Tuesday, October 28, 2008

New Arrivals

We have received a huge number of new wines in the past few weeks and we wanted to give you a heads up into price and Quantity!


2007 Big Bang
$15.99
Lowest Price in the US
We ordered this back in July and it has just now arrived - and we could not be more excited. This blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha and Graciano from Rioja truly gives you a big bang for the buck. It's selling like hot cakes so come taste and see what all the hype is about.


2007 Undone Pinot Noir
$11.99
A German Pinot Noir? A screwcap? A fancy, hip, label depicting a woman's corset being "undone"? While this doesn't sound like much just simply wait until you taste it - for the money we were blown away!


2006 Las Rocas Vinas Viejas
$18.99
Lowest Price in the US
Many of you love Las Rocas and this is his big brother, the 100% Old Vines Grenache. René Barbier, of famed Priorat winery Clos Mogador, tasted this wine blind recently and said a low end price on a wine of that taste should be about 30 Euros - or $38 US Dollars. Not quite buddy. It really is amazing stuff.


2006 Belle Glos Meiomi
$24.99
Many of you know Belle Glos, the Pinot Noir from Caymus Vineyards that has a red wax seal. This is their entry level Pinot Noir, only on its second vintage and it is utterly delicious. You don't find much from Caymus for $25 - I mean heck, Total Wine even sells this for $29.99!


2006 Tikalo Rubens
$11.99
We've said many times that the Alba Liza Tempranillo/Grenache is one of the best $10 wines we have tasted. We now have the pleasure of offering you Alba Liza's big brother - Rubens. He's 100% Tempranillo, 100% Affordable and 100% Amazing. Drink up and enjoy!


2005 Ladera Napa Valley
$39.99
It would not be any fun if we did not let you know about at least one underpriced beauty in this newsletter. From the brilliant 2005 vintage this 100% Cabernet from Napa Valley is a blend of two different vineyards - Howell Mountain and Lone Canyon. We tasted it for the first time last week and went on a buying spree! At this price it must be tasted to be believed!

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Taste Wines from Charles Smith!

Wines from Charles Smith & K Vintners
Thursday, October 23rd
6pm-8pm



Charles Smith of K Vintners has always a reputation of, er, intensity. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. If that is true, I'm still not sure why he hasn't punched me in the face yet. Maybe he figures I won't survive it; maybe I'm not worth the trouble. But there are certain people around whom I have the ability to act the ass, repeatedly, in many, varied, ass ways.

About a year ago, Smith was visiting my town. He was an hour and a half late, and we were almost done tasting his entire line of wines when he finally showed up. Maybe I was in a bad mood (it had been a tough week), maybe I figured Charles is the kind of guy who’ll get a kick out of a perfect stranger flipping him some crap. Maybe I’d had a bit too much to drink.

But I started flipping him some crap. “What’s with the big red truck?” I bellow (Charles has arrived in a big red truck), “did you always want to be a fireman when you grew up?”

“No, no,” he protests, “that’s all they had at the rental car. It was ridiculous; it took forever,” he insists. I start in with the people standing around him, insisting that the reason he was late is that he had demanded a big red truck and it took a while to find one.

Charles wonders who I am. Someone introduces us and I point out that we met before. Next up? “Why is it so many Washington State wines have problems with volatile acidity and Brett?” I ask. Charles looks at me for a while before I finish that thought. “I’m not saying your wines are like that, because they’re not,” I add helpfully, “but that makes them kinda rare among Washington State wines.” He takes a deep breath.

Then he talks about how alcohols are getting out of control in Washington (I think things are worse in California) and a lot of winemakers don’t really know what they’re doing and think that making their wines without enough sulfur (because certain critics think they should) somehow makes those wines better when it just makes them dirty.

He’s right, of course. And he may look like Sammy Hagar’s long lost skater brother but he knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s making delicious, big, powerful, dense wines and they are not at all dirty.

Things are going better. We’re drinking some K Vintners Syrah (K Vintners is his winery) when I just have to say something. “You know, I really hate your wines,” I say. “What? Really? he stammers.

“Yeah, I hate your wines because they always commit suicide in my cellar.” The look in his eyes is getting, well, faraway. “Yeah, it’s true,” I continue, “the last time I bought some Morrison Syrah, I was really proud of it. So I took it downstairs to the cellar and I squeezed my four bottles into a little space on top of some of my American Syrahs and Zins, where they could sleep for a long while. And when I went downstairs a week later, there was a broken bottle of Morrison right in the middle of the floor.”

“I couldn’t believe it, so I jammed the other three bottles even farther up into that space and left on a trip. When I came home and went downstairs, there was another bottle of Morrison busted all over the floor. I was starting to freak out, so I jammed the last two bottles as far back, way on top of the wine racks as I possibly could, so that they were actually in the space underneath one of the stairs, right up against the wood.”

"So when I come home a week later, there’s another bottle broken on the floor.” No one’s laughing, but I’m coming to the point of my story. “It turns out that my kids are bouncing down the stairs and the more I jam the bottles against the tread of the stairs, the more any well-aimed teenaged foot is going to dislodge the bottle and send it screaming to the floor.”

Nervous laughter all around. Me, I’m delighted with this story. “Because of that,” I finish with my flourish, “I hate your wine.” Charles smiles at me. Maybe he’s a genuinely nice person; maybe he’s smart enough not to mess with a crazy/drunk person. I was thinking about telling him how the last bottle, the one that didn’t break, turned out to be corked, but every now and then, I exhibit common sense. Not often, but now and again. I left.

This Thursday, a nice selection of Charles' wines will be on offer: K Vintners Viognier, K Vintners Cougar Hills Syrah, K Vintners The Creator and Holy Cow Chardonnay, a crisp tangy, unoaked style of Chardonnay.

Cheers,

Doug Frost, MS MW
Master Sommelier & Master of Wine

Friday, October 10, 2008

Blind Taste Merry Edwards

Blind Taste Merry Edwards Pinot Noir
Saturday, October 11th
11am - 8pm


As you know, we have had several blind Cabernet tastings over the last few months - all of them huge hits. The Pinot Noir drinkers though have been asking "Where's our blind tasting?" Well, we've put together an amazing blind tasting of Pinot Noir for this Saturday with some real doozies! This Saturday we will be tasting 2006 Merry Edwards Russian River Pinot Noir blind against 7 other rivals. Merry Edwards Pinot is one of the best known and most sought after California Pinot Noirs on the market today and now it is time to put it to the test.

If you don't know the price, can't see the label, and can't hear someone barking in your ear about the wine's "score," then all that is left is the juice and your taste buds. It's a scary proposition for any winemaker. That's why you have marketing departments that design catchy labels, create campaigns to build a wine's image, and spend all of their time and energy essentially trying to convince consumers that a wine is great. The problem is that you can't out "market" a blind tasting.

Which is why we're playing "Find the Merry Edwards" this Saturday. It's simple really. Eight wines will all be tasted blind. One of them will be 2006 Merry Edwards Russian River Pinot Noir and the others will be an assortment of wines at every price point from a number of different regions. All you have to do is taste and pick your favorite. Yes, that's right, your favorite. If that's the Merry Edwards, then great, if not, well that's OK too. You may be surprised as to what your favorites actually are.

Get ready to taste some amazing Pinot Noir!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

High Proof Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

One of the benefits of having old wines in the basement is being able to taste older wines, to see how wines change with time. And not only do the individual wines change, but changes to entire regions take place. Sometimes these shifts in style, in methodologies, in flavors, are dramatic, as when traditional areas such as Rioja or Piedmont stop making wines with marked oxidative character. Sometimes the changes are incremental and unnoticeable, at least for a time.

When it comes to the increases in average alcohol content for most wines, the wine industry has noticed. Some are complaining; most are still withholding judgment, but some of us are not only concerned, we are angry. Highly touted wines, and Turley is more or less the poster child for these sorts of wines, are routinely brought to market with fifteen percent alcohol; some are over sixteen percent. Some fortified wines (fino sherry chief amongst them) have lower levels of alcohol.

California is to blame, some folks opine. It's a hot place (at least viticulturally) and all that sun results in a bunch (or bunches) of sweet, high sugar grapes. Ferment all those many sugars into alcohol (since, after all, it's probably a dry wine that you're after) and you've got enough alcohol to light a crack pipe.

Those who make these monstrosities insist that it is all for the good of the wine. You see, as grapes ripen, it is not only the sugars that increase. Flavors can increase (at least, ripe flavors) color and things we aren't really sure exactly how to place value upon. And some things lessen in this process: acid, for one. Tannin also changes and indeed can lessen, if not in quantity, at least in impact.

The Uber-Ripeners state that they really don't even care how much sugar is in the ripening grape. All they want to know is if the seeds are brown (that's a sign that the tannins and catechins, another bitter element, are changing and, well, ripening, in the vernacular), and if the grape tastes good. At a minimum, they are watching tannins soften and from here we could go hurtling down the rabbit hole of tannic nonsense, pretending to some specificity of gritty tannins versus sandpapery tannins versus fluffy tannins and so on.

Fluffy Tannin, by the way, would be my drag name, if I were to have one.

But I digress. There is no argument, frankly, that Uber-Ripening makes for rounder, riper wines. The complaint is (at least from the mouth of this complainer) that the Uber-Ripe wines all taste the same, raisined, filled with figs, hot, powerful and as windy as a troop of Boy Scouts after a dinner of beanie-weenies.

The Uber-Ripeners say, either you get ripe, delicious wines with high alcohol, or you get thin, astringent, boring wines. And in that, they are not completely wrong. And they are certainly not all right. Things in wine are always varying shades of grey, and never black and white.

But the California wines of yesteryear were not necessarily thin, astringent or boring. What they were, unquestionably, was lower in alcohol however. My few remaining 1968's, 1970's, 1973's and 1975's (yes, I know there should be some 1974's, but we drank all those and besides, they were too high in alcohol. Ooops. I think I just undercut my own argument) are all 12.5% alcohol. It says so right on the label.

Okay, some smart ass out there is snarking that all wines of the day were labeled as 12.5% alcohol, and indeed, the USG (that would be the U.S. gov'mint) allows for a deviation of one and half percent of alcohol from the number on the label. One and half percent?!? That means all those old California wines might in fact be 14% alcohol.

Well, even if it were true (and it ain't true, most of these were indeed 13% or less) that still means these wines were a lot lower in alcohol than the stuff on the shelves today. Yes, their tannins were not as ripe, but it's not like the wines sucked, for chrissakes.

It's not a California problem either. Plenty of Australian winemakers (and a lot of these guys are doing it on purpose, just because Parker and the rest like it like that) are offering freaks of 17% alcohol in some of those bizarre, American oak-smothered non-wines (at least to me) from the Barossa Valley, and other hot places. Think raging steroids. Think steroid rage. Even in cool, northern France, alcohol levels are on the rise. Alsace's two dominators (for many), Zind Humbrecht and Domaine Weinbach, are thoroughly in thrall to the masters of high proof.

You can see where my proclivities lie when you note that I drink about twenty times as much German wine as I do Alsace. And when I drink Alsace, I prefer the traditionalists, though the critics damn them with the epithets, "good", "pleasant" and "interesting". "We want ripe," the critics cavil, even when they won't admit to caviling about the less ripe examples. They might not even complain, but they give them crappy scores, just the same.

Personally, I like balance. Though my palate is only one among many, I tend to recommend wines that I think are balanced, and not just big. Darrel Corti, perhaps America's smartest retailer, has famously refused to stock any wines (of the non-fortified variety) that have alcohols higher than 14.5%. When you're Darrel Corti, you can do that. But knowing that a palate that prefers balance to power is only one palate among many, Winestore still stocks big wines too. And even some of the Uber-ripe types.

Cheers,
Doug Frost

The Timing of our blog post could not have been more interesting:

Famed Priorat winemaker was quoted in an article recently by saying "Wines with higher alcohol are often produced to receive high Parker scores and are harvested later than one would have and are extracted more just to achieve the style Parker prefers."

Robert Parker responded on October 6, 2008 on his website by saying:

"A myth...alcohol has never had anything to do with a wine evaluation unless it is out-of-balance...much like too much acidity,wood,tannin,or dilution....it is always about equilibrium/harmony....moreover...what I have always advocated is full phenolic ripeness....not under-ripeness nor over-ripeness...this is hardly a novel idea...the famous oenologists of Bordeaux( both influenced the modern day generation)...Emile Peynaud and Ribereau-Gayon...were pushing their clients to harvest fully ripe fruit and take a few risks in the 50s and 60s long before I got out of elementary and high school..Seems most of these "perceptions" emerge from those who never have taken the time to read one of my 14 books or 179 Wine Advocates...just an over simplistic...and blatantly incorrect observation totally contradicted by the immense diversity of my wine reviews..."