A Jigger of Blog

After a period of relative slumber, this blog is awoken to find another wine travel-related contest for me to play in. New Zealand’s Brancott Estate winery is having a brief Twitter contest where all you have to do to enter is post tasting notes of their wine on Twitter with the hashtag #whatif. You’re limited to one entry per day and the contest runs until June 13th.

Brancott Estate is the best selling New Zealand winery in the world. I recently had a bottle of their Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2010 and will be using tasting notes from it, at least to start, as my entries into the contest. I’m breaking up my first three tweets to handle the nose, the palate, and my overall impressions – which were actually very positive. Here’s my first Tweet:

@brancottestate Marlborough SB 2010: Smell deeply the scent of lemon & dry minerality w/pineapple, passion fruit & faint cilantro #whatif

I did enjoy this wine a great deal. It’s fairly affordable too, with my local Whole Paycheck Foods having it for around $12 (though this bottle was provided to me as a sample from Brancott Estate’s PR folks). I’m hoping to pick up some other bottlings of Brancott Estate in the near future.

A word about why I’m posting on this. I will only post on a product/promotional contest if it’s something that I am interested in myself and if I think the product being promoted is actually a decent one. I can’t speak to other Brancott Estate wines (though I hope to in the future), but I did like this Sauvignon Blanc a lot. For the price, it’s a good deal (though I have a winemaker friend in Sonoma who will want to string me up for bestowing praise on affordable wines from half way around the world). Plus this is a contest anyone can enter, so posting on it actually decreases my chances of winning. But for what it’s worth, I’ve never been to New Zealand and it’s Number One on my list of countries that I’d like to visit…so I hope I do win at the expense of my readers.

Disclosure: This post was made possible because I received a free bottle of Brancott Estate Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2010 for the purposes of sample and review.