Sunday 23d [February 1862] Yesterday Jeff Davis was inaugurated for six years. We hear many reports from Fort Donaldson, hear that our Generals and most of our troops have cut their way through the enemies lines, and that their l…
Much has been claimed over the past few months regarding credit for bringing the Cal Ripken project to Fredericksburg. Below is the first article to appear in the Free Lance Star that provided the details on how Fredericksburg was chosen. Ripken Pitch…
You may or may not know that the 2005 vintage in Bordeaux has been hailed as possibly the best in 50 years, and as such the prices and exuberance over these wines are at an all time high.
In 2005 Kyle and I were fledgling wine retailers with barely enough know-how to speculate on Bordeaux. What we did know was that in order to be a credible player in the market we needed to have a decent selection of 2005 Bordeaux in inventory. So when I sat down with the futures catalogs I devised a strategy for purchasing; only smaller, lesser known estates with more reasonable pricing, and really good Parker ratings. Robert Parker gets a lot of criticism for preferring wines that are less classically French, but on the subject of Bordeaux I think his palate is dead on.
I picked out my wines, ponied up my 15% up front and basically hoped for the best. Two years later when the Bordeaux started rolling in I took a look at my order sheet and almost fell off my chair in shock. If the paper was correct I signed us up for 6 cases of Chateau Troplong Mondot with a retail price of $250 a bottle. What was I thinking?
I kicked myself for several weeks for committing kybecca to such a large investment without really knowing how we were going to sell this wine. After my panic subsided I decided this was the right time to market the website and hopefully collectors would notice our offering (after all the initial rating from Parker was 96-100 points). I took a deep breath and wrote the check for all six cases.
In April of 2008 Parker did his final tasting of this wine and gave it 99 points. Further kybecca has the entire allocation for this wine for the state of Virginia, which I only found out recently. Before I give any credit to myself let me just say that this is pure luck and every once and awhile it feels good to have something go your way.
The upshot is that our little wine shop has (as of this posting) about 40 bottles of the 2005 Chateau Troplong Mondot. (click to read the new rating)
New price: $399
On April 25th the Free Lance Star, in a story entitled– Checking the Factshttp://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/042008/04252008/374410 laid out the inaccuracies of Mrs. Girvan’s position on Auto Chalk. Mrs. Girvan’s response—post that same ina…
Here’s a link to a video from the 28 April tornado outbreak in the Suffolk VA area. I love to chase storms, but I’d much rather see them in rural areas with no property damage or injuries.
I’m often asked why expensive wines are expensive, but the question in the title of this post is probably more interesting. First, it’s important to understand the difference between cheap wine and cheap wine. Cheap wine can be really good and a great bargain. Often they come from countries, such as Argentina, where making wine is very inexpensive and they can thus charge lower prices for their wine. Our own kybecca malbec is from Argentina. Another technique is to make wine in large yields, which drives down the price of each bottle. Many good wines can be made this way. The result is that there are many wines less than $10 that are very good.
In the last ten or fifteen years, however, we have seen a ‘race to the bottom’ when it comes to wine. Clever marketers have convinced the public that the less you pay for wine, the better the bargain you’re getting. It has now become common to see people boasting about how cheap their wine is. We don’t even apply the same standard to beer – how many of you would boast about how cheap your six pack of Milwaukee’s Best was? You wouldn’t, because you wouldn’t buy that stuff no matter how cheap it was (unless you are in college). Or imagine if somebody was selling hamburgers for 25 cents each. Your reaction wouldn’t be “what a bargain!”, it would be “25 cents for a burger? That’s disgusting.”
This trend has reached its peak with the Bronco Wine Company, a company that believes wine is a common commodity good for generating profits rather than an art and a very enjoyable part of life’s leisure. Bronco is responsible, among other things, for the extremely popular Charles Shaw wines that you find at Trader Joes. I’m going to let you in on some trade secrets for your own benefit. Here’s how this wine is made: Grapes are grown in huge yields with no regard for quality (good winemakers constantly prune and trim their vines to ensure quality). The vines are tended by machines and in many cases go from seed to grape without a human hand ever touching it. The grapes are watered just before harvest to increase the juice yield (but eliminating whatever flavor they had). The juice is spun in a centrifuge to separate out the tannins and other stuff normally found desirable. The juice ferments with oak chips, which are dunked into the fermentation tanks like giant tea bags. At the end, sweetness is added using grape extract or plain sugar. In fact, most of the flavor you get from these wines is from oak and sugar and nothing else. These people are chemists, not winemakers. Bronco then takes these wines and markets them under all sorts of names like Napa Creek, Forest Glen, and stuff like that. Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw wines is just one incarnation of the same product. All of this also applies to another very popular wine from Australia with a kangaroo on the label.
My point is this: cheap wine is fine (we sell lots of it), but don’t be fooled into buying cheap wine. You’re not getting a bargain, you’re getting ripped off. Why spend $3 on wine made by scientists when for $4 more you can get wine at 10 times the quality?
