Dancing Coyote Wines, Tango, 2004 (El Dorado, California) - Fun bottle with a Wiley Coyote stiled dancing silouhette and fun wine too with a zippy zing of flavor.  It's 50% Cab Sav, 25% Tempranillo, and 25% Cab Franc, and the combo is just odd enough to create an unexpected bold but not overdone blend.  Easily worth the $15 price.  It's a 7 out of 10 for above average.

Quattro Mani, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, 2006 (Italy) - The latest tried at work and it was universally liked by the team.  Bold flavor with good balance and an elegant smoothness.  We were all guessing it was a $20 range wine but on the web it showed to be around $10.  What a value.  Easily a 7 out of 10 on the point scale, and I'd also call it an inexpensive value.

Smoky Hill Vineyard, Pink Catawba, year? (Salina, Kansas) - I shipped some wines back to Boston after a trip and was excited they had several grape types I don't find easily back in Boston.  Pink Catawba is a semi-sweet, tart, grapefruit-like wine, which when served cold has a very pleasant warm weather appeal and would go well with barbecue.  Granted you can still tell it's not an expensive wine, but it's fun and refreshing and that says a lot.  6 out of 10 for upper average.

Walden, 2005 (Cotes du Roussillon Rouge, France) - This is a curious wine because it's clearly both named for US marketing (it's refering to Thoreau's Walden Pond writings on freedom) and formulated for US tastes (it's a bold jammy fruity blend with little in common to most French wines).  Frankly I really enjoyed it and I remember the price was affordable.  Snatch this up when you see it.  6 out of 10 for upper average.

Concerto, Reggiano Lambrusco, 2005 (Vendemmia, Italy) - I had such high hopes for this because supposed Lambrusco is making a comeback as an artfully classic wine versus the sweetened bulk wine common the last 20 years.  Sadly almost no one in our wine tasting group liked it.  I could tolerate it, but I don't think I'd buy it again.  There's a trivial amount of froth, some acidity, some extreme tartness.  Frankly I think this wine is more guilty of the foxy (cloying) description than so many new world grapes blamed for the exact same thing.  No wonder the less recent trend was to make a sweetened plonk out of this.  So although this is possibly a decent example of this style of wine I'm simply going to score it a 4 out of 10 for below average.