Wine brands can be mystifying, especially when the regular bottling of something is $5.99 and the special selection bottling of the same wine company is $7.99 -- and especially when the cheaper wine is actually better.

Part of the reason for this is that large wine companies often have more than one winemaker for the various brands they make, and each winemaker has his or her own favorite sources of fruit. Where the fruit comes from often determines more about the final wine than the winemaker can at the winery.

Then there is the problem that is created when a wine brand grows. Its easy to make more of a particular wine, but as volume grows, quality can be affected if the quality of the grapes diminishes. Only if the winemaker can control the quality of the grapes, can he or she keep the quality of the wine resulting from them as high as it was when fewer cases were produced.

So I was intrigued the other day when I learned that one of the worlds largest wine companies had decided to release a new line of wines with the same name as its more widely distributed line that sells for less.

Icon Estates, the premium arm of Constellation, has owned the Blackstone brand since 2001. Blackstones flagship wine, merlot, now is made in the hundreds of thousands of cases. Most broad-distribution Blackstone items sell for less than $10 a bottle and represent good value.

But for a number of years, Icon has used Blackstone as the name under which it has tried to market other wines at higher price points. Many of the wines have been good, but none really established a niche of its own.

This new line of Blackstone Sonoma Reserve wines seems better focused than the Blackstone line extensions of the past because of a number of key decisions, the most important of which was to elevate winemaker Gary Sitton into the head winemakers role.

Sitton, who had aspirations to star as a soccer player and worked at Ravenswood in Sonoma County, loves Sonoma County because of its viticultural diversity and the fact that he can have access to a wide array of grape sources, each of which contributes a unique site-specific element to each wine.

As a result, there are no vineyard-designated wines here, though well-known and respected vineyards are listed on the technical sheet for each wine. Continued...