I definitely enjoyed it, whatever it was.

javadrinker wrote:Maybe we should just post our guesses and let J-dub make up a spreadsheet...the boy loves his spreadsheets. We'll figure this out on our own.

Funny thing is that our guesses went straight into a spreadsheet. So the work has already been done -- just need now to publish it.

javadrinker wrote:I was with you on this one. I opened the red dot with my sis and her boyfriend (both fellow wine wooters) and we bounced back and forth between calling this a zin and a merlot. In the end we settled on merlot after reading some of the flavor descriptors on the Wellington site. Bummer if we're wrong.

I did the same thing and also ended up at Merlot. I had the orange dot and was more certain that was Zin so I ruled Zin out for the red dot. But I didn't consider both could be Zin, maybe one was old vine as Corrado said.

Cesare wrote:I did the same thing and also ended up at Merlot. I had the orange dot and was more certain that was Zin so I ruled Zin out for the red dot. But I didn't consider both could be Zin, maybe one was old vine.

IIRC, I guessed:

• Green dot: Syrah -- surely wrong; revised guess (not submitted): Zin
  
• Red dot: Cab Sauv -- clearly I am a minority on this one
  
• Orange dot: Merlot

jwhite6114 wrote:IIRC, I guessed:

• Green dot: Syrah -- surely wrong; revised guess (not submitted): Zin
  
• Red dot: Cab Sauv -- clearly I am a minority on this one
  
• Orange dot: Merlot

We had about 5 people taste, form their opinions, and then we discussed, we were all unanimous, which means we were unanimously right or unanimously wrong.

We were red dot=Cab, orange dot=Zin

We were pretty certain about the red dot being a cab, but it seems that most people thought it was a zin.

andyduncan wrote:We had about 5 people taste, form their opinions, and then we discussed, we were all unanimous, which means we were unanimously right or unanimously wrong.

We were red dot=Cab, orange dot=Zin

We were pretty certain about the red dot being a cab, but it seems that most people thought it was a zin.

I had red at Cab as well.

andyduncan wrote:We had about 5 people taste, form their opinions, and then we discussed, we were all unanimous, which means we were unanimously right or unanimously wrong.

We were red dot=Cab, orange dot=Zin

We were pretty certain about the red dot being a cab, but it seems that most people thought it was a zin.

The other thing that pushed me away from calling the red dot a Zin was the amount of tartrate crystals on the cork. I have yet to find them on any Wellington Zins I've had. Seen them on Cab corks plenty of times. Hadn't tried any of Peter's Merlots in the past so I don't know if crystals are common on those but this really didn't feel like a Cab to me.

DH and I both thought very strongly that red dot was cab.

Wigdog wrote:I had the green dot. Bride and I each tasted and immediately said the same thing, so that was our guess.

We both thought the green dot was Zin...

Yeah, was the Noir de Noirs even an option..... cause that's what I guessed.... oops

I had Red Dot = Cab, also. But there is the great "is it a red dot or an orange dot" debate.

Per my unofficial tally so far I have

Red - Cab:6 Zin:3 Merlot:3
Orange - Zin:4 Merlot:1
Green - Zin:2 Grenache:1 Syrah:1

I had green=Grenache, red=Noir de Noirs...I think....

Corrado wrote:Isn't the Noir de Noir a blend? All wines were single-varietal.

Noir de Noir has enough Alicante Bouschet in it to have that name on the front label.

The 2006 vintage had 84% Alicante Bouschet in it. I call it a single varietal as far as the law is concerned.

javadrinker wrote:The other thing that pushed me away from calling the red dot a Zin was the amount of tartrate crystals on the cork. I have yet to find them on any Wellington Zins I've had. Seen them on Cab corks plenty of times. Hadn't tried any of Peter's Merlots in the past so I don't know if crystals are common on those but this really didn't feel like a Cab to me.

I think the orange was definitely the zin, I think that one was pretty obvious (I'm really digging myself deep here if I'm wrong). The red I suppose could have been a merlot, but we opened one of the merlots later that night and it tasted quite a bit different. We were several bottles deep by that point, however, so it might just have been us.

CpprCr8 wrote:I had Red Dot = Cab, also. But there is the great "is it a red dot or an orange dot" debate.

Yeah, that could be part of the problem, the red paper and marker dots were very red, from what I understand, but the orange paper dots were a sort of burnt orange, and the orange marker dots were almost a peach/pink color.

Maybe they were all The Dukes and the jokes on us!!!!

Corrado wrote:My initial conspiracy theory was that both Blue & Pink bottles were Syrahs from different vintages (didn't have either, but Peter make a LOT of Syrahs) and that the Red, Orange, and Green were all different Zinfandels with the Green being the '04 Zin that turned Gary upside down trying to describe it.

I'm not sure Peter would have done that, he already stated that year and vineyard were irrelevant to the contest. I mean, I wouldn't put it past him to be that tricky, but I also don't think he would have only shipped out two varietals.

Well, since we're posting our guesses. I had a green, and I guessed Syrah (even though the bottle shape didn't match up).

JOATMON wrote:Noir de Noir has enough Alicante Bouschet in it to have that name on the front label.

The 2006 vintage had 84% Alicante Bouschet in it. I call it a single varietal as far as the law is concerned.

But not as far as your self-imposed Century Club rules are concerned.

polarbear22 wrote:I had the green dot first, and thought it was Zin. So I ruled that out for the red dot. I came up with Cab for that one.

Seems as if I was wrong on the green, and that lead me in the wrong direction.

I drank them in a different order, but those were my guesses on those two. I thought the orange was a Syrah. Shows how much (little) I know.

EDIT: Never even thought about paying attention to bottle shapes. Duh!

mfelske wrote:Per my unofficial tally so far I have

Red - Cab:6 Zin:3 Merlot:3
Orange - Zin:4 Merlot:1
Green - Zin:2 Grenache:1 Syrah:1

My guess for red dot is Zin. I was leaning towards old vines, but not strongly enough to get cocky and go beyond the varietal guess

ddeuddeg wrote:EDIT: Never even thought about paying attention to bottle shapes. Duh!

Per this thread - the bottle shape didn't matter. There were two bottle shapes for one colour dot for several, IIRC...

Tartrate crystals- I've never had them in anything from Wellington other than Syrah and Merlot.

One of the dotted bottles I had had sediment (or lee) "staining," or residue, on the inside of the bottle. I've only seen this in Wellington Merlot.

Merlot is not in Chrome's spellchecker.



Since I can't remember what I guessed for which, and my notes are understandably confusing after going through four bottles that night (oops), I'd be especially interested in winemaker input on these. What was the process for bottling these? Did you re-bottle them? etc etc...

MaskedMarvel wrote:
Tartrate crystals- I've never had them in anything from Wellington other than Syrah and Merlot.

One of the dotted bottles I had had sediment (or lee) "staining," or residue, on the inside of the bottle. I've only seen this in Wellington Merlot.

Which, along with tasting notes from the Wellington Vineyards website, my party voted for Merlot over Zin for the red dot...

We both immediately agreed that red dot = merlot.

I'm certain that Peter did not rebottle any wines for this. I was there the day they were getting this offer going and they were only relabeling bottles and applying dots. They did, btw, run out of red dots while I was there...

Updated tally:

Red - Cab:7 Zin:4 Merlot:5 Alicante Bouschet(Noir):1
Orange - Zin:4 Merlot:1 Syrah:1
Green - Zin:3 Grenache:2 Syrah:2

mfelske wrote:Updated tally:

Red - Cab:7 Zin:4 Merlot:5 Alicante Bouschet(Noir):1
Orange - Zin:4 Merlot:1 Syrah:1
Green - Zin:3 Grenache:2 Syrah:2

FWIW, I love how certain so many are, yet with different opinions. It proves one of the points of this exercise: that we all taste things a bit differently.

jwhite6114 wrote:FWIW, I love how certain so many are, yet with different opinions. It proves one of the points of this exercise: that we all taste things a bit differently.

I thought it proved that we don't know Manos, the Hands of Fate about wine :-)

andyduncan wrote:I thought it proved that we don't know Manos, the Hands of Fate about wine :-)

That was point #2

Loweeel wrote:I'm 99% sure that green was grenache.

Methinks you're 99% mistaken.

I have yet to open my bordeaux-shaped pink dotted bottle, which I guessed to be a Merlot. For no other reason that the dot is pink.

SonomaBouliste wrote:Methinks you're 99% mistaken.

So was your Noir de Noirs even a choice, or did I make that one up!? Oh yeah, orange dot.... I'm afraid that I'm waay off on this based on other guesses!! ha ha