Daddy Winebucks

Admittedly, its been years since I’ve gone into a Cost Plus store.  Probably due to the fact that I am no longer in need of a garish area rug or a dining room table of exotic origin that I have to put together myself in just 71 easy steps.

But upon walking into my (semi) local CP location, I was immediately hit with a wave of nostalgia for my younger days; the magical early 90′s when my whole world fit into a one bedroom apartment (now replaced with what I affectionately call, the garage).

Cost Plus was a cornucopia where I could buy a set of blue drinking glasses, a fondue set, patio furniture and a jar of hot sauce, truly the Amazon.com of its day.  But what you could also buy there was wine.  Interesting wines too (though back then any wine was interesting to me).  It was a time here in LA that I had not yet graduated to the wonders (or even knowledge) of Trader Joe’s.

Now that I know a bit more about wine, I was once again impressed with their eclectic but informed choices.  They might not have as many brands as the Joe, but they really do cover the right varietals for the right regions at every turn.

In fact, when I went into the store to seed my Grape Madness bracket, I spent all my time in one section, domestic, before I realized the reach of their international offerings.  Many wines jumped in and out of my cart on the way to the Elite Eight.

Edge Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa – Very Cool Bottle.  Don’t let anyone tell you design is not a buyers friend.

Aaku Cabernet Sauvignon, Australia – Had to find two bottles under $5.00.  This was one of them.

Norton Malbec, Argentina – Argentinian Malbec, $8.00?  Done.

337 Cabernet Sauvignon, Lodi – When I was brainstorming names for Six Degrees, 337 was on my short list. Both wines use the same grape clone (337).

The Show, Napa - Also a cool bottle design.  And I’ve heard good things about the guys who make the stuff.

Talia Rosso, Italy – Looking for an Italian wine in this price range.

Pinot Evil, France – Cheesy name and I don’t normally do cheesy but I’m a sucker for French Pinot, wherever it may grow.

Baron De Magana, Spain – I needed another top seed wine and had nothing from Spain in the cart, a region I grow more fond of with each wine I try.  Thank you end cap displayer/corporate product placement executive…

So there you have it basketball & wine fans, the Cost Plus bracket for Grape Madness.  Please let me know if you have any thoughts on these selections and of course I’d LOVE to hear some predictions of what you think will happen when these wines go head to head.

(insert Dick Vitale voice here): “It’s Grape Madness, baby!”

One of my (many) regrets in life is not going to a big time sports college where I can now carry on my drunk, carefree days of youth long into adulthood.  Because really, is there a sadder sight than some balding, inhebriated guy in a USC sweatshirt several sizes too small, tailgating with the actual students eleven hours before game time?

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best illustration of what I missed.

What I meant to say was that I really do wish I went to a school where sports was an integral part of the collegiate experience. Where I could sleep in a tent for three weeks waiting for tickets to an Ohio State/Michigan football game or be able to share a fight song with 80,000 fellow disciples.

Alas, for me, the only sport I could become a fan of at my alma mater, The School of Visual Arts was the Ultimate Frisbee team who played their games in Central Park, or didn’t, if the Poetry Slam went too long the previous night.  There was no fight song to sing, unless you count something by Kate Bush or (insert punk anthem here) and instead of hanging around campus in logo wear, we all simply wore black – to show of course, how artistic we all were.

So it’s with great fanfare that I annouce what I hope will become an annual rite of passage each Spring, something conceived with the help of three other great bloggers, Jason from Jason’s Wine Blog,  Marc from Marc’s Muse and RJ from RJ’s Wine Blog, a race to the Final Four with wine:

Grape Madness

Here’s how it works…

Each of the four bloggers was assigned a store – Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Cost Plus and Bevmo – and a mission to pick out 8 wines (32 wines in total – cut in half from the NCAA 64, but we’re starting this with humble roots). The 8 wines are then divided into two brackets of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th seeds. Each seed level is governed by the retail price of the wine:

• 1st seed: $12 – $20
• 2nd seed: $8 – 12
• 3rd seed: $5 – $8
• 4th seed: $5 and under

For Round 1, we will each blind taste our brackets (8 bottles of wines) and narrow the field to, first, the best four bottles, then, finally, the best two bottles from each store. These two bottles will then move forward to Round 2.

In Round 2, the bloggers will pair up locally (Jason and RJ in San Francisco and Marc and I here in LA) and taste the eight remaining top wines together, eventually narrowing it to the best wine of each blogger’s grouping, thus creating the Final Four. The Final Four will then be tasted by each blogger and together we will anoint the first annual champion of Grape Madness.

Wines will be all reds, tasted blind and scored on the 100 point scale. In cases when multiple bloggers are scoring a wine, the scores will be aggregated. The winner of each match-up will be the wine with the maximum composite score. Should a tie result, even after totalling up the points, the winner will be determined based on, first, lower prices, then, a coin flip.

Personally, my first round scoring will be a twist on the 100 point scale.  I’ll judge them using basketball scores as end results but wind up in the same place for the later rounds.

This is already shaping up to be a fun event that I hope you loyal readers will follow.

More details in the coming days…let the madness begin.

When the Race for 57 began, I promised that if I had a wine that was truly poor, one that even in my creative genius I could not stretch out into a hit, then the streak would be over, once again preserving Joe DiMaggio’s magic at 56.  Thus I’m sorry (and somewhat relieved frankly) to have finally met my match.

Now you may say that I bowed to the pressure of some readers who were incredulous that there were so many singles in the mix, those who felt I was just keeping the streak alive so 14 loyal people could continue to read about the wines that I found in TJ’s.  But the truth is I battled valiantly and just came up short.

Now I know how A-Rod feels in the Bronx.  Guy can hit, .325, 45HR, 132RBI but without the ring, he’s nothing but Madonna’s dirty laundry.

While I’m sad the streak is over, I’m happy that the wine that ended the streak was one of Trader Joe’s own.  The 2007 Captain’s Catch.  By this I mean I’m glad it wasn’t a real winery, who’s latest vintage stank.  I’m not big on railing against those who try to earn a living in the winemaking biz.  It’s hard way to make a living and I truly believe that no one is out there intentionally making a bad wine just to make a buck.  But I can throw a bit of scorn on a company like the Joe, who presumably because they felt, why let Frazia make all the noise piggybacking on us?  We’ll make our own wine and take more of the profits.

It’s not so much that this particular wine was the worst thing I ever tasted (though it deserves a spot in my Hall of Shame) it’s the fact that they’re selling it at $5.99.  Again, this tells me that one of the things their internal research group told the powers that be is that at a $5.99 price point, with the TJ’s label on it, we’ll sell well.  And maybe they are.

But for $2.00 more you can buy some seriously good South American and Spanish juice that will completely satisfy.  Would this wine have made the cut at $2.99?  My honest assessment is no, it wouldn’t.

And so baseball and wine loving fans alike, the streak ends at a measly 21 wines.  A noble effort to be sure, one that might get my contact renewed, but still well short of the record.

On a positive note, talk is still churning regarding a four person, 64 wine bracket to coincide with the NCAA College Basketball tourney.  Stay tuned for details, though with February just around the corner, I suspect we have to start it soon.

But next up, my awards season blog of blogs!

I’ve been nothing if not a consistent hitter over the past few weeks but sadly for me (and you, loyal reader) I’m looking for extra bases, not singles.  In this league 3000 hits are not getting me to the wine tasting hall of fame.  It will just create a growing list of okay wines that I may or may not buy again.

I’ll tell you one thing, my mind has been circling the idea of doing a lights out under $10.00 bottle of wine.  Not saying it’s an easy endeavor, but it sure seems worth a try…

The Project Happiness has beckoned me before with its classic smiley face logo (is that in the public domain? – I mean this label is the exact yellow smile that’s been around forever) but I’ve never bit, grumbling to myself that it’s just too cliched a label, even given what the producer (Oreana) is going for.

But I suppose I’ll get through all of these labels eventually and while bypassing the Question Mark label – a surely uncopywritable (is that a word?) image, I grabbed good old “Have a Nice Day.”

The wine is a 2005 Syrah, though as I always wonder with a totally blank cork, is if Oreana simply bought this wine from someone else and with good concept in hand, is selling it as their own.  Again, I could write to ask them but according to an interesting piece at Vinography a few days ago, the last thing I want to identify myself with is being a wine writer.  I write, about wine, but I’m no wine writer…

So I just sit here in my ivory (blogging) tower making snap judgements on things I have no proof of.

At $5.99 I was expecting bigger things from this Syrah – and by bigger I mean more fruit.  It was a bit dirty on the nose (though to be fair we just got a dog so everything smells dirty around here, even the soap) and I caught a hint of licorice.

The fruit, as mentioned above wants to come through, it really does, but even after sampling some just now, a good twenty hours after opening it, still isn’t quite there for me.

I’ll give it a SINGLE, even though I’m sure to get flayed by my friend Howard who is already smelling some sort of scam here, like I’m really scoring these wines just good enough to further this blogging experiment.

I’ve not added up all the previous twenty wines yet but I think, a little less than halfway through, that many of the wines found at TJ’s are just that: SINGLES; nothing special but nor must they be at their price points.  And I guess I can move a little bit up the wine chain and act like Jay Z at a Vegas VIP room, spending upwards of $10.00 a bottle.

We’ll see.  For now, don’t complain to the ump.  I call ‘em as I see ‘em.

You think it’s bad trying to get to Staples Center for a game or concert on time for a 7:30-8 start, how about trying to get down there for dinner *and* an event.  My first inclination was to leave about 3:00pm, thereby having only to endure the out of work actor/writer/director/editor/DP/composer traffic on the 101.

And yet it is for creative pursuits I’m heading downtown today, as I’m pretentiously a season ticket holder for the LA Philharmonic.  Actually, I shouldn’t be so self-depricating.  I love classical music and the Walt Disney Hall should be a destination for you, whether you live in LA or are just visiting.

Amazing site lines, beautiful acoustics, everything pretty much perfect.  My expectations of sitting in traffic though to get there do not follow the usual crawl downtown.  I don’t anticipate any of us, dressed in suits, leaning out the window hollering to our fellow fans about Gustavo Dudamel’s performance or blasting our Tchaikovksy out the window like you do for the Lakers or Springsteen .

But because I am going to cut my day a bit short and also because I’ve now got two wines waiting in my blogging que, I thought it was time to play a doubleheader, those great all-day affairs of yesteryear.

In my youth, a double header was a scheduled game, pay one price for both.  Now, there’s no such thing unless the weather is involved.  And on those days, two separate crowds come and go for each game – how dare a professional sports league give the fans *more* than their monies worth?

So for those who recall those wistful days of eight hours of nothing but baseball here goes:

GAME ONE:

At $4.99 this Chianti from D’Aquino came in the quaint old wicker bottle.  The one I bought looked like it had been recycled from a much older vintage (say: 1971) or at least spent a good amount of time undecteted at the back of some dirty warehouse.

The wine was light in color and had a fruit candy smell, not quite a Life Saver, but maybe, a wine flavored sucking candy – and for all of you entrepreneurs out there – I just patented this idea.  Sorry you’re too late…

The first sip was tart & tannic with a hint of fruit on the mid-pallate.  The finish was dry.  Put another way, there wasn’t much to like or dislike about this wine.

SINGLE

GAME TWO:

I’ve been a fan of Cote du Rhone’s for awhile now, the first one being made by Guigal and written about someplace I cannot remember.  All I recall is that it was one of the first times I sought and bought and although I’ve not looked for this same wine in a few years, I’ve not often found a CdR I did not enjoy.

This effort, the Cellier du Rhone also set me back $4.99.  It had very nice color and a nose of strawberries and rasberries.  The wine was decently balanced but not as much as I would have expected based on what it looked like (hardly a scientific method, I know).

But again, nothing bad I can really say about it.  Did not get better as the night progressed but it served its purpose.

SINGLE

During Joe D’s hitting streak he ended up facing four pitchers who would eventually find their way to Cooperstown.  One of them was the great Bob Feller, who finished the ’41 season with 25 wins, one of them coming against the Yanks that day, June 2 when they prevailed 7-5.

Joe went 2-4 that day with a double and single but in looking at the Baseball Almanac I have to wonder just what he and the rest of his teammates were thinking.  For in Riverdale, NY that same day, maybe unknown to the team, Lou Gehrig died, finally falling to the horrible disease that now bears his name.

Has there ever been a more moving image in all of sports then Gehrig at Yankee Stadium that day, head bowed with his fellow ball players and fans, who were there to honor him in life, before they’d be forced to do so with his passing?

I tried to post the audio clip of his speech, but my computer skills fall far below that of my brain’s desire to do cool things in my blog.  But since blogs are about the written word, here’s two excerpts of what Lou had to say that day.  They are words we might do well to think about in good times and bad.

“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got.  Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.  I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.  Look at these grand men.  Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day.”

“Sure, I’m lucky.  When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat and vice versa, sends you a gift, that’s something.  When everybody down to the groundskeeper and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that’s something.  When you have a father and mother work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it’s a blessing.  When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that’s the finest I know.  So I close in saying that I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”

I applaud you if your eyes are dry right now.  Mine aren’t.

So Joe went 2-4 that day and I have a wine to review, but wow…

The 2003 Santino Syrah from the Sierra Foothills was my at bat for last night.  I’m guessing that with the older vintage the winery was able to sell off the rest of their inventory to TJ’s, who had it priced at $4.99.

The wine had a slightly musty nose but a little chocolate poked it’s way through.  The cherries were dried on the palate (this wine may have had lusher fruit a few years ago) but overall this was a nice, easily drinkable wine.

SINGLE

Amazingly, Joe DiMaggio ended 1941, in the winter after his streak, by enlisting in the army during World War Two.  Granted he did not see any combat time, rather he mostly played baseball with other servicemen, but he did not return to the Yankees for another four years.  To put that in its proper perspective, could you imagine Derek Jeter or A-Rod or Kobe, leaving professional sports to serve in the armed forces during war time?

Me, well, the only troops I’ll been entertaining as 2008 ends is the kids to play minature golf (thank you Southern California) before ringing in the new year on East coast time and being in bed by 10, or as I like to call it, my usual evening.

I did however find time to sneak in one more wine in the race for 57, a 2006 Tempranillo Barrica called, Albero.  This wine comes from Latitude Wines, the importer also responsible for the Slow Paseo brand  that began the streak a few months ago.

This wine has great color and a solid nose of black cherries.  There’s not much fruit but the structure is good.  And after about an hour it opened up very nicely, adding some more black fruit to the mix.

This is a solid effort at $5.99 to end the year with.

DOUBLE

And if I can offer up any last thoughts as we head into 2009 it’s that there are no wars to send anyone to, baseball superstar or otherwise, by the time my own streak ends…

Happy New Year!

Before my Bordeaux trip a few weeks ago, I had not drank any wine from the region in easily two years.   It wasn’t anything personal as I’d not drank many Burgundies (my favorite) or even much age worthy California Cabernet (other than the stuff Ryan makes).

Part of this is strictly logistical (my 200 bottle cellar’s cooling unit died on me – curse you, Vinoteque) and economical – I no longer like to spend money on wines I’m not going to drink for ten + years.

100% of the wines I buy these days (as are most bought by consumers today) are meant to be drank immediately.  As such, not only have age worthy wines fallen off my radar but I believe my palette has changed to favor more fruit forward and balanced wines – wines that can be enjoyed now or just a few years down the road.

So when I stuck my nose in that first glass of Cheval Blanc earlier this month I forgot how wonderful these wines smell, and when made well, taste.

As such my last trip to the Joe had me seeking out some Bordeaux’s and the first one I spied was J. Calvet’s 2006 Reserve De L’Estey.  This wine from the Medoc is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc.  Its nose was all chocolate and mint for me with hints of that oaky, smoky, earthy smell our olfactory glands have come to associate with wines from the region.

The wine was noticeably dry, with an absence of upfront fruit but after settling for about an hour the wine softened and was pleasantly drinkable.  Nothing spectacular, but balanced and smooth.

$5.99

SINGLE

I wonder how it was for a major league hitter in the Seventies when they realized they were going up against Nolan Ryan or in the eighties against The Rocket.  Knowing there was a good chance your bat would never touch the ball in four trips to the plate.

That’s kinda how I felt looking at and taking my first sniff of the 2006 Aquila D’Oro, a Tuscan Red billed as a “dry red wine.”  My first thought was, “the streak is over.”

There was just something about the lack of nose for me, nothing coming through, that told me this wasn’t going to be my night.

The first sip was like a 100MPH scorcher right down the pipe that I didn’t even have time to swing at, which translated meant, this wasn’t going to be my night.

I let the wine sit open for about a half hour before coming back to it and the wine had settled in a good way.  This was a mellow wine, and definitely as dry as advertised.

Ultimately, it wasn’t great, a real battle between pitcher and batter, working the count to two and two.  The next pitch was off speed, but crazy and I managed almost a check swing, just tipping the ball with the end of the bat.  It corkscrewed up the middle past the pitcher and just out of reach of the shortstop.

SINGLE

$3.99

Sometimes you have to be lucky to keep a streak like this alive.  This was one of *those* nights…

What wine tasting stunt featuring wines found at Trader Joe’s would be complete without the inclusion at some point of the wine that arguably put TJ’s wine on the map?

I’m talking of course about Charles Shaw (aka Two Buck Chuck)

When I started the race for 57 I’d cruise the wine aisle, avoiding the familiar, uninspiring, black and burgundy label with the generic gazebo on the front.  That’s not to say I was never intrigued by the $2 price tag in the past.

In fact, when I first heard about it (whenever the first vintage was released) I, like everyone else was curious as to how a wine so cheap would taste.  Prior to that, any mention of a truly horrible wine was referred to as “Ripple” or “Mad Dog.”  Now we had an actual wine we could mock and knowingly laugh at those who brought it as a gift when they arrived for a dinner party.

But something strange happened on our way to the Shaudenfraude.  That first vintage of Cabernet was really good as I recall.  Maybe it was really good at two bucks but I remember being impressed.  This said, I only felt this about the Cab.  Others enjoyed the Shiraz but not this refined palate.

After a few vintages though, the quality went severely downhill and I had not drunk it for years.  So when I came across the gleaming racks of infinite Chuck a couple of weeks ago, I thought, “Why not?”

The 2006 Vintage is a little light but the nose was pleasant enough, with a bit of licorice and pepper.  The wine was pretty well balanced, a little tart with some nice fruit.  The finish is longer than I would have expected and left me with a bit of a sucking candy sensation but at $1.99 it’s hard to complain about this year’s crop.

I’m not ready to proclaim that Chuck is back but he’s in the building with this one.

DOUBLE