04 The Magnificent Wine Company, Columbia Valley House Wine

You could make lamb meatballs with this. I don't mean mixing it up with ground, eggs, bread crumbs, and spices. I mean reducing it down to a thick paste, dehydrating it, and binding its essence with the will to taste great things. While the tannic 70% cabernet and 25% merlot back this juicy wine with pudding-like flavors of bittersweet chocolate, sweet plum, and plump raisins, it's somehow the mere 5% syrah that drives it to be, yet again, the greatest value in American wine. It's alluring, spicy, toasty, macerated fruit that reminds me of Minervois. Clove-kissed fruit that charges rustically like wild boar into the barrel of a gun. Fleshy, sauvage, like hog belly clenched between your fingers, like sweet lamb mashed with herbs de provence and fried on the back of a wooden spoon.