March 5 2008
The home of the unwashed Napa Valley tourist masses, a beacon of weekend chaos on Hwy. 29—a winery with all of the intimacy of a TGI Friday’s on, well, Friday night, is one of my comfort wines.
This winery also happens to be just about the only winery in all of California that took the time to understand the Indiana consumer permitting rules in place for direct shipping, which wins them big bonus points. However, direct shipping shrewdness should not be any surprise for fans that know this winery. You’re running a pretty tight business when your wines are luxury priced, but accessible to most visitors, your large array of varieties are not allocated and you only sell to consumers—at the winery, online and via various clubs.
Aside from the rancor at the winery, aside from an expansive list of wines, this winery satisfies a very important and critical criterion: they are good. No, they are not critically lauded. Doubtlessly, they do not send samples to Wine Spectator, The Wine Advocate or other major critical wine reviewers, but they do hit the wine competition circuit and they win medals, many medals.
This winery has been named winner of the California State Fair Winery of the Year Award three out of the last four years, a notation that indicates that their wines won the most gold medals at the competition.
My comfort wine of choice: V. Sattui
After I visited V. Sattui in August of this past year, some friends that are in the Napa Valley know kind of turned up their nose. Enjoying V. Sattui wines seems to be out of favor with many people. It is kind of like shopping at Wal-Mart when your friends do not deign to go any further below the consumer-shopping matrix than Target.
But, to me, there is power in the popular, especially if the wines deliver. And, in a place like Napa Valley, where gossip travels like a flu bug, there is a lot to be said for an iconoclastic guy like Daryl Sattui who not only runs the wildly popular V. Sattui, but who also has the coconuts to sink an unimaginable amount of money into a personal dream and build his castle cum winery, Castello di Amorosa.
V. Sattui wines are good. Do not let anybody tell you differently. They are technically correct, quintessentially Californian, include enough winemaking wherewithal to have acid for balance and are favorably priced as a slice, er, bottle of Napa Valley memory. V. Sattui is one of my comfort wines—one I reach for when I want a reliable wine that pleases, a balm to the soul, and a safe harbor in the storm of potentially bad bottle chooses.
Here is my review for the 2005 V. Sattui “Crow Ridge Vineyard” Zinfandel
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March 1 2008
When I started this blog a little over two years ago, I did not have any idea what lay in front of me.
As Jerry Garcia sang in the classic Dead song ‘Truckin,’ “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
When people have out-of-body death experiences they say that their life passes before their eyes, it is everything and it is nothing all at once—a blur of a life’s experience that transpires in moments suspended by the anticipation of what is next.
I understand.
A scant nine months after starting my wine blog as an anonymous tech sales guy in Indianapolis, IN who had rubbed two nickels together, in September of ’06, I was taking a job with a technology company serving the wine industry based in Napa, the Shangri-la of the U.S. wine world. This was seemingly the capstone to my 10 + -year career in technology sales and marketing with the opportunity to marry into the family of my wine enthusiasm.
Definitely not a rags to riches tale, quite the opposite actually, but few people get to combine their vocation with their passion.
The envy of others, if you read it on paper, it seemed almost too good to be true. “Dude, you got a job in the wine industry because of your blog?” went the line of inquiry from my friends and family.
Well, my folks do not call me “dude,” but you get the point.
I had been through the start-up dance before, and about four years into a pasty-faced fluorescent lighting and cubicle-based corporate/Fortune 150 existence, post dot-com boom, I was ready for another go around with a small company with some upside; all the better that it was in wine.
My hubris and belief in my talent has always exceeded my achievement, the cruelty of life that marks a Scarlet Letter on those with some moxie and a work ethic but not a preternatural talent to self-promote.
On my first business trip out to Napa, the first of at least 35 trips I made over the course of 18 months, I spent time with a colleague who graciously gifted me a bottle of the 2003 Hourglass Napa Valley Cab. At the time of the gifting I was somewhat buzzed from drinking a bottle of Patz & Hall Pinot Noir at dinner and was subsequently drinking a Red Bull to let the caffeine overtake the dehydration from air travel and the heady alcohol. Suffice to say, while mixing metaphors, at the time, I felt like I had freed myself from the shackles of the corporate anchor and jumped into a Porsche. Pulling the Hourglass out of its cradle in a wine rack, my colleague made it seem like it was a 6-pack of Bud Light, and not the generous gift that it was.
“This is nothing,” was the way I interpreted the gesture.
He seemed almost matter of fact about paying forward a $125 dollar bottle of wine, a wine that I cherished as symbolic of the largesse and the familial nature of what I was getting into.
“Getting into” would also be a saying that I retraced in my mind over the upcoming months—as in, “what did I get into.”
On Valentine’s Day, the ride ended and I got off the rollercoaster with said technology company from Napa. It was a kiss-off to the love affair. The details of which are not materially important.
Sometime a “Mousedriver Chronicles” book will be written by Richard Bachman about the experience.
While work-life balance is important, in my opinion, anybody with professional pride has a difficult time separating their professional life from their personal. When you are married to your passion, that separation is all the more difficult.
I will not make that mistake again.
I will not marry my mistress. My brief sojourn in the wine industry, while fun and fraught with challenge, will not ever be mistaken for my profession, a clear line of demarcation that needs to be kept for the sanctity of mind and body.
When I recently started a senior leadership role with another company, outside of wine, but in technology, I opened the bottle of the 2003 Hourglass Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.
I wrote notes down about the Hourglass wine. It is an interesting wine, yes. Notes of raspberry and black cherry with cocoa and tobacco on the nose. A delicious wine after some air, it shows nutmeg, chocolate, tobacco, mint and anise on a finish that is absurd in its complexity.
The wine is not that important though. What is really important is the appetizer and the main course. Frankly, the Hourglass is only the intermezzo.
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