Wine of the Week: Smashberry Red Wine

Wine: Smashberry Red Wine

Grapes: Merlot (40 percent), cabernet sauvignon (30 percent), petite sirah (20 percent), cabernet franc (10 percent)

Region: Paso Robles, Calif.

Vintage: 2013

Price: $9.99

Availability: Trader Joe’s, Lee’s Discount Liquor

In the glass: Smashberry wine is a densely opaque, inky purplish color with a dense blackish core going out into a fine fuchsia-red rim definition with high painted viscosity.

On the nose: This wine is the definition of a measured fruit bomb, with a plethora of mashed red fruits including raspberries, cranberries, currants and strawberry sorbet melded with black fruits such as blueberries, mulberries and boysenberries with hints of violets, vanilla, spice melange and underlying oak notes.

On the palate: It hits your olfactory senses through the mouth with an incredible red and black fruit mix, showing all sorts of crushed blackberries, jammy black currants, deep spice-laden black cherry and boysenberry sorbet, even replicating that creamy mouth feel, but with a seriously full-bodied underlayment, showing through the nicely balanced midpalate replete with chewy big black fruit and oak undertones. The finish is medium in this deliciously palate-pleasing and well-drinking wine.

Odds and ends: This is a bit of a redux of my Wine of the Year from 2013, the ultradelicious Smashberry. Yes, it’s the one with the front label that actually shows what you’re getting in the bottle, before you even open it. Talk about truth in advertising. Coming from the Miller family, which owns one of America’s most hallowed vineyards, the Bien Nacido vineyard, this 2013 Smashberry wine consists of four grape varieties with fruit bought from the fertile Central Coast in California. They are predominantly Bordeaux, France-style grape varieties, but like on steroids.

This continues to be a very skillful blending job on the part of the winemaker, who is working closely with Nicholas Miller. The vast Central Coast features 95,000 acres planted to grapevines of all kinds, so there is a plethora of choices here that ends up resulting in a superb value at less than $10.

Drink it now through 2018 and you still can’t go wrong with a nicely grilled rib-eye to accompany it.

Gil Lempert-Schwarz’s wine column appears on Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89106-0749, or email him at gil@winevegas.com.