A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I can’t believe that it took me nearly three years from opening the shop to stock this wine. And I can’t believe I stocked it on a whim! I still adore this wine and love selling it… and need to reorder it for Copake Wine Works soon. Looking back, this wine (along with the Bornard poulsard pet-nat) were probably the first big steps I took into the natural wine-proper side of things.
This would have been long before natural wine morphed into “natty wine,” when it was just starting to tiptoe into wine shops like mine – the cool, neighborhood-focused shop that stocked small production wines… but didn’t really focus too deeply on what “production” actually meant.
Originally published on June 6, 2010.
Time to wrap up on this Unreliable Witness series. I’m going to close it with a success story – and give a mention to a tasty, funky wine I’ve been wanting to mention for a while. A combo That-Customer-Wine-You-Never-Knew-You-Needed column.
Like I’ve said before, the best way to make sure you can find that great wine you had the other night is to write it down. Better yet, write it down….and take a picture. Then you can be the success story instead of the poor follow looking for the French wine with the house on the label.
Real Life Example: That Customer #4.6 – The Success Story:
So in this example, Customer #4.6 calls us. He’s looking for a wine he had the other night. He knows it was sparkling, had Dolce in the name, and was from somewhere in Italy. He thinks the producer was Donati and most importantly…he’s taken a picture of the label!
He emails it to us and yes, it’s dark and blurry and obviously taken at the end of a late night in a dark bar, but it’s enough that we can put everything together and confirm he wanted the Donati Camillo Malvasia Dolce Frizzante 2007
So we special ordered him a case and the story ended happily!
But that’s not the end of it…I was intrigued enough by his description to order an extra case for the store. Clearly, this was the rare…
Wine I Never Knew I Needed
Now I don’t usually order wine sight-unseen (well, bottle-un-tasted) but this bottle had several things going for it.
1) Customer #4.6 described it as a cross between cider, wheat beer, and cream soda, a funky combination I found oddly irresistible.
2) It’s part of the Louis/Dressner portfolio which is filled with oddly irresistible wines and one of a handful of importers from whom I’ll buy the occasional case without sampling.
3) I hadn’t been able to try it at the recent Louis/Dressner trade tasting because by the time I arrived (I always seem to arrive later than I’d like) it had already been drained by the sipping masses. While disappointing, this is usually a good sign.
4) It’s from the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, home to many delightful fizzy wines (including Lambruco) which the perfect companions to salty snacks. And I’m always looking for companions to salty snacks.
So I decided to make a leap of faith and bring in an extra case for the store. And it is indeed tasty. It’s not the easiest wine to sell – the cider/beer/cream soda description scares off a lot of people, as does the fact that it’s slightly sweet. But those who have tried it (me, my mother, a group of people in Indiana who keep ordering bottles of it) really like it.
It’s weird, but good. And we all need a little of that in our lives.