Carricante Champagne Blend Petite Sirah Pinot Gris United States California Sonoma Valley 750ml

The sparkling wines of Champagne have been revered by wine drinkers for hundreds of years, and even today they maintain their reputation for excellence of flavor and character, and are consistently associated with quality, decadence, and a cause for celebration. Their unique characteristics are partly due to the careful blending of a small number of selected grape varietals, most commonly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. These grapes, blended in fairly equal quantities, give the wines of Champagne their wonderful flavors and aromas, with the Pinot Noir offering length and backbone, and the Chardonnay varietal giving its acidity and dry, biscuity nature. It isn't unusual to sometimes see Champagne labeled as 'blanc de blanc', meaning it is made using only Chardonnay varietal grapes, or 'blanc de noir', which is made solely with Pinot Noir.

Petite Sirah was first brought from France to America in the 1880s. It later went on to become one of the only grapes to make it through the devastating Phylloxera virus in the 1890s, both World Wars, and the Great Depression. During Prohibition, it was a main ingredient used to make sacramental wines. In fact, through the 1960s it was a major blending grape in a number of the finest wines produced in California.

By itself, a bottle of Petite Sirah usually has no problem making a quick impression on consumers. With a large amount of natural color and tannins, wines made with the grape commonly feature intensive sweet fruit characteristics like fresh raspberry or blackberry jam, black pepper spice, and plenty of backbone or structure.

There are a number of different styles available. Some concentrate on highlighting fresh, fruity flavors; others are bigger, more voluptuous; and it keeps going up the ladder until you reach the powerful, more machismo-style category.

The Pinot Grigio or Pinot Gris grape varietal is now one of the most widely grown vines in the world, due to the surge in popularity of Pinot Grigio wines over the past twenty years or so. These grayish-blue fruits, which hang in their distinctively conical bunches, are responsible for a very broad range of wines famous for their variety of color tones and flavors Pinot Grigio varietal grapes are highly influenced by terroir, climate and particularly the skill and expertise of the vintners who process them. As such, there are full bodied, amber colored wines made from this grape, and there are equally delicious yet far leaner, paler, lighter bodied and crisp white wines made from the same species in other parts of the world.

Of all the New World wine countries, perhaps the one which has demonstrated the most flair for producing high quality wines - using a combination of traditional and forward-thinking contemporary methods - has been the United States of America. For the past couple of centuries, the United States has set about transforming much of its suitable land into vast vineyards, capable of supporting a wide variety of world-class grape varietals which thrive on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coastlines. Of course, we immediately think of sun-drenched California in regards to American wines, with its enormous vineyards responsible for the New World's finest examples of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot based wines, but many other states have taken to viticulture in a big way, with impressive results. Oregon, Washington State and New York have all developed sophisticated and technologically advanced wine cultures of their own, and the output of U.S wineries is increasing each year as more and more people are converted to their produce.

California as a wine producing region has grown in size and importance considerably over the past couple of centuries, and today is the proud producer of more than ninety percent of the United States' wines. Indeed, if California was a country, it would be the fourth largest producer of wine in the world, with a vast range of vineyards covering almost half a million acres. The secret to California's success as a wine region has a lot to do with the high quality of its soils, and the fact that it has an extensive Pacific coastline which perfectly tempers the blazing sunshine it experiences all year round. The winds coming off the ocean cool the vines, and the natural valleys and mountainsides which make up most of the state's wine regions make for ideal areas in which to cultivate a variety of high quality grapes.

California's beautiful and remarkably fertile Sonoma Valley has grown over the decades to become one of the United States' most respected and profitable wine regions, with wineries within the region benefiting from the superb Californian sunshine, low rainfall and wonderfully rich soils. Because of this vital combination of excellent conditions, the region is able to grow a wide range of grape varietals for use in the production of an impressive array of wines, with many different red and white wine grapes flourishing each year and producing excellent and characterful results. The soils have been enriched by volcanic activity, and the presence of geothermal springs, which make this region a unique one, and very much the beating heart of California's ever growing wine industry.