It is hot everywhere. But I cannot blithely recommend our wines for warm weather refreshment. Those are some other wines. For instance, I had a really good Picpoul de Pinet yesterday in steamy Raleigh, North Carolina.

But I can offer an opportunity to study some of our "lighter wines". We are going to invite 48 of you to a tutored tasting at the river house on Saturday, July 16.

We will taste a vertical selection of three series of related wines made from grapes grown in vineyards east of Napa. We will cap the tasting with a review of the 2010 Glos, now nearly two months after bottling.

The tasting is prompted by a desire for review and assessment. I have just begun pouring the wines from the May bottling in my travels around the country. As I have been pouring them, I have had the sense the wines are really quite good, and much better than they were at the barrel tastings, and much better than the final blends were immediately upon bottling. This is not surprising in itself: what is surprising, and lovely, is HOW EXCELLENT they seem. I think that I have never been more proud of a wine than I am of the 2009 MIDAN AL-TAHRIR. So I am eager to get two of these wines in front of some of you again with the hope of spreading my delight—and their reputation. I was also excited by this very perceptive and enthusiastic review of our wines (mostly from the Fall release), flowing from a tasting that I held recently in Louisville, Kentucky. It made me wish that Midan and more of the other new wines had been in the tasting too!
We have released the wines so far only in Chicago and Napa, so we still have plenty of most of the new wines to offer you.

Now, since we rarely miss an opportunity for study and learning, I have decided to frame the tasting in a (brief, of course) historical framework, with an opportunity to assess vintage differences and the ways that the wines age. Here are the wines that we will taste:

We will taste them in 5 flights, with 1-3 wines per flight. After the tasting, I will offer snacks and we can hang out a little. It should be fun and educational at once. Bring your own note paper.

SATURDAY JULY 16.
3.30 pm. The whole affair will last till about 5.30.
ADDRESS: 1536 MILTON ROAD.

RSVP if you would like to attend. We will offer places to the first 48 respondents.