You conveniently dodged the issue. If a wine buyer walks into his local wine retail shop (LWS) and looks at the selection of CA chardonnays, what is most likely going to find? If he chooses 10 wines at random, what are the odds that at least eight, perhaps more, will meet the criterions stated in the WSJ story.
I personally don’t find an eighty percent rate, at minimum, to be a generalization. I consider the 20% to be the exception to the rule. Take a look at what Constellation, Barton Brands, Fosters, etc. push into the retail stores. What part of that definition of chard is generalization?
Gordon - obviously it is easy for us in California to drink the best our state has to offer and i adore Chardonnay in the summer months. seriously, it is impossible for folks in some states to arrange any kind of delivery to a PO Box, some warehouse destination or a neighboring state? they are locked into their LWS or is seeking out the best domestic Chard just a PITA folks choose not to pursue? i don’t have a LWS within a 45 minute drive so i rarely shop any store.
Mrs Smith: “Honey, don’t forget that the Joneses are coming over for dinner tonight.”
Mr Smith: “Ugh.”
Mrs Smith: “Could you pick up a nice bottle of wine on your way home from work? I’m cooking flounder so you should get a white.”
Mr Smith: “Uh, yeah, whatever.”
Mr Smith [that afternoon at the package store]: “Hmm… Mer Soleil. Caymus Conundrum. Chateau St Jean. Sonoma Cutrer. Far Niente… Huh - here’s something called Newton, with big points from some guy named Parker - I wonder if Mrs Smith would shoot me if I spent $55 on a bottle of wine?”
Mr Smith [later that evening at dinner]: “I think I am going to shoot myself for spending $55 on a bottle of wine.”
but why buy wine like that ever? obviously if you are here you are passionate about wine, don’t you cellar bottles @ home? if you cellar maybe you can buy wines from avenues other than your LWS and try better CA Chard.
has to be close to 15 years since i made a purchase and popped that bottle within a few months even.
But John & Dottie aren’t writing for fanatics who plan their dinner parties six or eight months in advance - they’re writing for average Joe wine consumers who drop by the package store on the way home from work to grab a single bottle from among hundreds of different regions and thousands of possible selections.
If you’re a fanatic, then you look to guys like Tanzer, Meadows, and Schildknecht for advice on chardonnay.
John & Dottie, on the other hand, aren’t writing for an audience of fanatics.
And for the people that John & Dottie do write for, their advice is pretty simple: If you drop into the local store and grab an American chardonnay at random, then you will probably end up spending a rather large sum of money for something which will probably prove to be not particularly palatable.
Actually, the truly “average” American wine purchase is probably somewhere down around $5 or $6 per 750ml.
John & Dottie are probably writing for people a good standard deviation above that - folks who regularly [once or twice a week] open a $15 bottle of wine.
But the people who frequent a board like this are probably three or four standard deviations above average - out around 1% of 1% of all wine drinkers [or maybe even 1% of 1% of 1% of all wine drinkers].
Too many tasted like stagnant water, like pickling spices, or like vanilla flavorings added to water.
I rarely agree with them – if I can even make sense of what they’re saying – but I have to say I agree with the thrust here.
It’s the details I don’t get. For starters, it’s weird that they don’t mention the lack of acidity, which is another, key defining characteristic of too many chardonnays out of California, and the one that makes them really boring. I could probably take the oak on its own.
Also, vanilla I get, but “stagnant water, like pickling spices”??? Huh? Have you ever gotten those things in a chardonnay? Like most of their tasting descriptors, I find them meaningless – just colorful words that convey nothing to a reader because they don’t correspond to anything anyone else would perceive.
OK, and while i guess i understand that folks who spend < $50/week on wine purchases are the goal audience i don’t see how these folks ever really expect to enjoy a remarkable wine experience or even comprehend that they are not drinking good QPR CA Chard.
And most people fall in a big hump under the middle of the bell curve.
Furthermore, they don’t even realize that they are in the middle of the bell curve, and there’s nothing that you [or they, or anyone else] can do to move them away from the middle of the bell curve.
In the big scheme of things, you are so far off to the right end of the wine appreciation bell curve that, statistically speaking, you don’t even exist - you’re indistinguishable from background noise.
Just came back from a very quick Sonoma/Napa visit and was impressed by two Chards: Landmark '07 Kanzler, and even better to my palate, Hope & Grace '06 Beard Vyd. Where would you guys put either or both in this discussion?
I did not intentionally dodge a question here. Sorry.
Firstly, I think we need to refocus on the stupidity of this article. The two of them tell us that $40-$70 CA Chards suck. Then they go on to provide no examples. If a customer walks into a wine store that carries $40-$70 CA Chards, I would believe that many of them are delicious. I ambiased, of course, as I think we carry many delicious Chards in that price range.
The fact that they are catering to a more mainstream audience makes this article all the more worse. They are telling WSJ readers to avoid $40-$70 CA Chards, which is just an absurd generalization.
The reality is that most wine sucks. I taste garbage all day long.Should I write an article stating as much? THis week I attended 5 wholesaler tastings in NY. I probably tasted 700 wines in 3 days (I feel like Jay Stuart Miller). Now I skipped hundreds of the absolute garbage of the tastings, but even picking and choosing what I WANTED to sample, I still tasted a lot of junk.
Telling America that CA Chards suck and to avoid them because they are ripoffs, would be similar to me telling my clients to stop drinking wine because 90% of it sucks.
Daniel, I think you are missing the point of the column. Gaiter and Brecher don’t try to steer their readers toward or away from particular wines. As has been pointed out in many other comments on this thread, their audience is not mostly people who will hunt down specific gems, but rather people who would like to have a pleasant experience walking into a local wine store (perhaps yours), selecting a wine or two, and enjoying them. The WSJ column tries to make those readers aware of the areas in the wine store where they are most likely to have a pleasant experience – and, sometimes, to steer people away from areas where there is a greater risk of an unpleasant experience. 80-90% of the column is positive. Even in the Chardonnay column, they spent half their ink on the wines they liked.
I would expect that you do much the same thing with your customers – trying to steer them toward wines that you hope they will experience as a good return for their money (and, in some cases, away from wines that you think will not fit their tastes). Obviously, when you are standing with an individual customer you do not need to paint with nearly as broad a brush, since you are listening to what that particular customer likes or dislikes.
If the best you can get out of this column is they are “telling America that CA Chards suck and to avoid them because they are ripoffs,” I think you are the one who is grossly overgeneralizing. The point of the column was to see whether there were bargains to be found in ~$50 California Chardonnays. Gaiter & Brecher concluded that there were a few, but not a lot, “so, for value, we would still be wary of the Chardonnay aisle.” They then promised future columns exploring where values might better be found. Even as a wine geek, who no longer purchases most of my wine at my local stores, I can appreciate the effort they put in to produce a wholesale assessment of wine in a particular category. (Personally, I do not buy expensive California Chardonnays because, although I haven’t tasted any with off-flavors like those Gaiter and Brecher describe, I have found enough $15-30 Chardonnays that I like a lot, and the more expensive wines I have tasted have ranged from ok but uninspiring up to very nice but not better than my favorites from the $15-30 range. I’ve had better experiences with $50-75 white burgundy, so I will buy those.)
Without listing all the wines that were sampled, we have no idea how to judge this article.
It is possible they didn’t have the knowledge to select an appropriate group of wines in which to form an informed opinion.
Although I haven’t tasted the wines they did list in their article as acceptable, they are certainly not on my list of CA Chards in the top echelon. (They MAY very well be fine wines).
I agree with Paul, it is much easier to assess their assessment if we see their “sample” set.
I can appreciate that their are trying to steer their readers to the best value “aisle.” That makes complete sense to me, but telling us most of what they tasted was subpar and not providing examples is not fair to the region, the wineries or the winemakers. They are not panning a particular vintage of $50 CA Chard…they are panning $50 CA Chard…
“We bought more than 50 wines from stores in five states.”
Now, granted, most are from 2006, a vintage not high in quality vs other vintages…but they should say that.