Recently my partner and I bought all of the available at the time under $30 Champagne from K&L to see if any of them could supplant Roederer Estate as our inexpensive high quality house bubbles. Lots of fun tasting through the 10 bottles that we bought. While nothing really wowed us, it was a really fun experiment to do.
I was thinking - what other type of ‘Under $xx ’ would be fun to do? Ideally I would want there to be somewhere between 6-12 bottles in the order.
The only one I am really coming up with is 1er Cru Burgundy under $60. I am sure there are other regions that would be fun to do on this.
Looking for ideas from the rest of the Bersekers. +1 if I can make this happen with a single K&L order.
We gravitate to Pinot, Zin, Syrah, Barbera, and GSM blends. Being in NorCal, most of our cellar is heavily influenced by Sonoma, SCM, Sierra Foothills, and Paso.
The goal in doing something like this is to broaden our horizons.
I just did a tasting similar to this with Pinot under $40 from around the world. Funny enough, we also did all of our shopping at K&L. One of the winners was actually from their Kalinda private label.
Our group did a ‘cheap claret’ tasting once (I guess around 12-18 USD in modern money). Interesting, as it showed there was both value to be had, and some rubbish as well, which I guess is ideal for such a tasting.
If you want a somewhat unusual tasting, you can still get decent sherry for under $20, covering the different styles.
Other sparkling wines under $30 might make a cool follow-up to your champagne tasting, and indeed draw comparisons to it. Loads of good options e.g. various cremants, sparkling vouvray, cava, plus cheaper Trento / Franciacorta from Italy (and a brachetto/moscato for fun). Throw in a home grown sparker or two as well to see how they match up.
It’s going to be useful to think about whether it’s an academic exercise in exploring a tighter region/style, or something that allows for more obvious differences that might avoid a degree of palate fatigue from tasting very similar wines. Even within a single grape like Chardonnay, you could get a big range of styles if you set out to procure them.
I’ve really liked the “Pinot under $60” theme with no region specifics. Really good way to convince people that whatever generalizations they came in with are probably not accurate. Could raise it to $75 and capture all kinds of awesome.
Best example was only three bottles, all 2013. A Bernard/Thierry Glantenay Volnay 1er Brouillards, Pavelot SLB 1er Dominode, and a Knez Anderson Valley ($60-$50-$35). I knew the wines so was single blind and experience helped me identify which was which with ease.
The two others were double blind and were only certain of one thing. They loved wine #3 because it was the most clearly old world of the three wines and possessed the most elegance. Naturally, they were referring to the California wine.
I hope you so the Nebbiolo ones- let us all know how it goes.
I’d recommend Guigal for the CdR showdown- widely available, decent quality, reliable year to year, inexpensive, and in my mind at least, is the wine standard to beat in the inexpensive CdR category.
Since you like Barbera, put together a case of under $30 Italian Barbera (Barbera d’Alba, Barbera d’Asti, etc.). You could end up with an interesting mix of modern and traditional. Throw in some CA bottles if you want.
