What’s “Tri Appellation”?
Well, where so you even start? Since you are actually IN the area, you’ll have a better time telling us what’s out there than someone from the right coast who only visits wine areas there every few years. Lots of stuff going on in the New World. Depending where you live, you could even check out wineries on your lunch break! How many of us are lucky enough to do that?
I stumbled into the Menlo Park Trader Joes the other day to pick up a snack and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had a tasting room.
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Step one - avoid Trader Joe’s, even the Menlo Park store. Go to a real wine store.
Step two - take the advice of Wes, Sean, J Rock and others - don’t worry about Pinot Noir and Cab and Merlot and Chardonnay. Places like Sonoma, Mendocino, Paso Robles and others are turning out really nice wines from much more interesting grapes. And you won’t find them at TJ’s.
Step three - don’t feel that you have to like this or that. A lot of people have said to drink Zin. That’s fine if you like it and you should know that Zin is one of those grapes that can be very site and vintage expressive so if you don’t like two or three that doesn’t mean you won’t like any ever. But if you really don’t like the stuff, drink something else.
Step four - have fun.
That Harrington even would be great. I spent a good part of last night talking up his wines to some friends!
Jordan L wrote:
You may have lost me at the peyote analogy but I agree! I stumbled into the Menlo Park Trader Joes the other day to pick up a snack and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had a tasting room. The guy pouring clearly loved wine and everyone who came in to taste was also clearly a wine drinker. Walked out with a Boen PN for under $20 that is delivering killer value.
Draeger’s is an upscale market with a store in Menlo Park, and they usually have tastings once a week. +1 on K&L. They have tastings most Saturdays, and those are posted on their website. Welcome to the Bay Area!
Ed
Lol guess I’m not the only one with a Screaming Mimi’s habit. Last time there I had Gravenstein Apple pie in a cone. Absolute brilliant! Basically apple pie a la mode. It’s on my don’t miss list up there a long with a twilight round at Northwood
There’s a lot of interesting things happening in California wine right now. A lot of the newer generation of winemakers that make more restrained wines, like they used to. You can still get the big Napa ones if you so desire, but there’s a whole new tier of interesting producers now. I think it’s the best it’s ever been. A lot of good suggestions already, but here are a few more I really like:
Alban Vineyards - Syrah legend.
Paul Lato - both his Pinot and Syrah’s (especially the Syrah) are fantastic.
Sandhi - anything from Sashi Moorman is good.
Piedrasassi - Sashi again.
Lioco - another vote for these guys, amazingly mineral Pinots.
Bedrock - yeah, the hype is real.
Sandlands - Tegan Passalaqua who is winemaker at Turley’s brand.
Dragonette
Kosta Brown
Failla - amazing Pinots and their concrete egg Chardonnay is probably my favorite Chard ever.
Saxum
Pax Mahle
Clementine Carter - Sonja does some really nice Grenache.
Ceritas
Hirsch
Turley - Zin legend.
Raen - one of the Monday grandchildren, supposedly amazing.
In the low-intervention category, California is really booming at the moment with producers like:
Harrington
Martha Stoumen
Inconnu
Donkey & Goat
Dirty & Rowdy
Deux Punx
Broc Cellars
Stirm
Ambyth
Scholium
Arnot-Roberts
Eyrie Vineyards
Tessier
Ruth Lewandowski
Another + on K&L. Check their schedule online. They get some winemakers in there. Great selection of small CA producers, as well as imports, uncommon varieties.
Get on the Vin, Vino, Wine email list. Open Tues-Sat, they have themed tastings every day, as well as “weekly sampler” offerings. They carry a fairly small, but quality number of CA wines. Much more French and Italian. All terroir-driven.
Robert’s Market in Woodside has a great selection of hard to find stuff, and very much worth stopping by.
Waxwing in Belmont is open Friday evenings, as are a brewery and a distillery, and a food truck. One man operation specializing in Pinot Noir and Syrah.
If you get on the August West mailing list, they’ll send you a timely email about their open house. Should be later November and include some of their tenant wineries. Highly recommended. Several are Berserker Day participants.
It is a good idea to explore not so well known grapes from the area. But ultimately you may find, like I did, that for the most part they are rarely equal the European counterparts. And frequently, far too frequently, are much higher in price. On the wine side I am not sure if it is a stylistic choice or if they just have trouble overcoming California. Maybe a bit of both. And on the pricing side, it is certainly understandable that California can be an expensive place to produce wine. Still it is fun to explore and try old grapes from new places.
I don’t agree. It’s all about great sites matching a particular grape (or even the right clones of that grape). Pinot Noir is planted all over California. Most of it is subpar. (Some of the pioneers went through the effort to seek out great sites for it, while the more recent fad involves loads of lemmings planting it willy nilly.) If Pinot Noir were planted all over France the same way, most of it would also be mediocre. Some California sites are excellent for Pinot Noir.
The second aspect is in the vineyard and cellar. You can’t just translate what works best for one grape variety to another. Or what works best at one site to another.
Some more obscure grapes have done better here, because where they can be found in Europe doesn’t suit them well, and the winemaking is rustic. Some do quite well here, but express differently. You could say like comparing Valtellina to Barolo. There is such a range of microclimates and soils here, it’s more about finding the right sites for a grape than there not being any.
IMO, the Sangiovese disaster here comes down to bad winemaking, starting with the picking decision. That’s from working with 5 vineyards. All gave great fruit.
That’s also from my experience working with dozens of grape varieties. We researched, then experimented with each new grape. We got stuff grafted to appropriate sites. We brought in over 30 varieties that weren’t here. A few people have brought bottles of our Nebbiolo to show off to top Piemonte and Lombardy producers. Elisabetto Foradori said our Teroldego was “Very good. Not as good as mine, but very good.”
What can be done here is the same as what a new generation is doing in Italy, who are bringing back near extinct grapes and figuring out how best to treat them in the vineyard and tailor the winemaking to their strengths and unique expressions.
A lot of the Italian grapes do well in places that don’t suit the French grapes. Land value is a huge part of cost. That’s part of why we changed directions. If we continued making SVD Pinots, we’d have to be charging at least $60. A Sagrantino that’s just as good? $30. And gee, the in stock Sagrantinos at K&L right now range $35-43.
A lot of the Italian grapes do well in places that don’t suit the French grapes.
And Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Georgian, etc.
We in the US have built a model based on French grapes, but the US has as many microclimates as Europe and only a small portion of them have been explored for grape growing. French grapes don’t do well in every part of Europe and they don’t necessarily do well in every part of the States.
Kudos to Wes and the others for looking beyond France.
I will stand by my statement. I have tried dozens and dozens of wines. And for large part there are very few wines from California that can hold up against their counterparts from Europe. And certainly not for the prices offered. Nothing wrong with supporting the home team. But if you are judging the wines, that needs to be put aside. I would encourage anyone interested to taste as much as possible. And reach their own conclusions. I know where I ended up.
It’s very easy to get caught up in apples to oranges comparisons and not realize it. California is still learning/relearning. Tradition was devastated by Prohibition. Recent and relatively recent influxes of new wineries, lots of clumsy trend following, glut feeding. Market expectations inhibiting/punishing exploring the best wines that can be made in some regions. So what? The vast majority of European wines are utter garbage, just like here. You have to look past the BS. You don’t have access to most of what’s available here, which is what Jordan is specifically asking about, while he’s right in the middle of it. He can taste a 50 case production wine from a winery with no web presence, only available at a few stores (with no web presence), a few restaurants and an annual open house, if that.
There certainly are some really interesting inexpensive European wines of high quality. These are the mainstay of our work day brown bag tastings, so I’ve been buying and tasting hundreds of these a year. There’s no shortage of really interesting qpr wines in our market, and I do encourage Jordan and others to explore these. From where he lives, the best recs I have to explore these are K&L, Draeger’s, Robert’s and VVW. But, at the same quality level, as in impressive to me, prices are all over the map, depending on grape and region. $15, $28, $40, $80, all at the same quality and enjoyability for best examples of an uncommon grape. (Of course, we stumble across plenty of duds, too.) The price range from the same sort of wines from here is probably $18-45.
Also note, prices for the same quality level of such wines from here varies quite a bit. Some are just due to vineyard locales, while others have put a lot into hyping up demand. Think the buzz name winery charging $45 for a wine, and someone else charging $30 for a superior version of the same grape, same vineyard. The one that gets the hype on this forum is the pricey one, while posts from people who actually taste broadly offering better, less expensive alternatives get ignored. Imagine what we think when we see the “What’s the best California Syrah” type of threads full of bold declarations from people who haven’t tasted from very many producers (of which, were all Parker or forum faves). It’s like, wow, half those “best” recs wouldn’t make my top-50. End of rambling…
That’s not exactly correct, as most wines are O-K, many better than that, and quite a few better than that. The bell curve with wine is shifted far to the right and way past the median. I think 30-40 years ago you could get away with saying something like this, but not now, as the quality of winemaking worldwide is the best it has ever been.
I would agree with you that the vast majority of European wine imported is OK.
I agree with your main point about Ridge Zins - and Geyserville in particular (although the price of Geyserville is higher than what he typically spends and the Three Valleys Zin is more in his price range). However, Sunnyvale, where he lives is about 1/2 hour from Ridge’s main winery in Cupertino and about 3 hours (depending on traffic through SF or Oakland) from Lytton Springs. While it is neat to see the really old vines at Lytton Springs, I recommend that he go to main winery.
Isn’t this an explanation of why one would have to work really hard to find California wines providing the same QPR as better (and easier to find) QPR European wines rather than refuting the point that the price to quality ratio is generally better for many European wines than for most California wines?
You are absolutely correct that the vast majority of all wines are utter garbage, but are you really suggesting that the only values in California wines are at 50 case wineries. Wow.
I’d start with reading “The new California wine” by Jon Bonne (The New California Wine – Jon Bonné) and buying all the Edmunds St. John wines that I could find.
Rather inflammatory and … UNTRUE. Wines are better than they ever have been…in history. I don’t think anyone here has had rotgutt in years (unless you take out the nat experiments!).
You do realize Wes made the comment and I was just agreeing with him? I recommend you drink jug wine from anywhere.
When I walk into to wine store, or even a supermarket wine area, I see mostly 750ml bottles, not jugs. Last time I saw lots of jugs was in the 90’s. I think we are all beyond that now.
I guess in your lofted status, you have no idea that the vast majority of wines in the world are of jug quality or less. For example, Gallo makes about 75 million cases of wines a year. It may not be you, but someone is buying them. There are wines of this quality or lower made all over the world. Compare that with Wes’ wineries making 50 cases a year or even “large” classified Bordeaux estates making 20,000 cases a year.