Curts intros hold their value because he can never seem to produce enough plants to fill all the orders he gets each year. I was out there a number of times last summer because I really do live close, and he was really upset that he had too many orders, and not enough plants to fill them. Curt really has some nice stuff coming in the future. The third seedling is really strange, it almost looks like a tulip, that is as open as it gets. I would have been out there every week during the bloom but I had taken my van in for repairs on the 10th of May, and still did not get it back until mid July. The reason Ginny doesn't look happy in that photo is my van had been at a srepair shop here in Maple Heights, and the owner had it towed out past Curts to his other shop, and we had just been there asking why it was out there, and when it was going to be done. That was on July 2nd. To make a long story short, I had to have it towed back here to someone else, and it cost me over $800.00 to have it fixed and some of that cost was to repair work the other guy had done. I basically got sick of driving my wife to and from work.

I don't claim to be an expert (though I have been making my own beer and wine for 20+ years) and the wine experts/connoisseurs are probably going to cringe at this suggestion. My husband and I prefer dry wines too. However, our lovely daughter detests dry wines (she's more of a Boon's farm drinker). Since we usually have close to 200 bottles of wine on hand at our home, I'm not about to go out and buy a cheap sweet wine when she comes home for a visit. The solution to the problem is simple.........she pours herself a glass of whatever we have open and then sweetens it to suit her taste with sugar. We have a lot of friends who prefer sweet wines and I have shared our daughter's little secret with them. They have all tried it and rave about the improved taste of the wine. While the connoisseurs will turn up their noses at this suggestion, it does work. It's just like iced tea.....some like it plain, some like it slightly sweetened and some like it extra sweet.

What Scaldude said. Zinfandel is a red grape that was probably brought to California by Italian immigrants. It's been traced to Croatia thru DNA and in southern Italy they have a grape called Primitivo, which the EU has now said can be labeled zinfandel. I think Rabbit Ridge is calling one of their zins primitivo now as well - mostly for the marketing. Zin ripens very unevenly so to get full ripeness in all of the berries, some of the earlier ripening ones get almost over ripe. As a result, the wine tends to have a pretty high alcohol content. It was always considered a rustic peasant wine but there was a lot of it planted out in CA. (I guess peasants liked the hi alcohol?) Sometime in the 1970s some people decided to make a rose out of it. This was around the time that Lancers was a big seller. The US wine industry was pretty much only a handful of wineries and most of what was produced aside from those was pretty undrinkable - Gallo Hearty Burgundy, Almaden, etc. And rose was totally unfashionable. It's only gotten trendy in the past 6 years or so. Anyhow, the people who decided to make a rose out of it wanted a way to make it seem different, so they decided to call it "blush". They didn't ferment it completely dry but left a little bit of residual sugar in the wine so the average American, who was pretty unfamiliar with wine at the time but was willing to drink sweet cocktails and sodas, might adopt it. They were of course smashingly successful and made hundreds of millions of dollars and generated many competitors. It was so successful that many people now think zinfandel is always pink. And the people who started the craze, owners of Sutter Home, are now making really nice zins and other wines. There were two good parts to this tale. First, the white zins got people drinking wine. Second and more important, the fact that there was so much demand kept the vineyards from being uprooted and today we have many zinfandel vineyards with wonderful old and even ancient vines that are producing outstanding wine. So anyone who ever knocks white zin should pause to reflect on the fact that it saved so many vineyards that would otherwise have been replanted. Zin is tricky though, and there are many styles. If you drink something by Turley for example, you can pay over $100 and get a wine that is maybe 16% alcohol. It will be super fruity and will seem sweet even tho it is actually dry. And on a hot day with barbeque, I really don't like it. There are other, less over the top styles, that take very well to slight chilling. Very grapey, almost like pinot noir. Brown Estate for example. And then there are some that age beautifully. Most zin is consumed young, but you can find some older bottles with maybe 20 - 30 or more years on them, that sometimes taste like great mature cabs. Ridge Geyserville for example, ages nicely. As far as what is comparable, not too sweet or too dry, that's a real personal issue. You might try a young pinot noir from the central coast area. Alternatively, you can try an inexpensive Nero d'Avola from southern Italy, or a grenache or what they term GSM from Australia, or even Spain or France. Grenache is a very fruity friendly grape. Or a Beaujolais. That had a similar story to zinfandel - George Dubouef was successful in making young beaujolais become a fashionable item, but it destroyed the reputation of the area. The good side is that as a result, it is underappreciated and there are some excellent wines. Just look for what's called "cru" beaujolais. Something from the Fleurie area, for example, or Julienas. Dubouf himself makes wines from these areas and those are probably $10 most places and actually good values. When young, these wines are made in a way that makes them very friendly but they're also interesting in that if you keep them for five or six years, they start to resemble older Burgundies, which are more money and need much more time to mature.

I would decide what sweetness you like first. 0 is very dry, 1 is sweeter, 2 is sweeter than 1, etc... Once you know that, then go through and pick out a few different bottles to take home and try until you find one that you like. Everyone's taste is different so even a recommended wine might not be exactly what you are looking for. There are a lot of domestic Calif wines that are good and will be cheaper than imported. Personally, I like the German Rhine wines best, better than Italian and I prefer white for drinking without food, but I have not found a red that I truly couldn't drink either.