Frog's Leap 2006 Merlot - with Porkloin in Loquat sauce.

One of our favourite wineries is Frog’s Leap. Frog’s Leap is in the Rutherford region of Napa, and they have a great sense of humor, yummy wines, and have been way ahead of the curve in their organic and biodynamic farming practices. In our back yard we have a loquat tree, which is just starting to bear fruit. Loquat is new to us, so my lovely wife is experimenting, and last night featured a dinner with a main course of pork loin with a sauce made from loquat, strawberry and Madeira wine. It was joined by broiled zucchini and a rice dish. We pulled the cork on a bottle of 2006 Frogs Leap Merlot to go with the pork, and I was quite pleased with the results. The wine had the typical blackberry and red current flavours that you expect with a merlot, along with a nice undertone of earthiness. We put colored stickers on the capsules of the wines in our cellar – initially for the kids, with the rules being that a green sticker is fair game, pull the cork and enjoy – a yellow sticker means that you should ask first, and a red sticker means that the wine shouldn’t be touched. Most of our red stickers are wines that need to age more before they will get yellow stickers on them. The Frogs Leap Merlot was a ‘yellow sticker’ wine.