Carema

A really nice Zweitgelt from Austria might do the trick.

Good young Spatlese goes with milk chocolate. I know that sounds odd but it works in my mouth. Milk chocolate, epoisses, and young Spatlese. Sometimes these things are discovered by accident.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. And I am sniffing squirrels and honeysuckle every chance I get before the whole damned planet explodes.

IMO the '01 Ridge is way too powerful for a dry arid bird such as the Turkey. Better go with pure juice fruit like Limerick Lane or Marietta. Just a thought.

We always like Rose, there is a Nicodemi Montepulicano from Abruzzo that has very dark color and makes the bird meat quite juicey. About 10 bucks. Also a Pinot gris with a touch of RS like Sineann from Oregon (not the oak aged one) about 17 bucks. You can always be really decandent and drink something like Torcolato from Maculan in the Veneto. Botrisised Vaspaiola and Gargenaga grapes 1/3 aged in allier oak barriques. $33/ half bottle but you will only need a thimble full.

Smelling your world can also help. If you have never smelled honeysuckle, then how on earth are you going to pick it out in a wine. Next time you are walking down the street- smell every available flower and lick every rock in sight. Dart into flower shops and smell stuff then turn around and slink out. If you begin thinking of your world in terms of flavor and aroma components, this can help when trying to decipher wine. Taste fruit and vegetables in ripe, unripe, and overripe states. Blindfold yourself and make your friends put spices under your nose and try to identify them. In otherwords turn your world into one big smell-o-rama scratch n sniff adventure. Where I live there is a little skunk who visits me frequently in the summer. From him I have learned much about Mourvedre. If the squirrels came closer I would sniff them too. But they do not.

Costco buys based on profit margin, turnover, deals ( 100 cases on a thousand) and deals made over the phone, fax etc... There is no-one there spitting wine, thinking- "I could pull in 3 bottles of this, it is obscure but at least some will surely love it in the next three months" Costco is death for wine. Like Mcdonald's is death for food. Why can't anyone make this connection? Do I have to co-opt Bourdain? This does not make sense: Pampers, tampons, frozen chicken wings feathers attached, wine. sorry to all the bargain shoppers. Is it truly a bargain? Purchasing power means nothing when unearthing treaures that fall under the "5000 case or under radar" Let the castigation begin!

Clos du Roy is a fairly common name. There is also a wonderful Sancerre by the same name made by Lucien Crochet. Roy , of course means king (pronounced "rwah"). Clos is also fairly common meaning a walled vineyard or a vineyard once enclosed by a wall. It is pronounced clo (long 'o') Kings liked fortresses and walls. It allowed them time to have children with their sisters and cousins then bleed to death due to hemophilia. The wine simply thinned their allready ailing blood. I believe too, there are some Clos de Rois in beaune and Aloxe Corton if I am not mistaken.

I am confused about this post. The original question was regarding a Chateauneuf-du-pape and the response was regarding Pomerol. Now I know at one time syrah got snuck into Bordeaux but that was hundreds of years ago.......

hey B: being that I am lazy could you perhaps list some of your favs with importers. I have many jewish customers and always feel as if I am not offering them the creme de la creme. Thanks c Not just BN either

maybe a small explaination of Port is in order. Tawnies see time in cask (thus 10-20-40 years) and achieve a brown, oxidized color and quality. Be careful here because there are commercial Tawny ports which are a blend of cheap ruby port and white port- not as good. Ruby port is a blend of grapes from various years then bottled and sold after about 4 years. It is a smidge high in alcohol sometimes. Vintage port is made from grapes all from one year then cask aged for two to three years, but often requires cellar aging for a long time. Caution, vintage ports usually throw a serious sediment. Colheita ports are tawny ports made from a single vintage and cask aged for a minimum of seven years (by law) but can go in cask for longer if the producer makes the choice. Single Quintas are vintage ports made in years that are not declared vintage years but can be great values if you know the producer and perhaps know the year was not really bad but not enough of the consortium got together and declared a vintage year. Late Bottle Vintage ports are vintage ports (from declared and non declared years) that go through 4-6 years of wood cask aging. after 1975 all ports had to be bottled in portugal. You can find all this info in basic wine books, maybe perhaps it was helpful. I apologize to all you found this info redundant. What I have found for the most part, is that in the States you are usually faced with less variation and higher quality in Port categories that almost any other. Since most places (stores and restaurants) carry only an example or two of each- they usually buy the best for the money. Storing vintage ports until they are ready is an unrivaled experience. It is really worth the wait. A lot of things are not.

Now that's customer service. Oi vey!

El six pack I think too is a packaging geared for on-premise (ie restuarants) and also makes overpriced wines seem more affordable. Oftentimes you will see regular old stinky large ava bottlings in 12 and then the cannot really tell the difference 'cept for extra oak single vineyard business in the 6 pack. I like them because the distributor's do not charge that ever annoying 'split case' fee which can be up to $1.12 per bottle in this god forsaken state (Illinois). However oftentimes the salespeople will calculate the per bottle cost off a twelve pack. Then everything goes out the window. Just like ted said.

The only one we stock is the Chateau Chambon (M. LaPierre) TN: 2003 Sour cherries and a hint of flint. The unmistakable stench of CM (grape Bubblelicious). Nice cute lasting finish. I am hungover like no tormorrow and this is perfect. The color is pretty, a smashed dark violet smeared on the pavement during rain. Today in Chicago it is warm,almost tropical and winter lurks in the back- a chill that threatens and snow is imminent. A little swirl and the glass yields a snitch of garrigue. Also the tinniest smidge of herbaciousness, bergamot maybe straining to release itself from bon bon land. ooooh. And cherry mike n' ikes. remember those. I used to eat them after swimming at the Y. We are going there tonight. Arevoir y'all.

Pomegranate, quartz and enough bracing acidity to make the sleepiest eyes pop open in alarm. A stunning and unrivaled offering from Nahe. It is a baby I decanted a quarter of the bottle, will leave the rest until Thursday.

In the early 90's, when you couldn't bring coolers into see outdoor punk rock shows anymore we used to use the seal-a-meal to enclose vodka. We would make them into little packets shaped just like breast implants and stuff them into our bras, then tear them open with our teeth and pour them into plastic cups. It worked with wine too, but you needed a lot of girls. If you only had a couple of girls, vodka provided more alcohol per person.

Part of the'cuvee' of KJ Chardonnay, or at least was at the height of its popularity, was the addtion of off-dry Gewurtztraminer, meaning the Gew. was not fermented all the way to dry and therefore had left in it some residual sugar. It was this, along with full malolactic fermentation on the Chard that gave (or gives) KJ that dense rich mouth feel that everyone luuuuuuuuuuuuuvs so much.

Caro Carema, Kind of like Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay, right? Where are you ? Still at $9.99? There's one (among others) I refuse to do. Most KJ drinkers do not realize they are secretly drinking off dry gewurtz anyway so they go straight to Alsace here!

John Steinbeck? Of Grapes of Wrath and the Red Pony fame? I am not sure he was a biodynamic farmer, but surely an enjoyer of the early jug wines of California He mentions consuming copious amounts of cheap jug wine in letters he wrote, previous to literary fame. Nonwithstanding, if poor Jody had had access to antibiotics surely the pony wouldn't have died. The description of the cutting open of the pony's trachea sans anesthesia is another scene very hard to forget. There is a great deal to be said for the employment of balance; using modern advances along with time worn truths.

He means Champagne produced by a grower of his or her own grapes, not purchased grapes. Well I hope that is what he means. Would not want to speak for Mark S out of turn......... PS I am too restarded to quote more than 1 person at once sorry.....

We pay extra for the extra sugar they add to the USA Veuve. The European brut is much drier than the one they ship to the American market. And yes You can get it cheap in places. But that doesn't mean anyone is making a profit on it. Typically in retail, Veuve can be one of the prodcuts lowest in profit margin in a store. We make 6% on ours. That sucks. It is the one product you MUST have and cannot make any money on. What a racket!

I am sure they are great. And I understand your defending them- I am a small local merchant where I am too. But I do not need to subscribe to their emails, I have allready paid for a year's subscription to RP online.

$29.99 is at or below cost for VEEuve Cleequot in most markets. If this guy is indulging in the slimey world of loss leaders (take a loss but lead them in) then I do not blame his competition for complaining. Also in the viperine world of wine distributing, when a whoselsaler makes a deal with one person but not another it tends to make the one who was not the recipient of the deal a little ticked off. Much of the time I ask my reps to gather the pricing within the market here if I want to pick up something that I know will be around town. If I can come within a couple of bucks of that I am fine. If my price if off by $20.00 bucks because some schmucky salesguy threw in a bathtub of free goods in exchange for a twenty, forty, sixty case drop well then- there is other wine to taste and buy. And if someone tells me that something has no market play and then I am in the local grocery store and it is stacked to high heaven (this only happened once)- they gots problems.

This is one worth another chance.

The first Rubicon was fermented in 1980 and bottled in 1983. I suspect because the winery was so young there were bugs they had to work out and they might have been using fruit from young vines. It seems as if they started planting in 1975 but I do not know when they stopped sourcing fruit and started using their own for their estate stuff. Plus it is Rutherford, dusty fruit with short tannins and mediumish acid. I do not think the Rubiocn had attained such staus in 1985. It would be allright to drink it with a hamburger- the jackass who tells you otherwise should be banished to the Durkee onion casserole for the rest of his/her natural life. And only off vintage beerenauslese to drink with it!