Bishop Creek Cellars 2005 Pinot Noir

The Winery: Bishop Creek Cellars
The Wine: 2005 Pinot Noir
The Price: $23.99 at Central Market

Bishop Creek Cellars is an Oregon winery. It's not a winery that I'm familiar with, so I'm looking forward to trying this one out. They have one of those odd websites that doesn't look like it's really their own site. The Bishop Creek Cellars URL redirects to Urbanwineworks.com. In my brief poking around I don't see a connection between the winery and Urban Wineworks. Whatever the connection, I think it's a bad business practice to combine the winery website with a wine seller/tasting room website. It's unprofessional and makes it appear that Bishop Creek Cellars is not able to manage their own website. This is 2009 - there's no reason for ANY business to not have their own website.

Now on to the wine. The bottle is stopped with a natural cork stopper, winning points in my battle against synthetic corks and screw tops.

This bottle of wine had a lot more sediment than I've seen in a long time. The wine is deep, dark red but has a slightly milky/cloudy cast to it.

The wine has aromas of cherries, berries and autumn leaves.

This is a pretty bland wine. It's very disappointing. There is just no flavor development at all. It kind of has the velvet feel of a good Pinot Noir, but where is the flavor? There's nothing. I'm baffled. Completely and utterly baffled. How can you start with grapes and end up with a flavorless wine? It doesn't taste watery. It just doesn't taste.

This wine is like going on a first date with that totally uninteresting person. There's no character, no personality, and they're totally unmemorable. A week down the road you don't really remember anything about them. You don't remember their name. You might remember what they look like. But everything else just blends together as just another tasteless ingredient making up the gruel of bad first dates.

I won't be buying this one again.