So if you don’t know, I spend the off-seasons with the fabulous winery team of the Wilson Group.  For those not familiar with the group, they own Mazzocco, Matrix, Wilson, Soda Rock, deLormier, Jaxon Keys and Pezzi King wineries.  So whenever I declare the wonderful-ness of a wine outside of my employers’ realm, I feel like I’m cheating on Wilson a little bit.  But today, I found a wine worth cheating for:

So I couldn’t find a picture of Ivywood, sorry. This is VML’s traditional Pinot label. It’s pretty delicious as well. Another highly recommended wine.

It’s the V.M.L. 2010 Ivywood Vineyard Pinot Noir.  I went a to a little shin-dig at the winery, and got to taste the whole line-up.  I’ll be honest with you, like any winery, some wines were good, some were not so much, and although on the whole, the line-up was a hefty ways above average, this particular Pinot jumped out.

The color was really interesting, it was a super-dark red with a touch of brown, but the best part about it was the nose.  (Uh oh, wine nerd term: means smell)  It was rich and aromatic with lots of aromas of clove, black pepper, a touch of dark chocolate and hints of currant and black cherry.  For those fluent in wine, trust me, it’s a beautiful perfume.  For those not: just imagine all those things I just described made into some sort of crumble, now imagine that being delicious, now imagine said delicious thing in your mouth, o yeah.  It’s that good.

After the nose, the great part about was it’s taste.  So many Pinots are silky smooth, which is wonderful, but I’ve always felt all that uncountered richness gives them something of a Hawaiian Punch character.  This wine has some grit, some tannin (read: mouth-drying) to balance out the sweeter elements of the wine.  And it still shoes that mixed crumble deliciousness.  Oh, I recommend this wine so highly.  It’s available at www.vmlwine.com.  Get it soon, guys.