A scarily good red wine pick for Halloween
Bogle's "Phantom" red blend comes by its ghostly name and spooky label art somewhat honestly.
Bogle “Phantom” Red Blend
California
$19.99
14.5% alcohol
PLCB Item # 97543
Sale price through Oct. 31; regularly $21.99
Red wines are a natural choice for thematic Halloween tippling, since their color ranges from blood red to jet black. This fact is not lost on wine marketers, who have conjured an array of wine identities worthy of a costume party, like this example from Bogle.
This red blend combines two grapes known for the dark color of their wines — petite sirah and zinfandel — into a palate-pleasing wine of heft and substance that is neither fully sweet nor fully dry. There’s a degree of fruitiness, hovering near 10 grams of sugar per liter, that amplifies the wine’s forceful flavors of blueberry pie and fig jam.
Rather than being a seasonal label cooked up solely for ghoulish Halloween fun, Phantom comes by its ghostly name and eerie label art somewhat honestly. Bogle farms land lies in the foggy delta of the Sacramento River that feeds San Francisco Bay, where generations of vineyard workers believe the spirit of one of their forebears walks the vineyards at night.
Many of Bogle’s acres are made of old vines, up to a century in age, which were planted in a time when vines were not trellised neatly along wires. These older vines were “head-pruned,” and when bearing fruit and leaves, look like tangled little trees. After the harvest, when the vines are fully exposed by the autumn leaf fall, they resemble gnarled black hands reaching up from the earth as if buried alive. Seeing them in fog by night, as depicted on this bottle, might lead anyone to start seeing things that might not be there.
Also available at:
Wine Warehouse in Voorhees, Sicklerville, and Mantua, $14.99
sicklerville.winewarehousenj.com/
WineWorks in Marlton, $15.98
Kreston Wine & Spirits in Wilmington, $16.98