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October 6 2006
Napa Cabs have a somewhat deserved reputation for being expensive. It’s hard to find a smaller lot producer that isn’t more interested in crafting $60 bottles then $20 bottles.
So, it was almost on a fluke that I picked up a bottle of the 2004 Twenty Rows Cabernet Sauvignon while I was in Huntington Beach in August. It was an impulse buy after an impulse to walk into a tiny wine shop called Bacchus Wines.
Fortunate for me, I had to fly back to theMidwest, because I also impulsively walked into a pet store and saw a pug/beagle mix that was so darned cute and would have made a nice friend for my existing pug/beagle mix.
$22 for wine goes down a lot easier. And, I don’t have to potty train.
When I opened up bottle #9041 (yes, they number them), I wasn’t sure what to expect. But this wine is a fabulous value and highly recommended. Easy drinking now, with moderate tannins, it’s a mouth-filling beauty with crushed berries, tobacco and dust on the nose and dense mulberry/blackberry with some crème in the mouth and a finish that goes for two days.
On the UC Davis scale I gave it a 17.5. I knocked it a .5 pt for flavor because I think this gem would do well with some age and I knocked it 1 pt for quality and bouquet each because, despite the young drinkability, it should be dynamite in five years.
If you’re able to find this I would definitely snatch it up because it won’t last long. In the October issue of Food & Wine they named the ‘03 their Cab of the year under $20. F&W noted:
Cabernet
Sauvignon ($20) 2003
TWENTY ROWS
This small négociant operation, an offshoot of Brian and Lori Nuss’s Vinoce winery on top of Mt. Veeder, is this year’s best deal in Napa Cabernet. It’s a polished, mouthfilling red chockablock with crushed blackberry fruit.
Last month I checked out the Twenty Rows web site and was somewhat disappointed that there wasn’t anything there—two pages maybe. Well, they’ve alleviated that issue and they now have a downloadable/faxable order form and very limited shipping.
If you’re lucky to be in the handful of states where they ship to don’t pass up this opportunity to get a drinking $20 Cab that delivers—‘03’s are surely gone and the ‘04’s will will likely be sntached up, as well.
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October 5 2006
Tom at Fermentation is starting a wine blog link of the day—a good idea because he’s in the center of the zeitgeist for most things blog/wine related. On Tuesday he featured Joe Dressner at www.joedressner.com
Dressner is an importer in NY who has been blogging since before blogging had a name—since 1999, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s interesting, and compelling like the guy you knew at the office years ago who had the unique ability to tell somebody that they were a miscreant who was embarrassing his mother and actually have that person thank him for providing a moment of clarity.
If “droll” and “sarcastic” were a swinging type of couple with “world weary” and “whip-smart” they might have a love child called Joe Dressner.
Check out his site and, in particular, his current post on the October 24th tasting in which he goes on and on about gate crashers noting:
Anyone caught filling a half-glass of wine to take a tiny taste and then spilling everything out will have their arms broken at the door by our security team.
The third person who tells us it is great they can buy direct from us because they can avoid the excessive mark-ups of our wholesaler will have their arms broken at the door by our security team.
Anyone asking if Galimatias from Domaine le Briseau is available in New Jersey and if they can have the three case price for a one case order because Galimatias will be a hand sell in New Jersey’s less sophisticated market, will have their arms broken at the door by our security team.
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Kudos to Mark Fisher, the wine writer for the Dayton Daily News and the always excellent blog Uncorked, he has a byline in the current issue of Wines & Vines. The article titled, What’s so Bad About Sweet Wine highlights regional wineries and the conundrum of selling sweet/cordial style wines.
Fact is, outside of California,Washington, andOregon, you’d be hard pressed to not find 1 out of 2 wineries that DIDN’T have a sweet wine of some sort. They sell.
His article in a reputable magazine like Wines and Vines doesn’t legitimize cordial wines, but it does help to raise the specter of possibilities and alternatives for all palates.
Here in Indiana the #1 selling wine in the state is from the in-state Oliver Winery—it’s a semi-sweet red and they sell it by the pallet at Sam’s Club.
And, frankly, a nice blueberry or blackberry wine, though not a vinifera wine, is kind of tasty occasionally!
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Josh at Pinot Blogger has a post on Halleck Vineyard, a customer of Inertia Beverage Group (my employer), and a boutique winery that is seeking to expand their business and instead of using traditional financing, they are trying out www.prosper.com, a community based micro-lending vehicle on the Internet. Josh says of the concept:
Ross Halleck, a newer and well regarded Pinot producer who works with Russian River Valley grapes, is inviting anyone with some cash to spare to invest in his winery. He’s attempting to raise $25,000 in cash to fund their expansion from a few hundred cases to around 1500. I’d say more, but Halleck does a good job of hyping this interesting initiative. After all, his day job is as a marketer.
You can check out the post at Pinotblogger and the Halleck Vineyard site here. Buy some wine, that’s the best way to help grow the business!
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Tim at Winecast has an interesting post on www.cellarrat.org and the smaller, community based u-vint program at Crushpad. For the uninitiated, Crushpad is a consumer based micro-crush program that turns Joe Enthusiast into a quasi-winemaker to make a barrel. It’s a brilliant concept and one that I’m a fan of. One of the barriers to entry, however, is they have started their business around the ultra-premium/luxury wine market and that, in my estimation, is an inhibitor to getting wide adoption.
Wisely, they have created Crushnet which allows you to join a group and split up the cost of the barrel—allowing a smaller ante size, but all of the vicarious thrill ... like sitting at the $5 blackjack table next to the $100 dollar table, kind of.
Check out Tim’s post here.
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October 5 2006
When just out of college, I worked for a major publisher that, at the time, was theworld’s largest computer book publisher.
It was a progressive, entrepreneurial company that gave employees the flexibilityto grow rapidly—usually job assignments lasted for about a year until you madea play for more responsibility or another department “poached” you and yourcapabilities.
Whilethere, I got to try my hand at corporate sales, key account management,licensing, and business development for their online properties.
Foundationallyspeaking, working for this company really helped define what I would strive forprofessionally—and, it didn’t hurt that in my early to mid-twenties I foundmyself managing as much responsibility as I could handle in sink or swimsituations.
And,it was while on a sales call in New York City thatI learned about the concept of “institutional inertia.”
Sittingacross the desk from a gentleman 25 years my senior he conveyed he was sold,but my real challenge was to help him influence the folks at his company thathad an entrenched mindset that needed to be overcome. Institutional inertia, as he explained it, wasthe act of not acting for reasons of benign neglect, self-preservation, or,worse, lack of understanding.
Itwas a simple lesson, but one that really helped to shape how I interactedprofessionally—it’s not always your customer that needs convincing, it’s yourcustomers peers in her own organization that need to be convinced. And, from a partnering perspective, I learnedthat a sphere of influence has to run deep in order to be successful.
And,it was a lesson that resonated with me personally. Inertia is the act of staying still. I didn’tever want to be guilty of stayingstill; of being inert.
Meanwhile,in the late 90s and early portion of this decade, my fascination with wine andwine business had taken off to the point where I started a subscription to WineBusiness Monthly and Wines and Vines magazine, instead of Wine Spectatormagazine.
Anear entrepreneurial miss occurred when I pitched opening a winery at a non-profitliving history museum in Central Indiana that would tie Indiana’shistorical legacy with wine in the nineteenth century to this period authenticnineteenth century museum. When the president and 16 of 18 board members weredeposed in a de-coupling with the administrators of their foundation my planswere effectively quashed, as well.
Flashforward a few years: I had finished writing a business plan that read asa feasibility study for a wine retail concept. But, inertia, I assume, amongst other market factors, led to overwhelminglypositive feedback on the plan itself, but underwhelming feedback about itsviability in Indianapolis based on our maturity in wine consumption as a market and becauseI was a relative outsider to the wine business with moderate financialwherewithal to manage the cash nature of the business-for a young business carrying a lot of inventory is bad, especially when the terms are 15 days Net as a law.
Inan effort to channel my ideas, creativity and passion for wine into *something*interesting and credible, I started Good Grape in January of this year.
Isoft launched it and wrote in earnest for the first six or seven weeks withoutso much as a single other reader to interrupt my thoughts.
Itwasn’t until the first or second week of March that I linked to Fermentationand got a mention from Tom that I started getting readers and traffic. Amention from Lenn at Lenndevours similarly drove a nice amount of traffic tosee what I was writing about.
Basedon Tom’s work with a company called Inertia Beverage Group, I received an emailfrom Paul Mabray, their founder and CEO, who was assumingly tipped off by Tom’s post. Innocently enough, Paul mentioned that heliked the blog and some of the things I was writing.
Wineblogging has been more satisfying for me then I ever could have imagined. In about 8 months I’ve madeacquaintances with people all over the country, I’ve received numerous positive (and somenot so positive) comments and I’ve been paid to freelance write (WineSediments), though the payments equate to about two Venti Latte’s, all from aguy from Indiana, which, as a town, to me, seems urban, cosmopolitan and comfortably adeptwith wine, but to many people has to seem like a flyover cultural backwater.
AsI, myself, got tipped off to Inertia Beverage Group and started reading their blogandunderstanding their approach to market I thought to myself that thiscompany is the perfect marriage of technology (my professional background) andwine with a progressive (read: movingforward in a non-institutional inertia way ) focus.
InertiaBeverage Group has an enterprise technology platform for wineries to manage allof their direct to the consumer relationships and commerce. With the legal changes taking place in thewine industry with Supreme Court ruling in Granholm v. Healds, it strikes me asa great opportunity to help wineries to create greater value for themselves anda wider market for their artisan product.
Howpoetically just that Inertia’s name ties into what is a surmountable challengefor the wine industry and a concept that I identified with in my youngprofessional life—a not so small coincidence in shared idealogy.
Idon’t ever want to be guilty of staying still; of being inert. Most small to medium size wineries, Isuspect, feel the same way, but just need a little help.
I’vewritten a couple of posts about Inertia over the course of the last six months inan even-handed, but admiring way and long story short, I’m starting a new professional chapterin my life as I begin work for them tomorrow.
It’san opportunity that I am very excited about and an opportunity that I feelcertain is destined for success.
Isuspect that my blogging efforts will increase as I write for Inertia and GoodGrape, and I will continue to use Good Grape to make observations about the business of wine, but aside from that I’m not putting any hard and fast rules inplace except for some self-censoring from too much boosterism.
And,this site is getting a makeover that will be completed in the next two weekswith a significant increase in aesthetic quality completely un-related to my career move, though Inertia does this sort of design work extremely well.
Idon’t think I’m the first wine blogger to take a passion and turn it into acareer move-I heard of a guy in Wisconsin that took a marketingposition with a California winery, while workingremote, as I will continue to do, but it’s still a rare circumstance.
Overall,I’m thankful for a lot of things … a beautiful and loving wife, a good family, anability to write flowery, occasionally meandering and frequently verbose prose anda desire not to be inert.
I’mlooking forward to helping Inertia Beverage Group and their (our)customers (wineries), grow their business which will aid in all consumersgetting access to that special bottle of vino. It’s a good feeling to know that you will be a part of positive changeand that, in the end, is as far away from institutional inertia as you canget-an early lesson learned manifested in perseverance and wine blogging.
photo credit
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October 3 2006
I’ve always been somewhat stupefied by the amount of ads that I see in the back of every consumer wine magazine for wine cellar design, wine racks and general cellar schwag.
Who buys this stuff?
It must be folks that have money to burn and have already cycled through the entire house remodeling in a protracted “nesting” phase.
Well, these folks now have a book.
Keys to the Cellar by Peter D. Meltzer was published a couple of weeks ago by Wiley Publishing. Wiley is the mother ship of my wife’s publishing company (full disclosure). Though, I actually bought it off of Amazon.com, no danger of any undue influence based on *free.*
Overall, I’m surprised that this book would be published at all. Besides the fact that it’s not that good, there’s already an absolute preponderance of wine related books on the market (relative to market size) and empirical research indicates that most wine, an overwhelming-without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt overwhelming majority of wine is either drunk the same day it’s purchased or within the first year.
Very few people actually keep vino around the house. Even less people actually have what you could call a cellar. Even fewer people would buy a book, if they were inclined to build a cellar.
Color me crazy ... I wasn’t at the Editorial meeting, but those are the comments/questions I would have made. But, the publishing
industry is profitable when books can sell 15,000 units over two years and, well, I guess they hope the winners outstrip the losers. Very few authors, by the way, ever actually earn out their advance money—don’t let them tell you differently.
But, I certainly do my fair share of contributing to author royalties because I damn near buy every wine-related book that is published—including Wine & Society: The Social and Cultural Context of a Drink, Alpana Pours by Alpana Singh, At Home in the Vineyard by Susan Sokol Blosser and Perfect Pairings: A Master Sommelier’s Practical Advice for Partnering Wine with Food –- and that’s just this month. I already have a reading queue 15 books deep from other wine book related Amazon.com moments of weakness. DO NOT SET-UP ONE CLICK SHOPPING. My saving grace has been the used books on Amazon because I have bought a fair amount of $2.00 books, as well.
Though, not only does my wife want to put me in a book 12 step program, but she also wants to beat me about the head because we’ve been together for 3.5 years and I haven’t read Harry Potter, yet. Hell, it’s all I can do to make it through all the magazines we get ...
I digress ...
This book, in particular, is interesting because it breaks cellars out into four functional categories:
1) The Balanced Cellar—involved buying a mixture of wines from different areas and at different prices, some ready for immediate drinking, others meant to be laid down and aged.
2) Instant Gratification Cellar – a small stock of great wines at peak maturity, for when you don’t have space or don’t want to wait for your wines to age
3) The Tasting Cellar—a tightly focused selection of wine meant for comparing vintages, regions, producers, or other aspects—a great way to sample fine wines without having to devote space and money to buying whole cases
4) The Investment Cellar—consists of top-performing wines that are expected to increase substantially in value
The Balanced Cellar is pretty close to where I am at, but it’s more like a wine refrigerator and cube boxes from Pottery Barn kind of cellar.
Overall, the book looks like it has some decent advice in it—tips on insurance and the like—there’s just not enough of it. It relies too much on lists of wines, lists of wine accessory providers, lists of web sites, third person anecdotes (loose emphasis on anecdote because that presumes it’s something interesting) and general web related research.
There’s a fair amount of hubris, too. To wit: Nicholas Silver’s anecdote:
The most fun aspect of collecting is the treasure hunt when I am in other cities: finding that obscure shop that has one true gem and doesn’t realize it.
Snoooooooooooze. Nicholas, brother, come to Indy and I’ll steer you into all manners of stores with dusty bottles and fluorescent lights with brown wine ... let me know what you find.
The book is a relatively small trim size in the first place with generously thick paperstock and only about 180 pages of 255 total pages is real content—and that content is somewhat dubious in revelatory value.
My guess would be is that this book weighs in at about 70,000 words. As a case in point, if you are a blogger and you post one post a day with 500 words, you could have content for a book in about 6 months…
Come to think of it, speaking of blogs, Meltzer, a Wine Spectator auction correspondent mentions the following as wine blog resources:
1) www.foodandwine.com/seven-best-wine-blogs
2) Technorati.com
3) Eric Asimov’s The Pour – thepour.blogs.nytimes.com
That, in a nutshell, tells you all you need to know about the book—a reference to a blog aggregator and two mainstream sources.
Maybe sweet justice for Mr. Meltzer, his blog slight notwithstanding, is a book that sells 9,999 copies and 9,998 are to libraries.
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