Sonoita Wine Tasting at Home - Live Love Drink Travel

Greetings everyone! If you follow us you know we were forced to cancel our Jamaica trip due to the pandemic . Right after that we had a weekend trip planned to head to Sonoita to do some tasting and pick up some wine. Of course the increasing pandemic caused us to cancel that too. Therefore, we decided to do a Sonoita wine tasting at home. If you want the TL;DR version, we actually filmed it and you can check it out here.

Even before Arizona Governor Ducey issued his stay at home and non-essential travel orders, a lot of the Sonoita/Elgin area wineries had already closed their tasting rooms. Most were still doing bottle sales. However making the 3 hour drive to the Sonoita area just to pick up wine seemed to be a bit extreme since all the vineyards were still shipping wine.

By this time quite honestly we were going a bit stir crazy in self isolation. This entire pandemic situation is crazy, first everyone under reacted, then countries became reactionary out of necessity. As an apocalypse goes, this one is pretty mild. There is no way we are ready for zombies or aliens. Since we can’t really travel, we have been looking for ways to do things at home.

We have been very vocal about supporting local businesses during the pandemic thus we decided to order wine from a few Sonoita area wineries and have it shipped. It only takes a few days in transit, and an at home tasting seemed like it would be a good way to do “something”. Plus we could continue to support the businesses we love.

We chose four wineries to order from. We couldn’t order from all of them, and we chose places where we bought wine during Sippin’ September. Since spring in Phoenix is glorious, we decided to set up a tasting outside in our backyard. Unfortunately something happened with one of our orders, and although we have reached out to the winery in question, they are only open weekends and at the time of this article we had not heard back yet. So three wineries it is!

We started with 2014 A Hard Day’s Night from Rancho Rossa Vineyards. This is an estate Syrah with a touch of Grenache (13%), one that we had not sampled before. Rancho Rossa is a great little vineyard, and their Rescued Hearts Cellars label is a 501c3 non-profit supporting animal rescue causes with one hundred percent of their profits. Click the link above if you’d like to see our full article from Sippin` September. This wine started off a little fruity, with maybe just a hint of sweetness which surprised me. Overall it was a really nice Syrah.

Rancho Rossa 2014 A Hard Day's Night Syrah

Next up we headed over to Hannah’s Hill Vineyard. In Sonoita, this would have taken about 15 minutes, but today it took just seconds! We fell in love with Hannah’s Hill when we visited during Sippin’ September, and if you’d like to read our full article you can learn more. It’s a great location with some amazing views.

For our sample, we choose the non-vintage Aggregate, which is a red wine blend. We actually bought this bottle during Sippin’ September so I was excited to try it again. When I poured the glass, I noticed the wine didn’t have much of an aroma. This wine is pretty smooth, and is what I would call a table wine. I did notice though later in the day as I was finishing off the bottle, it did get more of an aroma as it aired out.

Lastly, we took the 3 step commute over to Deep Sky Vineyards. This was one of our favorite vineyards we visited in Sonoita during Sippin’ September, so much so that we actually visited it twice! For this tasting we chose the 2016 Black Hole Petite Sirah since we had recently had a bottle of their Big Bang Malbec.

Deep Sky Vineyards 2016 Black Hole Petie Sirah

I have to tell you, this wine is absolutely amazing. It’s great on the nose, and you can pick up some spice, maybe some tobacco. When swirling it has great legs, perfect color, and the taste, well, wow this is a good wine. We must not have tasted this wine in September because there is no way I would not have taken a few bottles home. I think I would have a hard time choosing between the Black Hole or the Big Bang.

In the end, we had a lot of fun doing this and we tasted some good wine and let us know if you ever do a Sonoita Wine Tasting at Home event! If this pandemic isolation continues much longer, I’m sure we will do this again, probably with Northern Arizona wineries. In the meantime, we have already started planning our next vacation to Grand Cayman for fall. We may not be able to travel now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t daydream or plan for the future.

Living, loving, drinking, and traveling through life.

— Derek