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Wine Review: Get bubbly on New Year’s Eve

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As a wine columnist, I am on the mailing list of almost every ad agency in the United States and receive many supposed super important, earthshaking, must-read product news releases. Reading them often can take a good bit of time, so I must confess to often skimming.

One, however, recently came in from Barefoot Cellars, a company that does not often resort to “for immediate release” on news releases. This one in particular really caught my attention.

It appears Barefoot’s line of sparklers - which they call California Champagne - recently was chosen as the “official” sparkling wine of the 2016-17 New York City New Year’s celebration. What does that actually entail? It means the city that never sleeps - where people often associate price with quality - has chosen a ten-buck wine to celebrate the well-publicized event.

Barefoot Cellars utilizes a sparkling wine production method called Charmat, which is essentially a bulk process. Here, the wine undergoes both the first and second fermentation in large tanks and is then transferred to bottles. This system produces a respectable wine that requires fewer production processes than Champagne and thus a lower selling price.

Barefoot Cellars California Bubbly Rose ($10)
This delightful bubblers’ pink color heralds the aromas of strawberry jam and concord grapes. The flavor picks up the strawberry, which is accented by a positive background of peaches. Although this wine is sweet, it is not overly sweet. There is a bit of an acid bite, which resolves some of the sweetness and adds to the power of the fruit flavor.

Barefoot Cellars Bubbly Extra Dry California Champagne ($10)
This sparkler takes California Champagne in a new direction. There is a bit of added sweetness not often found in California sparkling wines, which helps to propel this wine to new heights of enjoyment. The wine is a typical California sparkler, featuring green apple and citrus in the flavor and aroma and ending in a creamy, soft and toasty fresh-fruit finish. This wine is not the typical nose-in-the-air, raised-pinky style of sparkler. It is a wine that can be served in glass tumblers amid friends and relatives that won’t be diminished by a lack of pomp and circumstance.

Barefoot Cellars Bubbly California Brut Cuvee ($10)
This is the wine that made Barefoot Cellars Bubbly wines so popular and so famous. It has captured numerous first places and gold medals at wine competitions the world over. The wine captures the true spirit of fruit, while maintaining the structure and elegance required of a fine sparkling wine. This wine has a crisp acid bite, which is in perfect balance with the fruit, an important feature of any decent sparkling wine. There is also the flavor of toast along with a hint of vanilla.

Barefoot Bubbly Berry ($10)
Along with that announcement about Barefoot Bubbly wines and New York City, there came the announcement of a new sweet wine called Barefoot Bubbly Berry. The new wine is alive with the flavors and aromas of pomegranate, cranberry and juicy plum. The natural fruit flavors join together to form a bubbly union and an impressive one at that.

Nixa resident Bennet Bodenstein is a wine columnist and manages Facebook.com/ArticlesOnWine. He can be reached at ben@articlesonwine.com.

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