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The Corvelia Paso Robles Zinfandel Lot 22 is a $9.99 Trader Joe’s wine. Corvelia is a custom brand from Bozzano & Company, a wine company that deals in bulk grapes and produces retail and store-brand wines.
The Corvelia brand offers Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel. This is not a vintage-dated wine but a wine differentiated by successive lots.
The website is very sparse and does not provide any information about why this is a non-vintage wine. It could be because they are buying grapes for this Zinfandel; each lot is from a different grower.
A wine needs to contain only 75% of a grape to list it on the front label, It could be that the ZInfandelis 2022, but a possible addition of Petite Sirah was 2023, which would make it a non-vintage wine.
Sometimes an affordable non-vintage wine sets off alarms, but several reasons for it may help make it a better wine.
The tasting notes say “jammy red and black fruit, as well as coffee-shop spices. Aged in oak, this wine is structured and balanced, with soft fine-grained tannins.” Which sounds good to me.
Bozzano & Company is headquartered in San Luis Obispo, which is inside of Paso Robles. They should have excellent contacts for top grapes. The alcohol content is 14.8%.
The packaging is of excellent quality, the label is on good paper and the printing is embossed. The bottle is typical of a heavy bottle used for $50 plus Cabernet Sauvignon and a real cork is used.
The Corvelia Paso Robles Zinfandel Lot 22 Tasting Notes
The color is a deep purple. The nose is ripe blackberry, strawberry, spice, mocha, little chocolate, and plum. The Corvelia Paso Robles Zinfandel Lot 22 is soft on the palate but has rough edges on the mid-palate, which is how I like my ZInfandel/
This Zinfandel tastes like black cherry, black pepper, blueberry, and a nice slap of spice. The mid-palate shows milk chocolate, rough-edged spice, orange zest, and cranberry.
I do not like my Zinfandel to be too elegant and sophisticated, I like a little farmhouse style. There are plenty of grapes that do well being fancied up, Let Zinfandel be a wine of the people.
The Summary
- The Corvelia Paso Robles Zinfandel Lot 22 is a quality Zinfandel and an excellent $10 wine.
- It sips well on its own and can accompany pretty much any meat from the grill.
