This popped up on the NY Times main page this morning:
… because of the dominant trend on supermarket shelves for bland, wimpy wines?
I think that has been their marketing slogan for a while. Not that the average supermarket wine buyer would know that. Or care.
That has indeed been their slogan for at least 10 years - back when their wines were a lot better than they are now.
Are their serious Zins no good these days?
I haven’t had any Ravenswood wines in many, many moons. I do remember them being failry good QPRs in my early days of getting serious about wine.
I have buttons and bumper stickers from them with this that must be close to 20 years old. Sadly, their wines seem to have become more wimpy over the years.
Same here. They have buttons and stickers with the slogan in both English and Spanish.
As a member of the AFWE, I suppose I have to reject these wines as a matter of principle based on this slogan.
The ones in Spanish were something about no wine without eggs IIRC.
No viños sin huevos which should be understood as no wines without balls.
-Al
No “ñ” (enyie…more or less phonetically) in “vinos” Al.
Oops! I’m better with the slang,
-Al
Back in the day they really were. When J.P. stepped away from the daily action and went Corporate, things changed. I remember a Sonoma visit in 2003 that included 20+ wineries. Can you guess the only one whose tasting room operation and wine quality were totally disappointing? I’ve heard rumours of a return to quality…in relative terms.
RT
IIRC, the mid to late 90’s Icon was a really good blend. The last one I had was maybe an '01 or '02, and it was just a hot, alcoholic mess.
Hefty hefty hefty!
Maybe we can buy them by the Cinch Sack?
I have their slogan on a bumper sticker in Latin on my office door:
“Nullum vinum flaccidum”
I think their SVD wines are still fairly strong in quality. Tasted several 07s recently and they’re still quite distinct. It’s the wines that have wiggle room for increasing volume (AVA designations and broadly defined blends) that have taken a corporate hosing over the last decade. I do have fond memories of barrel tasting the SVDs on my honeymoon in 2002, and their vans have their circular raven icon on their hubcaps, which is pretty slick.
True about the high production wines.
Joel Peterson came to FSU my last year there and spoke to our Enology Society. We took him out to dinner after, and he said that as far as the winemaking is concerned, the corporate people let them do what they had always been doing- native ferms, etc. I’m sure they really only dictate production levels. And flow of $$.
At one time back in the 80’s I would have said that Ravenswood wines could run with Ridge - while I always tended to prefer what Draper did with Zin than JP, the “edge” was slight. In fact, we used to comment on the “4 R’s” of Zinfandel - Ridge, Rafanelli, Rosenblum & Ravenswood.
Unfortunately, at least IMO, it’s been quite some time since you could honestly say that what Ravenswood has been putting in the bottle actually merited inclusion as a top-tier Zin producer, and despite Joel’s protests to the contrary, most people seem to trace that decline in quality to the change in ownership.