The Wine Curmudgeon

Expensive wine 42: Newton Merlot Unfiltered 2005

It’s probably too much to call this wine an anachronism, but it is a snapshot of what life was like in a certain part of the wine business just in those warm, sunny summer days before the recession.

The Newton ($40, sample) is Napa Valley wine the way a certain segment of wine drinkers, critics, and retailers thought Napa Valley wine should be – rich, luscious, ripe, and alcoholic (15.6 percent, believe it or not). It screams “Give me more than 90 points!” and descriptors like intense only begin to tell the story.

These days, it’s more difficult to find wines made this way. The recession played its part, devastating the super-premium wine business. Meanwhile, consumers seem to be tiring of high alcohol, while cooler harvests in California the past couple of vintages have made it more difficult to get wine to taste this way.

For the Newton is distinctive. Though it’s a huge wine, it is more interesting than others of its ilk, with more balance between dark fruits, silky tannins, and the acid than I expected. Having said that, it needs food, and manly food at that – big slabs of red meat. Otherwise, after two glasses, you're done. That so many people wanted that sort of thing almost makes me want to wax nostalgic.

Catfish meuniere, Randall Grahm, and Spy Valley

Honest wine is the best pairing for honest food.

The most important lesson I ever learned about seafood came from the late, much loved and much missed Merlin Kleinpeter: If you can’t buy it from Robert at Bayou Seafood, she used to say, then don’t buy it.

Which was Merlin’s way of telling me that fresh is what matters, and that any supplier who wasn’t honest about things like freshness wasn’t worth my time and money. If the crabs weren’t good that day, then Robert told her so, and Merlin didn’t buy them.

I mention this because food and wine are inextricably linked, and not just about which wine goes with which food. Pairing wine with most takeout pizza, which never tastes as good as you think it should, is one thing. That’s what $10 grocery store merlot was invented for.

But pairing wine with honest food – food that someone cared about and that required them to make an effort when they prepared it -- is another matter entirely. More, after the jump:

Mini-reviews 38: Muscadet, Toad Hollow, Brocard, Rhiannon

Reviews of wines that don’t need their own post, but are worth noting  for one reason or another. Look for it on the final Friday of each month.

• Alfred Pery Vallee Loire Muscadet 2010 ($10, purchased): Those of us who think Muscadet, a French white, is one of the world's great cheap wine secrets can skip this one. Not much to it other than some lemon fruit amidst a bland, watery style.

• Toad Hollow Pinot Noir Rose 2011 ($10, sample): California wine is better than the 2010 vintage, which was a white zinfandel knockoff, but still not up to its former $10 Hall of Fame standards. Thin and missing any sort of noticeable fruit.

• Jean-Marc Brocard Chablis 2009 ($20, purchased): This French white is more New World chardonnay in style than most Chablis. It’s rounder and softer, with more red apple instead of green apple and Chablis' tell-tale acidity. Having said that, it's not worse, just different.

• Rhiannon 2010 ($13, sample): Find this California red blend for $10, and you're in business. Simple, dark fruits (even a little less than ripe, which I liked), and a bit of tannin.

Mark West and the revolution in pinot noir

This is the wine that helped changed pinot noir in the U.S., both in how it tasted and how it was sold. As such, it probably deserves some sort of lengthy academic treatise and recognition for those accomplishments -- good and bad. Instead, Constellation Brands, one of the world's biggest wine companies, just bought it, and who knows what’s going to happen next?

Before the current version of Mark West debuted in 2001, drinkable pinot noir cost at least $20 and came from Burgundy in France, Oregon, and parts of California no one knew much about. Most of the rest of the world’s pinot wasn’t very pleasant – harsh and unripe, even on its best days. That’s because pinot is not only difficult to grow, but difficult to make. Those who grew it in un-pinot places or who made it without having Zen-like pinot skills almost always failed.

Mark West’s great accomplishment had three parts: Making a quality wine, making it cheaply enough so it cost $10, and making so much of it that it could be sold in grocery stores. The irony is that, to do this, Mark West had to make pinot noir that didn't taste like pinot noir had always tasted. More, after the jump:

Bogle Vineyards: Combining value and quality

Ryan Bogle started smiling almost as soon as I told him the story. A friend of mine, on business in rural West Virginia, despaired of finding a decent bottle of wine to drink. But, lo and behold, at a local retailer, was the Bogle petite sirah.

“We hear that a lot,” says Bogle, the third generation of his family to run the 1-million case California winery that is perhaps the best grocery store producer in the country. “It’s the kind of thing that that keeps us going – to make high quality wines that are a great value for the customer. We want to be accessible to the large majority of the population, and we’re happy to able to accommodate them.”

Yes, 1 million cases – a number that makes the Bogle story that much more amazing. There are plenty of huge wineries in the U.S. churning out tanker trucks of cheap wine, but few of them do with it Bogle’s consistency and quality. That the company is able to do this, despite its size, speaks about its commitment to the consumer, even when that might interfere with the bottom line.

Ryan Bogle was in Dallas for meetings with his distributor, and we talked for a few minutes about what the winery does, how it does it, and what the future holds for the winery. More, after the jump:

Wine review: Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay 2010

The wine business doesn’t have a national brand, in the way detergent has Tide or ketchup has Heinz. Those products are instantly recognizable, sold everywhere in the country, and seen as representative of their category.

What the wine business has, instead, is Kendall-Jackson. It’s about the only brand sold everywhere that wine is sold, and even people who barely drink wine know Kendall-Jackson. And what was the big wine news when Barack Obama was elected president? That someone had seen K-J bottles in his Chicago home.

The chardonnay is the most ubiquitous of the Kendall-Jackson wines. It made the brand famous, and has been the best-selling chardonnay in the country for 20 years, according to the winery. Some 2.5 million cases are sold annually, which would make it the 12th biggest winery in the U.S., according to Wine Business Monthly.

The secret to the wine’s success? Stuck fermentation, which the late Jess Jackson, who started the winery, pioneered in the early 1980s. In stuck fermentation, not all of the sugar in the grape juice is converted into alcohol during fermentation, which produces a sweeter wine.

As such, the chardonnay ($15, sample) is rarely taken seriously. Or, as issacjamesbaker wrote on CellarTracker (the unofficial wine inventory software of the blog):

“I picked this up at the grocery store just for the hell of it. The nose shows the expected buttered pear, but also some crisp green apple. The palate actually has some fresh acid, which I like. Crisp apple flavors, rounded out by some whipped butter. Not toasty at all, just pure buttered fruit. The acid on the finish keeps it balanced. This is not a serious wine, but it's very pleasant, albeit not very exciting.”

That’s a fine description of the wine (though “whipped butter” is a bit much), and is pretty much what it tastes like. What surprised me were how those flavors and qualities were so noticeable, when in most wines at this price (and I’ve seen it for as little as $10), you have to hunt for them. This is not a shy wine.

But the tasting note is written entirely from the perspective of someone who doesn’t think the wine is worth writing about. And that’s the thing about K-J and its wines that always baffles me. It takes effort to make the wine taste that way year after year, because the key to grocery store wines is consistency of quality. Consumers will forgive one lesser vintage, but after that, it’s on to the next cute label.

In this, K-J also pioneered something taken for granted these days – the professionally made wine, produced every year without flaws or off-tastes. When I started drinking wine in the 1980s, it was all too common to find wines that were oxidized or made with unripe fruit or tainted in some way. That almost never happens anymore, and today’s arguments about wine quality are about styles and not whether the wine is technically well made.

No doubt I wax too metaphysical. K-J and Jackson’s successors probably don’t care about that. What’s a 92 in the Spectator when your chardonnay is bigger than all but 11 wineries in the U.S.?

Wine of the week: J Pinot Gris 2011

Let’s be straight about this: The recession, as horrible as it has been, has been great for wine prices. Nothing illustrates this better than the J Pinot Gris, which was just another California wine until J decided it needed something more affordable to sell during the recession and slashed the price by 25 percent.

Does this make up for unemployment, suffering, and hard times? Nope. But to paraphrase Sam in “Casablanca”: “It sure do take the sting out of being recess-ed.”

This vintage of the pinot gris ($15, sample) is the third at this price, and it’s certainly the most interesting. The alcohol is lower, and the wine tastes fresher, more lively, and not as soft. There is lots of citrus in the front (lemon and lime?), a tropical-ish middle and a lingering finish that's pleasant if not very obvious. All in all, a wine that deserves the term yummy.

Serve this chilled on its own or with something fried – chicken, seafood or mushrooms would all work well.