Saucy Saucers! Le Cigare Volante Red 2004 - Bonny Doon Vineyard

I had a half bottle of the Bonny Doon Cigare Volant years ago – before I started thinking of myself as oh so knowledgeable. I loved it. I enjoyed it so much that I thought now that so many years have passed and my palate is oh so sophisticated, I will probably think it’s pedestrian. I didn’t. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, that when I saw the Rose version at Spec’s in Houston – I convinced my father to pick up a bottle. I think my mother and I drank most of it before he could get a sip.  The red is smooth and rich and luscious. It's big, but it's really balanced. It was great to sip by itself, but it was even better with the boeuf that we had for dinner.

The Cigare Volant is done in a Southern Rhone style. That means it’s a blend of several different grapes that are commonly grown in The southern Rhone Valley. We’ve looked at a cotes du rhone in this blog, but some of the other fancy pants wines from the area are the whopper Chateauneuf du Pape, Gignondas, Lirac, and Vacqueras. The wines from that area are full bodied spice houses with luscious fruit and earthiness. Some of the most common red grapes are Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre and Carignan.

The breakdown of the Cigare Volant Red is:

38% grenache, 35% syrah, 12% mourvèdre, 8% carignane, 7% cinsault

The name? Well that’s a play on a law that was passed by the Village of Chateauneuf in 1954 that prohibits flyaing saucers (cigares volantes en francais!) from landing in the fields. It’s hilarious that they would even think to get such a law passed, apparently the folks at Bonny Doon thought it hysterical enough to take their parady and their respect of the wines one step further. So you see the lable is adorable – the top of the screw cap (yay screw cap!) has a little Alien on it. Sometimes a gimmicky wine DOES taste good!

Bonny Doon is located in Santa Cruz, California.  The man behind the beast is an irreverent jokster named Randall Grahm.  Apparently he is called many things.  The Rhone Ranger and God are just a few.  As you can tell, he has an amazing sense of humor and I think that is an invaluable quality to bring to the wine world. His wines look approachable, and they taste approachable without being unsubtle.   He moved out there to produce the best Pinot Noir imaginable and ended up realizing that the Southern Rhone varietals and Italian varietals were really what the region lent itself to. Sounds like a pretty awesome guy!

Here's what Bonny Doon says about their wine:

vibrant, fruity and floral notes contrasted against a denser, darker core rarely seen in preceding Cigares. The first wafting aromas suggest freshly warmed black raspberry conserve, rose petals, black licorice and garrigue. The grenache is hinted at by way of the bright puffs of raspberriocity and cherry liqueur, with the syrah and mourvèdre showing their tendency towards dominant density - laying down thick, recumbent panes of flavor vaguely suggesting spice, meatiness, and a strong expression of the minerality we have been working so hard to mine, as it were, in our high-flying flagship.

check them out on Facebook or their website:
http://www.bonnydoonvineyard.com/