TMiW 1 ? Looking Back, Looking Forward

This is the premier episode of This Month in Wine, a monthly discussion about what is going on within the wine world from a consumer and insider perspective. Hosts: Tim Elliott and Jeff Lefevere Topics What?s up with Good Grape? Is wine blogging on the decline? Wine Trends & Predictions for 2012 Value Replaces Cheap [...]

TMiW 1 – Looking Back, Looking Forward originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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New Service Offers Fast Wine Delivery to Wellesley and Weston

So I'm driving back running some errands last weekend (a visit to Guitar Center and Home Depot in case you were wondering) and I see an illuminated OPEN sign in the window of Metro West Wines. I'd heard about this business popping up in Natick just over the Wellesley line on Route 9 on The Swellesley Report but I hadn't noticed they'd opened for business yet.

So I pop in and have a conversation with the two guys behind the operation - Fred McIntyre and Paul Lavallee. They've set up Metro West Wines as a DBA (doing business as) of Nine East Wine Emporium which they share a building with. If you've traveled east on Route 9 entering Wellesley you've seen Nine East's "25% 2+ Cases" sign. They're one of several retailers that have set up shop right on the Wellesley border to offer ready access to alcohol for Wellesley residents. Although Wellesley restaurants are allowed to sell alcohol with meals liquor stores aren't allowed in Wellesley.

This limitation, along with an interest in providing the convenience of fast delivery to Wellesley and Weston is the main thrust of Metro West's value proposition. Currently, they're asking for a $50 minimum order and charge a $15 delivery fee. They deliver wine, beer, and spirits to Wellesley and Weston within an hour.

I spent about a half an hour or so talking with Fred and Paul. They're enthusiastic, motivated guys. They come from a tech background and paired with Nine East's assortment of products they've got some nice things to offer. By law Metro West's pricing must be exactly in line with Nine East's.

They shared that the idea for the business came from looking around at Weston and Wellesley households who have their dry cleaning delivered, their groceries delivered, their lawns taken care of, and take-out delivered a few times a week. In Manhattan you can have practically anything delivered to your apartment quickly. They feel there's an interest in eliminating "one more stop" from people's hectic schedules and they're here to serve.

I wish them the best in this new endeavor and I'm pleased to have them on board as an advertiser here on the WWP. Hopefully for a long time.
Check 'em out:

Metro West Wines

Question of the Day: Under what circumstances would you take advantage of a service like this? Have you heard of similar services in other locales? What suggestions would you have for a business like this?

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A Tablas Holiday

Christmas tends to be pretty low key here at Adams, Heritier and Associates. We don?t get involved in the commercial aspects of the holiday at all. We don?t put up a tree, nor do we buy each other gifts. We do like to have a quiet dinner with some good wine, and that?s what we [...]

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Shut the Front Door: A Vinsane, Pay-it-Forward, Drinks 4X the Price Wine Recommendation

The problem with sleuthing out good wine under $10 is the recommendations usually come with provisos like, “This is pretty good for the price,” or “This isn’t bad for the style of wine.”  Rare is the time that a wine recommendation for vino under $10 is just, “This is a fantastic wine.”

Who can blame the wine recommender for their caveats and written sleights of hand when they’re left to tout the middling amongst the insipid; the redemptive within the felonious?  It’s like the back-handed compliment from the parents of an axe murderer who note plaintively from the front stoop, “He has a good heart.”

Adding insult to this injury, it seems like nearly all domestic wines under $10 are manipulated to appeal to a demographic.  Far too often, they are oak chipped to a formula, softened, vortexed and plumped back up into a wine beverage complete with a label that screams, “Benignly vague and blandly appealing.  I am inoffensive to a large group of people.”

And, forget about pairing under $10 bottles of vino with food.  Do so only if your idea of wine pairing centers on condiments with artificial coloring and HFCS, so duotone are the wine flavor profiles.

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When it comes to what should be reliable international value wines, forget about it – most of them aren’t even has-beens, they never were.  France and Italy – I’m talking to you.  For a sawbuck, these are sad, middling, barely potable wines evocative of an athlete whose entire identity is wrapped up in jockdom, but for whom life’s fate never provided him acclaim beyond the local playground. The fact that these wines often taste like a sweaty gym sock may, in fact, be no small coincidence.

Harrumph. 

What I want is what most wine consumers want: A non-spoofulated wine with quality that stands on its own—a good wine at $9.99 that is a good wine, period.  No half-hearted caveats associated with it.  If the wine pairs with dinner, instead of being a digestif, all the better.  Tie me up, spank me and call me Shirley if this mystical and elusive under $10 wine also has any of the following characteristics: Organic, old vines, unfiltered, native yeast, judicious oak, and complexity whilst being food-friendly.

I’m pretty sure I won’t have to have any dalliances in the wine S&M dungeon save for one emerging country.

Recently, I started to see glimpses of where quality, inexpensive wines might be coming from in the future when I tasted through a sampling of wines from the Navarra region of Spain. One $5 bottle of wine was so screamingly good it defied the law of reason. 

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And, then, I received a recommendation for Masia de Bielsa’s 2009 Garnacha, a Spanish wine from the Campo de Borja area in the Aragon region of Spain, southeast of Navarre and La Rioja.  Adam Japko, a wino friend and author of Wine-Zag, and I did some horse-trading on bottles and he threw in a bottle of wine in a wine shipment to me and noted, “Curious what you think of this…”

What do I think?  I think I owe you favors to last a month of Sundays for turning me onto a beauty.

Of course, wine recommendations don’t happen in a vacuum and the Masia de Bielsa 2009 Garnacha is no different even if it follows a certain circuitous Internet-borne dynamic that seems unusual even in this day and age of “brand vs. land, there are no secret wine values anymore…” online battle.

Jose Pastor is a wunderkind (30 years old) wine importer with a fast growing reputation amongst wine insiders for his portfolio of Spanish wines that are typically natural in style – producers who farm organically when possible, emphasize terroir, use ambient yeasts, filter sparingly and use minimal oak.  In other words, his wines, and especially his inexpensive wine selections, are the anti-brand.  Or, should I say, “They’re the antidote to brand wines.”  The good stuff. 

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Jose’s wines won’t have an end-cap in stores with promotional materials, nor will they follow you on Twitter or ply you with faux-flattery for a “Like” on Facebook. Ditto that for Pastor playing the points scoring game.  He doesn’t do it. The wines and wineries in his portfolio simply represent something good and honest and rely on smart trade buyers who know good juice when they taste it and are interested in paying that forward to consumer’s one bottle at a time.

This formula isn’t a recipe for getting rich, but it is a recipe for long-term, slow-burning growth based on a purity of vision.

When Richard Schnitzlein, a longtime wine buyer in the greater Boston area, took over the wine section at Ferns Country store in Carlisle, MA in early 2011, he started to remake the selection of wines on offer and that meant much more diversity, spreading the selection from two distributors to 14 over a seven month period.

A part of that remaking was to engage Genuine Wine Selections, a wine distributor in Massachusetts, who carries the Jose Pastor portfolio.

When Genuine Wine Selections partner Dennis Quinn showed up at Ferns in the spring with samples to taste, the ’09 Bielsa was a part of the mix.

Enamored, Schnitzlein started stocking the wine.  “Initially (the Bielsa) was a hand sell, but (it) soon became a wine that people were asking for,” he noted.

Japko was turned onto the Bielsa from Schnitzlein and mentioned the Bielsa on his site in June.  A September Ferns promotion dropped the price on the Bielsa from $11.99 to 9.95 and that yielded 15 cases of the Bielsa moving through the door for Ferns including a stock-up from Japko.

Within a week of receiving my bottle from Japko, I had taken to the Internet to find this wine and I bought a ½ case online from Marketview Liquor in New York state who sells it for $7.99 a bottle.

I’ve gifted a bottle to a friend at work, and, well, I’m writing extensively about this vino, too – my own pay-it-forward juju for having been tipped off to this wine.

The moral of this story?  Finding a gem of a wine for $10 or under isn’t a hopeless process, but you do have to sift a lot of muck to find the gold nugget.  In my opinion, you’re more likely to find a gem by keeping your ears open for word of mouth recommendations from wine-inclined friends or a local wine shop then to take to the wine aisles of your supermarket wine section playing brand roulette.  Here, the internet and Wine-searcher.com is your friend, as well.  In addition, Spain is a country that is producing some excellent wines across all price tiers, and my very recent and very anecdotal track record at the lower-end has been very good.  And, finally, it pays to know people.  It pays to know what Jose Pastor is all about, and it pays to know the Richard Schnitzlein’s and Adam Japko’s of the world who freely share where to find the good stuff, even if finding the good stuff requires an Importer in California, a wine buyer in Massachusetts, a generous friend and internet ecommerce.

2009 Bielsa Vinas Viejas Garnacha

Huge, pure nose with mulberry juice, black cherry, orange peel, earth and a meaty savory quality that gives way to an expressive palate with plum, black cherry, spice and fresh squeezed orange juice.  The finish lingers with plum, pepper and earthiness.  This is a varietally correct, gorgeous, natural, unfiltered wine that screams for food and would be a bargain at 4X the price.  Highly recommended.  At under $10 a bottle, you’d be foolhardy not to find this wine.

Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/shut_the_front_door_a_vinsane_pay-it-forward_drinks_4x_the_price_wine_recom/

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The Real Reason Wine Bloggers Are Not Relevant To Advertisers

Almost all of us don’t treat blogging as a business. And those few who do find building a community around a wine blog very, very difficult. Without hundreds of thousands of pageviews a month, advertising on blogs of any topic is not a viable business. Source: Typepad Via: FERMENTATION There are are a grand total [...]

The Real Reason Wine Bloggers Are Not Relevant To Advertisers originally appeared on Winecast. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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Berlin Tasting in Copenhagen

Berlin Tasting in Copenhagen" might sound a little confusing? However the Berlin Tasting is a reference to a famous tasting held in Berlin the January 23. 2004. It was held by the Chilean wine producer Eduardo Chadwick from Errazuriz and he had invited 66 wine journalists from all over Europe to taste the best Chadwick wines from Chile against the supernames from Bordeaux and Tuscany. 16 wines were tasted from the vintages 2000 and 2001, among them 2000 Chateau Latour, 2000 Chateau Lafite and 2000 Chateau Margaux.

Source: http://www.wine4freaks.com/37/berlin-tasting-in-copenhagen/

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Groupon: 6 Bottles of Cameron Hughes Wines for $59 Shipped


Groupon is offering 6 assorted bottles (all white -or- all red) of Cameron Hughes wines for $59 including shipping. Choose from one of these two options:

$59 for a Cameron Hughes red-wine bundle ($99.99 list price)

  • Two bottles of 2009 Lake County syrah (Lot 224)
  • Two bottles of 2009 Napa cabernet (Lot 257)
  • Two bottles of 2010 Mendoza, Argentina malbec (ot 258)
$59 for a Cameron Hughes white-wine bundle ($99.99 list price)
  • Two bottles of 2009 Santa Barbara County pinot grigio (Lot 264)
  • Two bottles of 2010 Atlas Peak chardonnay (Lot 324)
  • Two bottles of 2010 Russian River sauvignon blanc (Lot 270)
A quick scan of wine-searcher.com seems to support their claimed list price of $99.99 and since the offer includes shipping I consider this deal "good to very good".

They cannot ship to: AL, AK, AR, DE, HI, KY, MA, MS, MT, ND, OK, PA, SD, UT, Canada or Puerto Rico.

Massachusetts friends: Here's a deal you can take advantage of

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Tasting Report: SF Chronicle Winemaker of the Year Arnot-Roberts

There was a great article in The San Francisco Chronicle this week naming Arnot-Roberts (two guys) their winemakers of the year. Here's a link to the piece. Read it now if you haven't already.

I've wanted to try their wines for the longest time since they produce wines from one of my favorite vineyards in California: Clary Ranch. Paul Clary's wines were the wines that got me into wine blogging. After a visit to Sonoma in 2004 I wrote this piece about his wines - four year before this blog would make its debut.

No amount of reading and research compare to walking a vineyard with a winemaker. I still remember getting a feel for the tiny scale of Clary Ranch, seeing the challenges of growing grapes up close, and tasting the wine steps away from where it was produced. I remain a fan of Paul's wines to this day.

After reading the article in The Chronicle I sought out a bottle of the 2010 Arnot-Roberts Clary Ranch Syrah. Jon Bonne (the wine writer for the paper) described this bottling as their calling card because of how prior vintages re-defined expectations of where California Syrah could be produced. Clary Ranch is situated in a relatively cool climate where Syrah sometimes has ripening challenges. In 2010 it produced a wine with just 12.2% alcohol.

After reading the article I found myself a bit concerned I may not be able to see the virtures of these wines. But perhaps like Littorai they do seem to strike a chord with a new world enthusiast like myself. Here are my notes on the 2010:

2010 Arnot-Roberts Clary Ranch Syrah
12.2% Alcohol


Really excited to to taste this after SF Chronicle winemaker of the year. Just 12.2% alcohol. Aromatically present immediately upon opening. Olives, black pepper, corriander and just a hint of red fruit hiding in the background. Absolutely would have pegged it for a Chateauneuf-du-Pape on the nose, but where the low alcohol levels shows is on the palate.

To be honest it's a little hollow, but it's such an interesting wine it's easily forgiven. Light acidity. Slightly chalky tannins with a touch of menthol in a high toned finish. Really pretty package (bottle/label/easily penetrated wax enclosure). A lot to like here. I have a second bottle of this I'll look forward to trying in a year or two but I doubt I'll be able to wait that long.


92/100 WWP: Oustanding


Bottom Line:


Definitely add these guys to your list of cutting edge California wineries to check out. I love luscious, fruit forward new world wines and these guys have found pitch perfect way of expressing new world terroir with old world sensibilities. Hop on their mailing list at http://arnotroberts.com


Related Reading:

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