San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
There’s nothing quite like leaving a screening of The Muppets just before hitting up WineRave, one of the first events of this year’s San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival, to make you feel really, really old. The setting for the wine event was Eden in Hillcrest, a joint I don’t frequent. The music was loud, and there was even a guy dressed in a bear suit (promoting Barenjager, a honey liqueur). And since I got there on the late side, I was dry, while many of the attendees had already had more than their share of tastings.
But there was plenty of wine to be tasted, as more than 20 wineries, breweries and spirit purveyors had their wares on display and were offering up samples. I walked the room, sipping from a number of bottles, including Warrant Red, a 2008 blend named for the hair band, and a 2006 Cabernet from Opolo, out of Paso Robles, which I really enjoyed.
My favorite of the bunch was the 2009 Barbera from Dobra Zemlja, a winery in Plymouth, about 40 miles east of Sacramento. I don’t usually go for wines that are as fruit forward as this, but I was quickly won over by the rush of berries that immediately flooded my palate. It’s perhaps not the most complex bottle I’ve ever had, but there’s definitely a time and place for a solid, casual, flavorful bottle of wine, and I suspect it will open up quite a bit if decanted.
Dobra Zemlja—which means “good earth” in Croatian, by the way—is a small operation, producing just a few thousand cases of wine each year. That’s great when it comes to quality, but it does cause a hitch when it comes to getting your hands on a bottle. The good news is that you don’t need to visit the winery or its tasting-room cave (although that sounds like a nice trip, right?), because they’ll sell you wine via their website, dobraz.com.
