In the spirit of helping to make that San Antonio wine shopping experience just a bit friendlier, Three Nine Wine is introducing our Guide to San Antonio Wine Stores, Shops and Merchants. The guide is a Google Maps mashup of our favorite places to shop for and find great deals on red, white & sparkling wines in San Antonio.

Screenshot from our Guide to San Antonio Wine Stores, Shops and Merchants

From superstores like Walmart, to grocery stores like HEB, to chains like Gabriel’s and Spec’s, to local wine shops like Saglimbeni’s, the Guide to San Antonio Wine Stores is where you’ll find information about who has some of the best deals on wine in SA plus ratings from Three Nine Wine and links to user generated reviews from sources like Yelp. We’ve also started experimenting with how to share tips and check-ins from location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Though still in beta, we decided to open things up to the public as we build and you can now access the guide anytime via the link San Antonio Wine Stores which we recently added to our main navigation menu above.

And to give you a little glimpse into what’s coming down the road at Three Nine Wine, we’re working on taking all the information we’re creating and collecting on San Antonio wine stores, reviews and ratings (along with our wine reviews spreadsheet) and curating it into a special version of the web site optimized to help you use your smart phone or favorite mobile device to find an awesome bottle of wine at a great price in San Antonio.

image of G1 from T-Mobile Launch Event photo by Flickr user MobileBurn

Ultimately, we think it could be pretty interesting to build a layer of augmented reality services on top of all this wine data and release it as a downloadable app for Android devices, the iPhone and iPad with the hope of delivering the ultimate mobile shopping experience for tech savvy San Antonio wine consumers.

Stay tuned — and if you have any feedback or input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks for visiting Three Nine Wine.

But, unfortunately it didn’t work out that way as I found this Riesling to fall squarely in that “too sweet” camp where many Rieslings seem to live. And I say this as someone who’s been enjoying some value priced Rieslings lately. Somehow those wines have found a way to stay true to their Riesling heritage while overcoming their sugary stereotype, where this one — at least for my palate — does not.

Now it’s important to note here that this is NOT the Llano Estacado Late Harvest Riesling which I have yet to try, but rather a blend of juice from a variety sources.

And perhaps this description of the wine from their website may explain what happened with this offering:

A short supply of high quality Texas Riesling has restricted our production. In order to provide our customers with an ample supply of this popular variety, we have utilized premium grapes and juice from Texas, Washington, and California.

Maybe these particular Texas and California grapes mingle about as well as Spurs and Lakers fans?

Now to be absolutely fair, the longer this wine sat the better it got. And by the second day it was almost ok.

Almost.

Though I’ll keep rooting for Texas based wine makers like the Llano Estacado Winery to succeed, I don’t think I’ll be buying this one again.

Llano Estacado Vinters Selection Riesling

$8.99

Three Nine Wine Rating: **~~~ (2/5)