Wine of the Week 3/26/2006

Worthy "Sophia's Cuvee" Napa Valley 2003

 Hold on to your socks, lest they get knocked right off your feet.  This is a great wine, and I recommend everyone try it.  It is pure hedonism.  The wine is a blend of 77% caberent sauvignon, with the rest cabernet franc, merlot, and petit verdot.  This "winery" is essentially a second labed from Gus Kalanis, owner of the super-premium California cult wine Axios.  The consultant wine maker for Worthy as well as Axios is Bob Egelhoff, who has also worked with Palmeyer, Harlan Estates, and David Arthur Vineyards.  Axios, which debuted with the 1999 vintage, has been an overnight smash, and consistently sells out its highly sought after cabenet, despite a retail price of well over $100 per bottle.  The "Worthy" winery concept brought Mr. Kalanis and Mr. Egelhoff together again, with a mission to create a Napa Valley wine of "70 dollar caliber, but selling for less than half the price".  In my opinion, they suceeded handsomly.  The wine retails for 35 dollars, but can usually be found for under $30.  The Worthy wine label debuted with the 2001 vintage, and has sold out quickly during its first two years of production.  Incidentally, "Axios" is actually greek for "worthy".

This wine is the quintessential California fruit bomb.  Much like Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit, this wine does not leave much to the imagination.  It's all there from the moment you pick up your glass.  The blackberry liquor notes jump out of the glass without so much as single swirl or twist.  Crushed plums, blueberry, black currants; you name it;  It's all present in this bouquet driven wine.  The nose portends what will follow on the palate with layer upon layer of black fruit, with just a hint of mineral, spice, and oak. The tannins are soft, round, and fleshy, and the finish is as smooth as one could imagine.  The wine is extremely well balanced.  The wine does not try to be restrained or cautious.  It simply flaunts what it has, which is abundantly ripe fragrant fruit which is beautiful enough that it does not need the heavy smoke or woody nuances that many other wines require.  Although this wine is essentially a Bordeaux blend, no one will mistake it for Bordeaux.  This baby is a California girl all the way.

In my opinion, this wine could easily compete in the 50 to 70 dollar market.  At 35 dollars, it is a good deal.

I must also say that I owe a debt of gratitude to two fine bartenders (Brad and Jimmy) at the Bin 36 wine bar/restaurant in Chicago for turning me onto this wine last week.  It takes a lot to make a recommendation that ends up as a wine of the week on this site.  I also appreciated the fact that these guys gave as much attention to the wine novices ordering inexpensive  "wines by the glass" as they did with the big spenders ordering 200 dollar bottles.   Good job gentlemen. 

Here in San Diego, you can purchase this wine for under 30 dollars at the Wine Sellar & Brasserie (Sorrento Valley), The Wine Loft (Carlsbad), and Wine Street (Carlsbad).  It may be available elsewhere as well.  If I find more stores that carry it, I will update the site.

4 stars

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                                    Wine of the Week 3/12/2006

                  Cosme Palacio y Hermanos Rioja Reserva Privada 2001


O.K.  You knew it was going to happen sooner or latter.  A wine for under 20 bucks at Costco was going to beat out all the high priced fancy-shmancy wines.  Well, this was the week. I bought the wine for $19.99 at the Costco in Rancho Bernardo.  This was a really nice Rioja.  I don't have a nice picture of the bottle or the label, and I don't know anything about the winery.  The name of the winery is "Bodegas Palacio", and they make several Tempranillo based wines from their base in Rioja, Spain.  For 2001, they made a regular Rioja, and a Rioja Reserva Privada (Private Reserve).  The regular retails for about 12 bucks, but I have not had it.  Wine Spectator loved the regular version and gave it 90 points.  Interestingly, they gave the Reserva Privada only 85 points, and knocked it for being rustic.  Robert Parker gave the Reserva Privada 90 points.  Go figure.

The wine has a fairly dark ruby, almost garnet color, which is dark for Rioja.  The bouquet is smoky, oaky, a little gamey, and the term rustic is appropriate.  This is precisely what I like about this wine.  Those who like Riojas that are light and almost Pinot Noir-like will not appreciate the smoky, sultry quality of this wine.  But those who like Bordeaux, Brunello, and other old world wines will find this a most enjoyable Rioja.  On the palate there is ample toasty oak, vanillin, crushed black fruit, and very supple tannin.  The finish is liquid velvet.  This was really a thorougly delightful Rioja, and just a tad bit more full bodied than other Riojas.  It is entierly ready to drink now.

3.75 stars

$19.99 at Costco

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                                       Wine of the Week 3/5/06

                  Sauvage Cabernet Sauvignon 2003
                    (St. Helena Winery), Napa Valley
   
                              



First, let me first say that this is a beautiful wine.  Secondly, let me say it again:  This is a beautiful wine.  The only problem here is that the wine is in very scarce supply.  Only 75 cases were made.

Sauvage is a huge wine, bursting with fruit and tannin.  The nose is smothered with black fruits and plum, and the palate is saturated with layer upon layer of blueberry, blackberry, and boysenberry.  There is a huge amount of tannin here, but it is well camouflaged by the fruit.  This is one of the purest expressions of Napa Valley fruit that I have had in a long time.  The wine has a giant mouth feel.  This is a wine that literally attacks your senses in an "oh so pleasant" fashion.  It is a heavy, dense wine with 14.5% alcohol.  The finish is luxurious and lasts a long time.  As an added bonus, the bottle is impressive looking and beautiful to look at.  I have no doubt that although this wine is enjoyable immediately, it will probably get even better with a little bottle age.  I purchased this wine for 47 dollars at Bacchus Wine Market in downtown San Diego.   I think this is a good price, and a fair one.   I have seen it selling for $125 dollars in Los Angeles.  Believe it or not, this wine is easier to obtain in San Diego than Los Angeles, and this may explain why the pricing down here is better.  San Diego retailers who carry this wine include Bacchus, the Del Mar Wine Company (also 47 dollars), San Diego Wine Bank (downtown), the WineSellar (Mira Mesa/Sorrento Valley), the Wine Loft (Carlsbad), and Meritage Wine Market (Encinitas).   In Los Angeles, the wine is carried at 20/20 Wine Market and The Wine Room in Irvine.  The wine is not available outside of California.

I rate this wine 4.5 Stars.  Bravo, Kristian for a job well done on your maiden vintage!

To leave your own review of this wine, or to read what others have said, click here to go to the reader blog pages.



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A VinoCritic Exclusive:  Read our interview with Kristian Story, wine maker for Sauvage

Editor:  Wine geeks (myself included) are likely to find this wine both irresistible and simultaneously maddening.  Why do I say this?  Well, wine geeks are not just content drinking enjoyable wine.  They are always looking for new gems that the mainstream public does not yet know about.  They love to share these finds with their closest friends and fellow wine geeks in a sort of "one upmanship" contest.  Boutique wineries, limited allocations, and exotic imports really get the wine geek excited.  This wine fits the bill to a "T".  There are only 75 cases made, and it is available at less than a dozen retailers throughout the country (all in California).  It is a phenomenal wine, as you can tell from my above review.  Personally, I know of no one else who has tried it yet.  This seems to be the perfect fodder for any self-respecting wine geek.  This is why I say the wine will be irresistible  to  the wine geek.  HOWEVER, wine geeks also feel compelled to know everything there is to know about the wines they drink;  Who is the winemaker?  Where are the grapes from?  When were they harvested?   Which type of barrels were used to age the wine?  The list goes on and on.  Lovers of this wine will find it maddening because there is virtually no information on this wine.  Since there are only 75 cases made, it was not reviewed by Robert Parker, Wine Spectator, or any other media outlet that I am aware of.  The bottle simply says "vinted by St. Helena Winery".  The winery (which itself is a small boutique producer) makes no mention of this wine on it's web site or in it's newsletter.  Google searches yielded nothing.  The wine shops had little information.  Surely someone must know something about this wine!  The staff here at VinoCritic.com, in the interest of our readers, felt obliged to get to the bottom of the story and learn something about this wine.  Through some mis-directed e-mails, we were eventually put in touch with Kristain Story, wine maker of Sauvage.  Kristian was gracious enough to give VinoCritic an exclusive telephone interview.  Highlights are provided below.  Thanks, Kristian for the info.

Well, it turns out that Sauvage is a brand new  wine  produced by St. Helena Winery, a small boutique winery in Napa Valley.  Sauvage uses 100% estate fruit.  The winery was started in the mid to late 1990's by Peter  Story, a retired computer specialist from Silicon Valley.  Peter's wife, Paulette, is also a partner in this venture.  The first vintage for St. Helena was 2000.  St. Helena Winery owns 18 acres of vines. For the last 4 vintages, Peter Story had made 2 wines called Sympa (their reserve wine), and Scandal. Both wines are usually sold out through their mailing list. Their son, Kristian, was living in our own fair southern California, and had no affiliation with the wine making industry.  In fact, he was living right here in Rancho Penasquitos until he was bitten by the wine making bug which he caught from his father.  Kristian recently relocated to Napa and decided to enter the wine making business, under the tutelage of his father.    2003 marked the maiden vintage for Kristian, and the wine he would name "Sauvage".  For the 2003 vintage, Kristian, purchased his grapes from one of the  blocks of his father's St. Helena vineyard to make his own wine.  Sarah Gott was the consulting wine maker.  Many will recognize Sarah's name from having cut her teeth at a variety of big name Napa wineries, including the famed Joseph Phelps winery, where she helped create Insignia.  Together, Kristian and Sarah made Sauvage.  Grapes were crushed and the wine was made at the St. Helena Winery facility.  For this maiden vintage, only 75 cases were produced.   Kristian tells me that he plans to increase production over the next two years and make his wine more available.

Although not indicated on the bottle, Kristian tells me that his 2003 Sauvage is a blend of 94% Cabernet Sauvignon, 4% Petit Verdot, and 2% Petit Syrah, a rather interesting variation on the usual Cab/Merlot Bordeaux style blending that has become popular in Napa.  Several  times during the growing season, grapes were "dropped" (intentionally removed) from the vines to keep grape yields low, but grape quality high.  Final yields were kept at 2-3 tons per acre, according to Kristian.  Many other top-notch wineries who put a premium on the highest quality grapes set a maximum yield of 3-4 tons per acre as a rule of thumb.  By taking this rule of thumb and cutting it in half,  you can get an idea just how stringent the vineyard managers at St. Helena have been.  The grapes were harvested from October 18-23, 2003.  All grapes were picked by hand.  The wine was bottled unfined and unfiltered.  It was aged for 20 months in new French Oak Barrels.  I was surprised when I heard this because although the wine had a sweet oak nuance, it was by no means overpowered by oak, as can sometimes occur with 100% new barrels.  They used barrels from three different French forests, utilizing three different toasting methods (and five different manufacturers).  I'm sure the selection of barrels had a lot to do with the wine not getting "over-oaked", and shows the talent of the wine making team.  This 2003 vintage wine was bottled July 15, 2005, and March 1, 2006 was the official release date.   Obviously, some wine made it out to marketplace a little ahead of schedule.

I asked Kristian why the wine was available at so many retailers here in San Diego, and far fewer in the Bay area and Los Angeles.  After all, San Diego usually is last to receive small production boutique wines.  It turns out we were lucky here in America's finest city.  Kristian was a long time resident here in San Diego, so when he produced his wine, it was just natural to approach the local retailers here in San Diego first, since he already had connections.  He just loaded up his truck, drove to San Diego, and within a week, the local stores snatched up all his supply.  Hopefully, we can keep the Sauvage-San Diego connection going strong in future vintages as well.

My hat is off to Kristian, his mom and dad, and Sarah Gott for producing a top notch wine for their first venture together.  I look forward to enjoying future vintages of Sauvage, and perhaps trying Peter Story's original two wines, if I ever run across them.  When word reaches the mainstream how good this wine is, it may be much harder to find.  Remember, you read it here first at VinoCritic.Com.




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Wine of the Week, 2/26/06

T Vine Cellars 2002 Napa Valley Proprietary Red Wine

                                                                             

   

This week's wine of the week is an interesting Cabernet Sauvignon-based wine from Napa.  I purchased it at the Wine Loft at the Forum Shopping Center in Carlsbad, on El Camino Real, near the La Costa Resort.  My wife likes this shopping center because it has nice shops.  I like it because it has a nice wine store.  It seems like a match made in heaven, or so it would seem.  The wine store has a wine bar as well;  Nice touch.  On a recent Saturday late-afternoon, my wife and I, and our two toddlers went to the Carlsbad Forum.  I figured my wife could shop and watch the kids, and I could lounge around tasting wines at the Wine Loft.  Unforunately, the toddlers were in a particularly rambunctious mood, and proved too much for my wife to handle solo.  Therfore, the afternoon at the wine tasting bar was out of the question.  I was, however, able to briefly visit the shop (wife and toddlers in tow), and hoped the sales staff could turn me on to something new that I have not tried.  Usually they are helpful at this store.  Unfortunatley, on this evening, I could not get anyone to help me out.  They were relatively busy, and the staff were all busy chatting leisurely with some of the other customers.  They seemed to avoid me like the plague.  Perhaps they thought that I did not look like a "serious" wine drinker, whatever that means, with a family and kids by my side.  Maybe they were hoping that I would just leave and take the kids away, although the kids were well behaved and not causing a ruckus of any sort.  But this is precisely why I always review wine shops and restaurants annonomously.  It is the only way to see how the shops treat the average Joe.  After all, when shops know you are writing a wine column, they may give you VIP treatment or free samples, or special prices.  This can lead to biased reviews.

After about fifteen minutes of being ignored, I realized I was not going to get helped, so I decided I would just buy a bottle of California Cabernet from a winery that I had never heard of before.  It seemed like  a fun gamble.  After all, with two toddlers at home, an unknown random wine is about as adventurous as life gets, at least for the time being.  I picked up the T-Vine Cellars 2002 Napa Valley Red Wine.  I had no particular reason for choosing it.  It was just  a wine at the right place at the right time.  I asked the fellow at the cash register about it, and he did not have much to say.  He could not tell me what was in this red wine, but we both assumed it was probably a cabernet blend of some sort.  Upon coming home, I realized that this wine has never been reviewed by Wine Spectator, Robert Parker, or any of the main stream wine critics.  I like it this way. Everyone can decide for themselves what they think.


As it turns out, this was a beautiful wine.  The color was a dark inky purple, almost black.  The nose was a little restrained at first, but opened up quickly to reveal nice black fruits and licorice/anise.  The palate was saturated with more black fruit, with a touch of mint/menthol, reminiscent of the old Heitz Martha's Vineyard from their Hay-day.  The finish was strong, long, and elegant.  The tannins here were strong enough to allow cellaring, but well integrated enough to allow immediate enjoyment.

The main reason for buying this wine is because it is good juice.  Period.  Having said that, however, there are a few other peripheral things I like about this wine.  It seems to me that the winery owner/wine maker (Greg Brown) probably doesn't care much about what other people think.  He probably marches to his own beat, and shuns marketing consultants and "focus groups".  He probably makes wine that he believes in, based on his own palate, and those of his friends and family.  I believe this to be a good thing.  But why have I concluded this about someone I have never met?  Well, firstly, the front label has a funky logo, but fails to mention the winery name or the type of wine contained in the bottle.   The back label just says T-Vine Napa Valley Red Wine.  It's a nice bottle, and kind of artsy, but I am sure a marketing specialist would shudder to see this artistic approach over a more informative label.  I guess the winemaker just wants you to drink the wine and decide if you like it, and not be overly-concerned with the exact mixture of the grapes.  Secondly, the website gives no useful information about the winery or the wines.  Basically, there is an on-line order form, and that's it.  Lastly, on the back of the bottle there is some poetic gibberish about the "family tribe celebrating the birth of spring and death of autumn".  The poetry is probably meaningful to Mr. Brown, his family and friends, but is of little interest to the rest of the wine buying public.  It was certainly of no interest to me.  One must assume that the winemaker is following his passions and staying true to his beliefs, and not getting overly concerned with Madison Avenue style marketing.  The reason I think that this is a good thing is that if somone is not overly pre-occupied with marketing  wine to the masses, but instead follows his/her personal passions and ideals, they will probably make interesting wines worth drinking.  I say all this speculatively, as I have never met anyone from this winery, nor read anything about the winery.

It seems a little weird to rate a winery that has gone out of it's way to avoid hype, marketing, and media exposure.  However, I think that our VinoCritc scoring system can do justice to this wine, (and all wines), by describing the wine in detail, and then scoring the wine based on our intuitive criteria of enjoyment as outlined on this website.  This wine gets 4 stars (a "memorable" wine).  My wife also gave it four stars.

I purchased this wine for $45.95 at the Wine Loft in Carlsbad, CA on El Camino Real in the Forum Shopping Plaza.  If anyone would like to comment on this wine, click here to go to our blog page.


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