These are my tasting note on the Nickel & Nickel Dragonfly Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 ($65) and the more I thought about that assessment, the more it puzzled me. Not puzzled in the sense of being surprised because the Nickel & Nickel people make a superb portfolio of wines, but puzzled by the bit about the comparison to Bordeaux. So, in an attempt to learn why this might be, I got in touch with Dirk Hampson, the Chairman and Director of Winemaking of N&N.

Napa has more sunshine and more heat than Bordeaux so it is always going to yield lusher, more generous fruit, but Hampson pointed out that Dragonfly is located in a particular area of St. Helena known to old-timers as the Banana Belt because of its propensity to produce wines packed with ripe fruit flavors.

OK, so that’s the fruit part of the equation resolved, but what about the more tricky issue of the complexity?

To answer this we need to back track a bit. The owners of Nickel & Nickel first started making wine under the Far Niente label and the single bottling of the cab contains wine from several different blocks, each one contributing subtly different qualities to the blend. As Hampson explains, this is not dissimilar to what happens in Bordeaux. “The great estates in Bordeaux are able to blend wine from different terroir in their estate, and different varietals so they are able to bring in more layering and complexity.”

Dragonfly Vineyard

Then, in 1997 the same team launched a second line of wines, Nickel & Nickel, with a different philosophy – each wine is the product of a single vineyard. The downside is that they don’t show the complexity of a blend but on the other hand they are a pure expression of the characteristics of that unique place. Hence Dragonfly’s astounding ripe fruit characteristics.

“It’s like asking the question ‘Which is better, the symphony or the soloist?’ ” Hampson theorizes. “There’s no answer. A symphony has more layering, more richness, more complexity whereas a soloist can be such a clear, perfect note that it cuts right to your core.”

The current release of this soloist cab is the 2005, and it costs $97 from the winery. For retail outlets try www.wine-searcher.com.

“In Napa land is not priced on vineyard land economics, it’s priced on lifestyle, or ego economics. They are good reasons but it’s not a business” he explains to me one balmy early summer evening on the deck of his winery’s handsome visitor center overlooking the bucolic golf course of the CordeValle resort 20 miles south of San Jose in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

“I fully intend to run a profitable business because if it isn’t, pretty soon it will cease to exist. If it’s just about the beautiful place and beautiful wine and the lifestyle that’s great but if it’s not a successful business, if it’s not sustainable financially, eventually it’s going to fall apart.”

Believe it or not, such commonsense thinking is not as widespread in Napa Valley as one might expect - there’s an awful lot of vanity winemaking being done there, winemaking where competition for ratings points, not to mention price points, is more important than actually making money.

But not for Murphy.

Time For Wine Evening

As we chat I am savoring a glass of his best wine, the Clos LaChance Hummingbird Series White Tufted Sunbeam 2008 Sauvignon Blanc ($15) and watching a couple of hundred locals enjoying the regular Thursday evening open house, a Time For Wine Evening, while listening to music, eating picnics on the center’s terrace and lawns and, not incidentally, buying his wine. Murphy is nothing if not adept at applying the skills he honed in his previous life as a senior marketing executive for Hewlett-Packard to promote his wine.

Perhaps because SB is a relatively simple varietal – you can only go so far with it, and it shows well even when the vines are young – it is often the wine that stands out in a start up winery’s portfolio.

This version is crisp and fresh but not totally dry, and mercifully free of that assertive gooseberry taste so many SBs exhibit these days. It’s also acquired a touch of appealing minerality since I last tasted it.

Whatever the reason this is a beautifully made inexpensive wine that will work equally well as a summer party sipper, an aperitif, or with scallops, clams, mussels or lobster for supper.

And it should certainly help Clos LaChance on the road to profitability.

To find this wine try www.wine-searcher.com.

Strange as it may seem, these wines first registered on the wider world’s consciousness thanks to the actions of a left wing government. I kid you not; in 1936 the socialist Front Populaire under Léon Blum enacted a law mandating two weeks paid vacation for all French workers. Now what this has to do with the state of Provence rosé might seem opaque, to say the least, but bear with me. As a result of this new law, tens of thousands of northern factory workers and their families, taking advantage of their new privilege, headed off to the sunny south to discover the pleasures of ratatouille, bathing in the balmy Mediterranean and, yes, rosé wine.

But at that time the wine I now savor for its delicacy and finesse was pretty nasty stuff; the sort of thin, watery and acidic wine that if you didn’t drink ice-cold on a hot summer day you didn’t drink it at all – and in truth, there is still more than a little of this kind of plonk around today.

But to a large degree Provence rosé has been reborn in the last decade or so and there are more and more wines like the delectable Mas de la Dame, Rosé du Mas 2008 ($14), a wine made with care and attention as opposed to being a mere afterthought in the winemaking process.

Les Baux de Provence

Mas de la Dame means “Farm of the Woman” but is owned by not one but two women, Anne Poniatowski and Caroline Missoffe. Located close to the dramatically picturesque hilltop village of Les Baux de Provence just south of Avignon, the wine is made with the assistance of star Rhone winemaker and consultant Jean-Luc Colombo.

Quite delightfully quaffable, it just brims with glorious strawberry flavors – think fraise du bois in this month of strawberries, June. Not too dry, so it works well as an aperitif but with enough acidity and granular minerality to make it the perfect accompaniment to Mediterranean summer food.

And who would have thought that all this sun-splashed pleasure comes to us now, seventy years later, thanks to the actions of a socialist government in 1936. Talk about unintended consequences.

Each region has it’s own particular cucina, especially when it comes to pasta, and in Langhe, south of Alba in Piedmont, it is tajarin, a thin, yellow tagliatelle made with up to twice the number of eggs as the conventional kind. It’s yellow from all those extra egg yokes, and incredibly rich….yum!

On a recent visit to explore the wines of the region – Barbaresco and Barolo – I found myself eating it every day. This certainly wasn’t hardship rations, at least for a short time, and the best example I encountered was served at the unpretentious Trattoria Antica Torre in the hilltop village of Barbaresco. It came with a simple topping of ground veal and diced tomatoes, and a bottle of the wonderful Giuseppe Cortese Barbaresco Rabajà 2004 ($45), Rabajà being a single, and highly esteemed, vineyard of which the Cotrese family own a part.

Thanks to the almost 60 year old vines and Cotrese’s traditional, restrained approach to winemaking – he uses large botti rather than the currently fashionable smaller, new-oak bariques to age his wines – the results are astounding. Rich yet elegant, concentrated and intense but far from heavy, the Rabajà is redolent of red fruit and floral aromas at the moment, and went as well with the preceding vitello tonnato and the subsequent rabbit wrapped in pancetta – it was one of those Italian lunches – as it did with the tajardin.

With time, as it evolves and deepens, it will develop darker, earthier tones, and be more appropriate for roast meats and stews, but for me it will always remain a memorable wine from a memorable meal in that memorable hilltop village.

One hesitates to speculate on what might have provoked the honest peasants – and vignerons too, for it is a famous wine village – to enact this wonderfully bizarre government initiative, but one only hopes it wasn’t a surfeit of their excellent wine. Whatever the motivation though, the decree - unlike many such well-intentioned government initiatives - seems to have had it’s desired affect – CNP has mercifully remained a flying-saucer-free zone ever since.

We must now fast forward to Santa Cruz, California in 1986 where maverick winemaker, passionate exponent of Rhone Valley wines, founder of Bonnie Doon Vineyard, and all round absurdist himself, Randal Grahm, released his first wine – a red Rhone blend named Le Cigare Volant.

A few years later he followed it up with a white version, Le Cigare Blanc, and it remains one of my favorite California whites. I opened a bottle, Le Cigare Blanc 2007 ($22), the other day and was once again amazed by the overwhelming explosion of lush, ripe fruit flavors this wine displays – think peaches and cantaloupes in summer, or comice pears in the fall. But it’s not just a fruity, sweet dessert wine – far from it; there’s also a fine backbone of citrusy acidity that leads to a long, completely dry, and hugely satisfying finish.

And don’t miss the discreet cigare volant looming like a malevolent insect in the upper left corner of the label. Absurd? Indeed, but a delectable wine nonetheless.

After an hour or so this featured wine ran out – it really wasn’t that bad – so our host resorted to his own cellar, pulling out a few bottles of Montecillo Reserva, Rioja 2003 ($18), a widely available and always reliable wine, and I was reminded what Spanish wine should taste like.

Good Rioja like this displays that unmistakable dry, dusty quality that reminds me of the experience of entering an old, dark Spanish church on a hot summer’s day; the smell of worn stone, ancient wood, and centuries’ worth of incense and smoke from the candles of the faithful.

This Rioja evokes just such a response in me thanks to its rich, smoky flavors laced with hints of deep mystery. It is as darkly evocative as a painting by Velasquez or Ribera and quite unmistakably Spanish.

According to Joel Peterson, the winery’s founder and chief winemaker, its fans even go so far as to have themselves tattooed with the iconic three intertwined ravens of the label. “I’ve seen breasts, butts, the middle of backs and lower, arms, belly buttons, you name it,” he told a recent interviewer.

So I was more than a little surprised by what I found when I pulled the cork on a bottle of the 2007 Ravenswood Vintners Blend Chardonnay ($10) recently. Subtle is not a word often associated with Ravenswood zins so what I was expecting was a typically big, oaky, unsubtle California chard, but what I got was a charming, fresh and fruity one. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was flinty but there’s definitely a touch of minerality to go along with the vanilla and toasted almond flavors, but above all, this wine is about fruit.

As Peterson explains in an email “the tropical character of the fruit is so good that it seems like a shame to cover it with too much oak. A little bit of that is important for perfume and complexity but in this case, the wine really reflects the character of the fruit” Amen.

And who would have thought it, from the winery that inspires tattoos?

Rosés are back in fashion these days and as my favorite version comes from Provence, I will be featuring a few of them over the summer, with the first offering being the modestly priced Saint Roch les Vignes ($14).

It comes from the village of Cuers, northeast of Toulon, and somewhat surprisingly is made by a cooperative. Wine cooperatives in France have a deserved reputation for producing ropy, bulk wine with the emphasis on quantity rather than quality. But even they are being forced to upgrade their act in the face of the new, world-wide market.

And Saint Roch les Vignes have obviously managed this transformation most successfully. Beautifully balanced and redolent of summer strawberries, the wine got better and better in the glass, so my advice is to let it breath for half an hour after opening, and don’t serve it too cold, that will just mask its seductive, peaches-and-cream harmony.

And I think I’ll have bouibasse for supper this evening. Just to get in practice.

Until recently, at least. Through the twentieth century Argentinean winemaking functioned in viniferous isolation, producing vast quantities of inexpensive plonk for local consumption, wine that wouldn’t stand a chance in the competitive export market, if they even bothered to try.

Recently however political stability and the prospect of cheap land has attracted a slew of foreign investors and their accompanying band of traveling international oenologists and viticulturists who often work two harvests a year, one in each hemisphere.

One of these investors is Domaines Barons de Rothschild of Chateau Lafite who have formed Caro, a joint venture with a local producer, Nicolas Catena of Mendoza, the country’s wine capital at the foot of the Andes.

The other evening I drunk a bottle of Caro 2001 and what a delight it turned out to be. Soft and accessible, it showed lovely dark berry flavors – think blackberry and cherry – accentuated by touches of punchy spice, I assume from the malbec in the blend. Still fresh, with fine balancing acidity and well integrated tannins for a solid structure, it is a gem of bright fruit and flinty minerality. In a blind tasting I would peg it as a very good Bordeaux.

It retailed for $40 on release but this vintage is now listed by Wine-Searcher with an average price of $85. The current release, the 2005 is young and fresh and fruity but with none of the polished sophistication of its elder relative – an exuberant adolescent next to the avuncular and urbane uncle. But give it time, give it time…..

Too many champagnes, even expensive ones, taste bland and uninteresting to me, but not these beautiful bubbles which have a real depth of flavor that sets them apart from the crowd. Perhaps it’s because it’s a privately owned business, always a help when you are trying to make fine wine, or perhaps it’s because Henriot use only chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, with none of the more prosaic pinot meunier, in the blend, a formula that’s usually only found in prestige cuveés at four or five times the price.

Perhaps it’s because those grapes come from top rated vineyards, but whatever the reason this wine has a wonderfully delicate and polished style, refined and elegant but at the same time possessed of a subtle, rich, yeasty earthiness which becomes more pronounced with the second glass.

So, if you are looking for a stunning rosé champagne for a special summer event at a price that won’t do to much damage to your already bruised bank account, this is the fizz.

And yes, and I’ll have that second glass please.