A week of average wines...

1) [yellow tail] The Reserve, Chardonnay, 2004 (Australia) - We had the reserve at home and also a recent event at work had the non-reserve chardonnay.  They both were pretty much the same thing to me.  Both were fine.  Standard chardonnays, less oaked then Toasted Head but still muted into an ordinary uniform mass appeal.  Nancy drank most of the home bottle and enjoyed it.  Note it's an extra tall bottle so you're squeezing a little bit more out of it, and the price is really a value.  Does anyone know why [yellow tail] is bracketed that way?  My guess is it's just a pretension of importance - for the sake of marketing.  Anyway, I respect that [yellow tail] wines are consistent values at decent prices, I just can't get away from the fact that they're ordinary mass produced run-of-the-mill wines.  5 out of 10 for lower average.

Southern Right, Pinotage, 2006 (Walker Bay, South Africa) - A decent well flavored wine.  It had less finesse and power than the Fleur du Cap brand of pinotage which I reviewed earlier but at least I still liked this one, unlike the Graham Beck bottled I had railed against.  Two oddities with this wine is the neck of the bottle is the thickest dang neck I've ever seen on wine.  It's a heavy sucker.  Good luck breaking this bottle on the bow of a ship.  The other thing is the back of the label talks about the several types of grape varietals they grow and I swear it's a typo error because they refer to pinotage in two separate references (one reference I think was supposed to say sauvignon blanc).  So actually the original reason I bought the Fleur du Cap brand for work's sampling instead of the Southern Right is I thought the latter was careless in their labeling.  Oh well, I knit-pick.  This is still a decent wine, and I'm actually giving it a 6 out of 10 for upper average.

3) Avedi Areni, Uptbh, Getap Wine Factory (Armenia) - I was excited to try this.  There's a Russian import store in Washington Square/Brookline MA and walking by I saw wine in the window so I went in for an exotic excursion.  I'm sure I'll be going back to pick up some more oddities.  Well, several of the wines were Armenian, and they're considered one of the oldest if not THE oldest wine procuding culture on the planet, so I had to try something.  This Areni I picked up I later looked up on the internet.  Several websites claim this is a unique grape from a unique village area.  I don't know if that's true or not.  From a taste standpoint I'd say this is a dry Old World style with hints it could have been made big bold and fruity if a different vintner had done it.  It was not bad at all but I'd describe this as an upper example of standard East Europe wine, which from my limited exposure actually ranks as a lower average wine on the world scene (5 out of 10).  Not bad though for a factory produced wine of relatively low alcohol (11%) and with no year on the bottle.