Friday Night Bubbles

2007 Latitude 50 Spätburgunder Sekt Brut Rosé, $17, Savio Soares Selections. For some reason, this is the third Latitude 50 wine I've drank in just over a week. I had the Dornfelder at the Obscure Wine Dinner, the Riesling with Szechuan food the other night, and now this. Latitude 50 refers to the northern locale of these vineyards in the Rheingau, Germany.

It's not easy for grapes to ripen that far north. The fruit in this wine feels somewhat ripe, but perhaps not as ripe as would be necessary to avoid high dosage, and I suspect that the dosage is high in this wine. It tastes sweet, as opposed to ripe. I'm guessing that this is not a macerated rosé, that still red wine is instead added to the blend.

The nose is creamy and a bit yeasty, with nice soil character and shy dark fruit. Later on there is something like red zinger tea or rose hips. The palate is straightforward with tasty fruit and more of that creamy character. There is enough acidity to make this wine fresh and it's very drinkable, a good sparkling rosé of higher quality than any other I can think of at this price.

I could quibble about things like complexity and intensity, find little faults here and there, but what would be the point? This wine costs $17, and for serious sparkling wine, that's cheap. This is a genuinely nice wine, and a good value at this price.

On another note...I'm convinced that although there are many great still wines available for less than $20, there are far fewer great sparkling wines available for less than $20. Instead of continuing to buy them and write luke-warm reviews for Friday Night Bubbles, I'm going to move to another format, something like a wine of the week. I'd rather drink great wine for $17 than pretty good sparkling wine for $17. It's been over a year on the Friday Night Bubbles thing. Change is a good thing. There will still be Champs, but there will be other wines too. We'll see how it goes.