Several months ago, I was bemoaning my store’s lack of a classic white Bordeaux. But a couple months ago, one walked into my shop that met all my criteria: a higher percentage of Semillon, some barrel ageing to add a bit of spice and creaminess, and little bit of bottle ageing. And it sits on the shelf at $29.99, the high end of my range, but well worth it.
The new addition? R de Rieussec Bordeaux Blanc 2004.
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Chateau Rieussec is one of the top Sauternes, arguably second only to Chateau d’Yquem in sweet botrysized fabulousness. But this version, the “R” is not a Sauternes. Yes, the grapes come from the same plots of land as those that go into bottles labeled Sauternes. They may even come from the same vine – or even the same bunch. But the grapes that go into the “R” bottles haven’t been affected by botrytis, so the final result is dry rather than sweet. And Sauternes, according to French appellation laws, must be sweet. So “R de Rieussec” is labeled under the more generic Bordeaux Blanc appellation.
The only problem – the distributor will be moving into the next vintage in the near future. So unless the next vintage comes with bottle ageing already intact, I’ll be searching again.
A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Sadly, there is no more Dominico Selections. I miss those wines. And I miss placing orders with Terry.
Originally published on August 20, 2009.
It’s supposed to be Weird but Good Month at Frankly Wines, but I’ve been so obsessed with getting my tasting notes catalogued that I haven’t had a chance to set up a formal tasting schedule. So every Wednesday evening, we come up with something at the last minute that fits that theme. Over the last several weeks, we’ve opened wines made from obscure grapes such as Frappato, Monduese, Gelber Muskateller and Pineau d’Aunis. They taste nothing like the usual suspects (Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir) which are the reference point for the vast majority of wine drinkers. On shelf talkers, I call them “Wines You Never Knew You Needed,” (which probably leads to more sales than “Weird but Good” but it’s not quite as catchy.
But this week, we did something a little differently. Rather than going for the obscure grapes, we choose two wines that are weird BECAUSE they’re good. Soave and Valpolicella are two much maligned regions in Italy’s Veneto region. Traditionally considered cheap, but not necessarily cheerful, they could be the butt of many a wine joke. But these days, there are increasingly good wines coming out of this area and we have two of them, both under $20
We’ve tooted the horn of the Vaona Valoplicella Classico before which is a fresh, floral, traditional version from a very traditional family producer.
And we’ve just recently brought back the I Stefanini “Monte de Toni” Soave after a springtime flirtation with its juicy little brother (or sister?) Il Selese. The Monte de Toni is a bit more sophisticated, with hints of the nuttiness you might find in a good Chardonnay, stone fruits and an underlying acidity that keeps it fresh. It received great Wine Spectator ratings (especially given it’s $16 price tag) and was immediately snatched up by a certain big retailer in New Jersey, but our friend Terry at importer Dominico Selections, saved a bit for us. Thanks Terry! And yes, Terry, we know, it’s time to place an order.
I would love to be one of those people who can taste a wine once and fix it in their mind forever more. Actually, I do have a good palate memory – I can taste a wine and remember the general sensations. But as a wine buyer, I also need to recall the producer, vintage, distributor, frontline cost, deal structure, order minimum, and split case fees associated with every wine I taste. Or at least every wine I might possibly want to buy for the store. Which given that I have very good sales reps, is a good deal of the wines I taste. So I need a system.
Some people just type their notes directly into an electronic device of choice – an iPhone, a Blackberry, a computer. But this doesn’t work for me. As quickly as I can type (and I can type very quickly) there’s a disconnect between my palate and my keyboard. The tasting notes just don’t flow as well when there’s a power cord involved. (And there’s always the danger of dribbling on the key board.)
Some people may rely on the spec sheets provided by the sales reps. These are useful if I want to check how a producer or region is spelled without squinting at a wine-stained label. But they don’t take the place of my own notes. And most damanging to this potential system, at least in my view: it would require 3-ring binders to keep track of everything. I hate 3-ring binders and 3-ring hole punches and those little sitcky reinforcement circles.
So I’ve turned to taking notes in a series of ruled Cahier Moleskine notebooks. Yes, these little books are now seen in the hands of hipsters everywhere, but hipster coolness factor aside, they work. They’re light, they can be thrown in any size bag or purse, and they have a handy pocket in the back. This pocket is important because occassionally I can’t find my current notebook and have to scribble tasting notes on Post-its or little scraps of paper. These stray notes can then be piled on the counter and later, tucked into that handy back pocket.
The only problem with this system….I’m now on my 12th book. And while flipping through 12 notebooks filled with tasting memories may seem like a wonderful way to spend an afternoon (oh, I remember that lovely Frappato, all roses and violets and fresh spring berries), it’s not terribly productive when you’re desperately trying to find the distributor for a specific wine you had back in May, or was it April? (Actually, it was January.)
So I am now in the process of cataloging my tasting notes on my computer so I can use the brute force of a spreadsheet program to sort through 12 books of tasting notes. It would be mind-numbing, except that it is quite nice to reflect on all the wine I’ve tasted over the last year and a half. Yes, it would be quicker if I could just do this the first time through, but like I said, it just doesn’t work that way for me.
And anyhow, those Moleskine notebooks are really, really cute,
To start, a mention in the New York Times will certainly raise consumer interest and increase sales, but it won’t cause a nationwide feeding frenzy, as when a wine is crowned, say, the Wine Spectator’s “Wine of the Year.” And while old-school Rioja is easily one of the best values in fine, age-worthy wine, it’s still not inexpensive – and in this economy, even the big stores are watching their inventory levels and working capital expenses.
Another mitigating factor of the giant sucking sound – there just isn’t a huge amount of old-school Rioja sitting around in the distributor’s warehouses. These wineries tends to release a specific vintage when they feel it’s just entering the first phase of “ready-to-drinkness.” And from what I can gather, they only release a portion, with a fair amount of their stock held back in their cellar for release at a later date. This later date generally takes the form of a DI offering, during which retail and restaurant wine buyers get to mull over lists of old vintages and decide how much of each to buy.
I’ve written before about how these offers are like Christmas for wine buyers. For me, this is especially true for the Rioja DI offers from the traditional, old-school Rioja. These are wines that seem to age endlessly, gaining a leathery, tea-leafy complexity as the primary notes fade into a haunting whiff of exotic spices and ghostly fruits. I could go on, but you might start to laugh. These are wines best drunk slowly and quietly, because you can sound a little silly if try to describe them.
So my DI wish list can get a little crazy, with most of the bottles falling under the heading of “one for me, one for the store.” But the actual purchase order is trimmed to a more fiscally responsible level. And then the wines arrive…and I squirrel them away and drag my feet on pricing them, setting them up in the system, and putting them out on the Internet. Because I really don’t want any one to buy them. I want to keep them….all.
Such is my love of old, old-school Rioja.
But the New York Times piece, great sucking sound aside, inspired me to share the love and let my semi-secret stash be known. So every bottle of Lopez de Heredia, La Rioja Alta, and Bodegas Riojanas in the shop is priced up and ready to go.
Well, almost every bottle. Fiscal responsibility only goes so far.
Did you hear it? Over wine distributor warehouses on Staten Island and Long Island and near the ports of New Jersey? What was it? A giant vacuum cleaner? A massive sieve? A colander from the great beyond?
An article gets published in a major paper or wine publication. Specific producers are mentioned. Customers read the article and want the wines. Retailers know there will be customers asking for those wines, which means relatively quick and easy sales. So they call their distributors and order lots of whatever wine was mentioned. This creates a giant sucking sound as those cases of wine move from distributor warehouses onto shelves across the city.
OK, so this process really doesn’t make a sucking sound. It’s more like the clicking of cell phones and computer keyboards as orders are placed, followed by the drone of delivery trucks. But you get the picture.
Now I don’t generally chase the wines that appear in these articles. The Frankly Wines selection is so tightly edited, that there’s just not space for whatever wine happened to be mentioned in publication X the day before. It’s also a good bet that I’ll already have a wine from the region in question – something that I think offers similar or even better value. After all, it’s my job to find those wines and if I’m only reading about them in the paper, well, I’m not doing a very good job.
But sometimes, I already have one of the wines being mentioned. And this can be a bad thing. Sure, it’s nice to get the quick and easy sales that come when a wine is suddenly sought out by lots of customers. But that bad thing is the giant sucking sound. The sudden demand can pull all of the wine out of the system within a day or two. I either have to buy more – and I can never buy as much as the big guys that make a living at this game. Or I have to come to terms with a favorite wine’s impending unavailability and find a replacement. And that sucks. Literally. Or figuratively.
There’s a certain science to retail. There’s a book called Why We Buyby the fabulously named Paco Underhill that goes into much of this science. Things like the “butt brush factor”. Or where to place shopping baskets. Or that most people turn right when they enter a store. A lot of it doesn’t apply to a shop like mine, which is so tiny that if you turn right, and you’ll hit a wall. But it’s still a great read.
But I don’t think it addresses one of the great mysteries of my wine shop…possibly any wine shop. The mystery is below, but first, a bit of minutia on how my shop is stocked.
The bottles are lined up on the shelves, standing up, one behind the other, like in the picture below. Yes, I can hear the wine geeks shuddering – “But isn’t bad for bottles to stand upright?” In the middle- to long-term, yes, but these bottles sell quickly. They’re not upright long enough for the corks to dry out…and half of them are screw caps anyway. And those that don’t move so quickly, we only keep one on the shelf and every week replace it with one that’s been on its side. So stop shuddering…I take very good care of my wine!
Now, on to the mystery…
A wine can sell like hotcakes, literally fly off the shelves. But when there’s one bottle left, with no mates behind it, it suddenly just sits there. And sits. And sits. And sits. It sits there until one of three things happen:
I buy more and restock
I fill up the space behind it with neighboring bottles
I move it to the “going… going… gone” section at the front of the store. Sometimes bottles on this shelf get a $1 price reduction, along with the all-important big, red slash.
Now it’s no great surprise why a single bottle on the bargain shelf moves. People like bargains. And they really like big, red slashes.
But what I don’t understand is why a single bottle in the general shelf population won’t sell. Or perhaps oddly, why it does sell if you just put non-matching bottles behind it. Why are customers so wary of a little empty space?
A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Alas, Amy Atwood’s mydailywine.com blog is no longer up and running. But she’s importing wine, so that’s probably a better use of her time. And at this point, ten years on, you can easily google ‘natural wine’ and a heap of articles will pop up. Or you could buy Alice’s book, Natural Wine for the People. Or subscribe to her newsletter, The Feiring Line, which I edit. Surprise!!
Originally published on July 23, 2009.
A recent post by Alice Feiring’s on her blog, In Vino Veritas, set off a small firestorm of a discussion on taste…good taste, bad taste, elitist taste, Devil Dog taste. The initial post was about Daniel Boulud’s “lowdown downtown place”, DBGB Kitchen and Bar. The bar is located on the Bowery, in the East Village, not far from the site of former punk-haven CBGB. For those not familiar with the intricacies of the New York restaurant scene or its gentrification geography, there’s a definite irony to a major multi-starred chef setting up shop on a street that was until only recently, best known for its many halfway houses.
I haven’t been to DBGB yet, but the post points out that the DBGB wine list is heavy on natural wines. Rather than lay out yet another definition of what makes a wine “natural”, I’ll just point you to another blog (mydailywine) which recently interviewed Alice. Since she is one of the leading voices discussing natural wine, her words should do just fine.
Now, back to the DBGB wine list. Lots of natural wines, which as Alice says in that post I pointed you to (go ahead, you know you want to read it now,) can be quite shocking. They don’t taste like other wines. Or to be more specific, they don’t taste like wines with big ratings from the big wine rating gurus. Which to generalize just a bit, is what many of the customers at a “lowdown downtown place” fronted by a big time fancy chef are going to expect.
Alice brought up the concept of warning labels. Since these wines can be a little, well, odd when not given a bit of context, why not put a warning label on the menu? Proceed with Caution. Or a skull and cross bones?
I had to laugh at the thought….because we tagged our first bottle with a warning label about a year ago: the Lopez de Heredia Rosado 1997 (now we’re into the 1998.) Fino sherry notes, exotic spices, very little fruit. Not so popular with someone looking for a lovely little Provincial rose. Generally, we were able to give verbal warnings, but sometimes if it was really busy, a bottle would manage to escape without getting its proper due. And often, that bottle would get returned because its new owner thought it was “off.” It wasn’t, it was just odd. So we would swap it for something else and drink it ourselves. A nice treat, but not so fiscally responsible.
I spend a lot of time on this blog pulling back the magic curtain on the “dream” of owning a wine store. You may think owning a wine store is all about wine. But no – it’s really about hand trucks, electric bills, the perils of wooden wine boxes….
O.K…sometimes it is about wine. There are some very good wine perks. Like tonight, when I was the last stop on one of my sales rep’s daily road show. Being last is good – it means you get to take home the half-empty bottles. And tonight, they were some very nice half-empty bottles.
Tonight, I took home 2 different wine from Lopez de Heredia, the standard-bearing for old-school Rioja.
First up was the Cubillo Crianza 2003. It’s the first time I’ve had the Cubillo, which comes from the estate’s Cubillas vineyard, and it was quite yummy, even juicy. Now I’m never at a loss for words to decribe Lopez wines (elegant, haunting, exotic – pick your favorite semi-pretentious wine geek phrase) but “juicy” and “yummy” usually don’t spring to mind. It’s probably the combination of a very warm vintage (a.k.a. the heat wave of 2003) combined with the higher percentage of juicy, yummy Grenache in the Cubillo vineyard site. In any case, it was delicious and definitely a nice entry point to these very lovely wines.
Next up was the 2001 Bosconia Reserva from the El Bosque vineyard. I’ve had some older examples of Bosconia bottles, from the 1970’s and 1980’s and they evoke all the usual Lopez phrases (see above for elegant, haunting, exotic). But this is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit with an younger bottle and I liked it very much. Longer time spent aging in the big oak barrels, a better vintage, and a higher percentage of Tempranillo vs. Grenache all result in a wine with a darker tone (I apparently taste in colors) and firmer structure than the Cubillo. It was one of those wines I wanted to run out and buy a case in order to taste it as it evolves over many, many years. And at around $30-something on the shelf, it’s highly possible that I just might.
Ah, perks. Sometimes it’s pretty nice behind the magic curtain!
July may be Sparkling Wine month, but we still reserve Saturday afternoon to open whatever strikes our fancy. And last Saturday, our fancy was struck by a the Chateau Petit Roubie Picpoul de Pinet 2007.
Picpoul has been a bit of an obsession since we brought one in about six months ago. The Chateau Petit Roubie combines what may be our three favorite factors.
The Frankly Wines Favorite Factors:
High level of obscurity
High level of tastiness
High level of affordability
Let’s break it down.
Obscurity factor: Most wine geeks, let alone regular civilians, haven’t heard of the Picpoul grape. It’s generally only grown in the south of France, and primarily used for blending. But in this sub-region of the Langeudoc (I suppose it’s the “de Pinet” region) it stands on its own.
Tastiness factor: An ideal summer wine for those willing to stray beyond Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc. It’s crisp and refreshing, but still manages to have a bit of body to it. When we first tried it, it reminded us of a Muscadet, but from a warmer climate. Both have a serious minerality, citrus notes, and an almost salty/saline quality. Both pair perfectly with the shellfish found in their respective regions. But Muscadet, coming from the northern reaches of France, where the Loire empties into the Atlantic, is racier, leaner, more on the stoney side. Picpoul de Pinet, however, shows off its location near the sunny shores of the Mediterranean with more a tropical feel. We don’t want to suggest overripe pineapples, but rather a sense of the warmth of the region that you can feel in the wine, balanced by citrus notes, minerals, and that pleasant saltiness.
Affordability factor: $13.99. Works well for both the “Under $20” crowd and the “Under $15” crowd.
Obviously, we like it. But last Saturday, on one of the first really nice, sunny days of the summer, lots of customers decided they liked it as well.
Our self-declared Sparkling Month continues with another 3-Pack featuring three different sparkling wines make using the traditional method, a.k.a. Method Champenoise, a.k.a. the same way Champange is made.
Get three bottles for $55.99 – the price of 1 mid-priced bottle of Champagne:
Lucien Albrecht Cremant d’Alsace Blanc de Blancs NV (Alsace, France)
J Vineyards Cuveé 20 NV (Russian River, California)
Read all about them on the store site.
And here, you can read all about Method Champenoise. We’re going to get a little technical, so don’t be scared.
Method Champenoise is one method by which those bubbles get into the bottle. There are other ways to make this happen, but Method Champenoise is the most time consuming and adds the most complexity to the final juice. But before getting into that, we need to understand the basics of fermentation.
In science speak: C6H12O6 → 2C2H5OH + 2CO2
In normal speak: sugar (which you find in ripe grapes) + yeast (which isn’t noted in the fancy equation) = alcohol + carbon dioxide (a gas, or if trapped, bubbles!)
Now, on to Method Champenoise, step by step:
Make the base wine: In simplest terms, take ripe grapes, crush, add yeast (or use what’s already on the grape skins and floating about the winery), ferment, bottle. Just like that.
Blend: Many many sparkling wines are labeled NV (Non-Vintage). This means base wines from previous years can be blended with wines from this year. This helps even out the vagaries of the vintage since many sparkling wines come from places that aren’t always so sunny. Some producers blend more than others.
Bottle the base wine
Add sugar and yeast (a.k.a triage) to kick off the secondary fermentation: Remember sugar + yeast = alcohol and CO2. If you trap CO2 in a bottle, you’ll get…. BUBBLES!
Commence with riddling: This is the tricky part. The bubbles are trapped in the bottle, but so are the dead yeast cells. This is not gross. This is good. The wine’s contact with these dead yeast cells gives sparkling wine made in this way an extra note of biscuity, creamy goodness. But….most people don’t want to drink dead yeast cells. Riddling (remuage in fancy French) is the way to get them out of the bottle. The individual bottles are rotated, little by little, day by day, until all the dead yeast cells are clumped in the neck of the bottle. (There are machines that can do this. Not as romantic as riddling by hand, but it works.)
Disgorgement and Dosage: To get that clump out, the neck of the bottle is frozen, the bottle is opened, the clump is disgorged (fancy speak for “flies out”) and the remaining wine is topped off with the dosage, a mixture of wine and sugar. The dosage differs depending on the final style desired. Some sparklers are sweetened quite a bit, some just enough so that they’re not mouth-puckeringly, painfully dry. A little bit of red wine may be added as one method of creating rosé sparkler.
Insert cork: The fancy cork is inserted and the cage that keeps it in place is clamped on. Prior to that point, the bubbles have been kept in place with a plain old crown cap – the same sort of cap you would find on a lowly beer bottle. Not so sexy, but it gets the job done.
