Quite a bummer.

One of the less-expensive "cult wines" in my area is a Shiraz called Layer Cake.  It's made by Jayson Woodbridge, of Hundred Acre fame; the Layer Cake line is, as Mr. Woodbridge would say, a chance to bring global fine wine to the American consumer at a low cost.

My take on the wine?  It's repackaged bulk wine, harvested uber-ripe, with high residual sugar levels, and high alcohol.

In fact, the wine's factsheet (PDF) supports that idea: "For our Shiraz, we pull from vineyards all over McLaren Vale; from the full-clustered, sandy soiled blocks on the sea coast of Gulf St. Vincent, to the Terra Rosa based, tiny-berried wind-blown hills across the Vale.  The vineyards are all within a few miles of each other, yet give us a broad array of flavors to blend into a complete wine.  Each year we pull a small amount of fruit from tiny vineyards in Padthaway and Wrattanbully for added layers; combined they represent less than 10% of the blend."

Traslating: "We got grapes and/or juice from a ton of places, and threw it together."

Their tasting note?  "Dark, dense and creamy, complex aromas of black plum, Bing cherry, blackberry and pepper merge with licorice, tobacco, mocha and dark chocolate.  This is one inky Shiraz; an explosion of dark, super ripe, wild blackberry, with a touch of cigar box finishing with a mélange of exotic spices. A pure fruit bomb…complete from attack through a long, lingering finish."

My tasting note?

Inky black/red. Fairly strong nose of raspberry and some herb. In the mouth, the wine has some slightly velvety notes, and is reasonably weighty. However, it is quite hot (14.9% abv) and the alcohol throws it out of balance. Flavor profile is mainly towards the raspberry-and-slightly-spicy side, with some mint on the finish. Balance is, as noted before, off -- it's flabby. Finish is average-length.

If you like slightly sweet, flabby wine, this is great. For me, not so much.  83 points.

There just wasn't a lot to the wine.  Here's the fruit, lots of heat, some spice, and done.  Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.  No backbone, no subtlety.  I had been hoping for something with some structure, and wound up with alcoholic grape juice.  Sigh.  And I'm forced to wonder, why is it that people lust after this wine so much around here?

Cakebread and Far Niente; tasting cult wines.

The other day, I found myself in one of my local enomatic bars with about an hour to kill, and decided to do some tasting.  This particular bar has a good selection of upper-end Californian wines, and (it being Florida in the beginning of the summer, ergo hot), therefore, I decided to taste the whites.

First on the block was Cakebread Cellars 2007 Chardonnay.  This is, if you don't know, a cult-classic chard that is quite hard to get a hold of at retail (Cakebread allocates their wines, slanting heavily towards the restaurant market -- and the wine bar can get a large allocation, since they're an on-premises license holder, hence a "restaurant" so far as the winery is concerned).  My thoughts:

Yellow-gold in the glass.  Highly oaky nose, not showing a bunch of fruit.  In the mouth, the oak dominates, showing some vanilla, with a creamy mouthfeel.  There is amazingly little fruit in this wine; it tastes like chewing on a toothpick.  The oak astringency throws the balance out of whack, but the finish is long.  I can see why people hunt for this wine -- it's rarity, primarily, drives demand -- but it's a big pass for me.  87 points.

So, you can see, this is -- to my eyes, at least -- a demand-driven cult wine.  It's good, if you like oak, but the main reason people seek it out is it's rarity, not it's flavor (well... unless you love tasting barrel rather than wine).  I was actually quite surprised how much I didn't like this wine -- as much as it's hyped, it was downright disappointing.  This wine is a poor value, period.

Then, there was the other wine I tried -- well, the other Chardonnay, at least.  Far Niente Chardonnay 2006 (note: pictured is the 2005, although it's hard to see the neck label).  Far Niente is a luxe producer from Napa, a product of the Nickel and Nickel partnership.  They're best known for making exactly two wines -- a Chardonnay and a Cabernet.  No "reserve," no "special selection," and that's it.  According to their website, "[we produce wine of] the highest quality possible from our estate vineyards; if the wine doesn't meet expectations, it doesn't make the final blend."  So how is their Chardonnay?

Golden in the glass.  On the nose, the wine shows buttered fig and some pear notes; this may not have gone through intentional malolactic fermentation, but there's definitely some cream evident.  In the mouth, the wine is luxuriantly rich, with well-controlled oak underlying the fruit and buttercream.  This is deep, intense wine.  Balance is nearly perfect; just enough acidity to keep it interesting, enough weight to be intense.  Finish is quite long.  90 points.

So, there, you can see the difference.  For me, at least, the controlled use of oak in the Far Niente made it a much better wine than the Cakebread.  And I can understand why this wine is so sought-after; the flavor, not the rarity (Far Niente may allocate, but it's not nearly as slanted towards restaurants as Cakebread is.  So you can, you know, actually buy some in a wine shop!).

And the upshot?  Both these wines are quite expensive (in the $50-$60 range).  In both cases, it's really mainly conspicuous consumption, drinking either.  Heck, my tasting pours cost $7 each.  Is it worth it?  For the Cakebread, definitely no -- if I wanted Chardonnay with all oak and no fruit, I'd drink some Simi Alexander Valley.  For the Far Niente... perhaps.  There's a lot of good Chardonnay out there, but this one is quite good, and their reputation for consistency is excellent.  That being said... it's twice the price of one of my favorites (more on that wine later).  But if I were trying to impress, both with the label and the wine?  Yep.

Photos from Cakebread Cellars and All Star Wine and Spirits.

One to avoid.

It was a free tasting at the local wine shop, and so I went to try what they had on the table.  The first wine was the Hess Lake County Sauvignon Blanc 2007.

The Lake County AVA is just north of Napa, and is where  a number of well-known wineries source grapes (Guenoc is probably the most popular, especially for their Sauvignon Blanc).  In fact, before Prohibition, Lake County produced more wine than any other region in California!

So, we had a wine from a reasonably premium appellation, made from a grape that's popular (read: well-suited) in that appellation, and from a producer that "everyone knows about," as Hess makes fairly popular Chardonnay and Cabernets.

So the wine should be good, right?

Um.  No.

The tasting note:

Lemon-yellow in the glass. Average intensity nose, showing grassy citrus. Pretty average sauvignon blanc, until the wine goes into the mouth... then it all falls apart.  The flavor is, to put it mildly, awful. Sour, unde-ripe citrus, grass, medicinal herbs, and green pepper -- not nice, crisp green pepper, more like green pepper that's been sliced apart and left out in the sun for a day. Ick. Just... ick. Balance is decent -- but it's hard to get past the flavor of the wine to make an assessment. It's a little sweet, but not horribly so. Moderate acidity, light bodied. The finish is, thankfully, not terribly long, but I would have preferred it to be shorter.  I can think of a large number of sauvignon blancs that are better, both at this price point and, indeed, less expensive. It's literally the worst sauvignon blanc I've had in years.  72 points.

At $10 a bottle, this isn't exactly cheap, either.  The problem is that there's a ton of good Sauvignon Blanc coming out of any number of appellations (Chile, New Zealand, California, even some Bordeaux wines cost less).  $10 can buy you some pretty damn good Sauvignon Blanc right about now.

Looking at Hess' winemaker's notes, from their website, we see "Harvest 2007 began early, with the looming possibility that both red and white varieties would ripen at the same time.  The weather turned cool, however, and the pace slowed substantially by mid-September, allowing for a break once all of the Lake County Sauvignon Blanc was picked."  In other words, "we picked the grapes early, because if the reds ripened at the same time as the whites, we'd have been screwed because there isn't enough labor available to get all the grapes out of the fields."

Which explains some of the wine's problems; if the grapes were under-ripe and rushed into harvest, the green pepper notes make a ton of sense, as do the medicinal herby quality (and not in a fresh, Ricola kind of way -- more in a nasty, smelly poultice kind of way).

Hess Lake County Sauvignon Blanc  2007 -- proof that a well-known name doesn't equal a well-made wine.

Edit: I should note that the other wines on the table were rather nice -- a Sauvignon Blanc from Reverie, in Napa, an Eden Valley Chardonnay from Courtney Benham at the Martin Ray winery, some Central Coast Pinot Noir, Merlot, and a very nice Cabernet Sauvignon from Cupcake.  But the Lake County Sauvignon Blanc was truly awful.

How not to find value...

The other day I had the chance to meet a vintner from a boutique California winery; he makes about 4 wines, all estate-grown around his house.  I'll decline to name him or his winery, for reasons that will become clear shortly.

Really, he was quite a nice guy.  Very friendly, in a slightly reserved kind of way -- were he a generation younger, I think he'd be a blogger, in fact -- and he served three of his wines, two of which were 3-year-old library releases (the current release is 2005, we had the 2002).  There was a white Bordeaux blend, a cabernet (well... 85% cab, 13% merlot, and 2% petit verdot.   But, in the US, since it's more than 75% of one grape, the wine can be called that grape), and a Bordeaux blend with cab, merlot, and cabernet franc (less than 75% of any single grape, so it's sold under a proprietary name).  He did feel very strongly that his wines were "great values," that the prices they were being offered for were "rediculously low."

The white (a new-release semillon and sauvignon blanc blend) was good.  Not great, though, and not worth the selling price when compared with Bordeauxes in the same price point ($15-$25, in this case).  Then, I tried the cabernet... and this is where it fell apart.

The wine was acceptable, but not anywhere nearly as good as the vintner apparently thought it was.  This was a wine in a price point where I have come to expect a lot ($30-$50).  Honestly, when a bottle of wine in a store costs more than an entree at a restaurant, it's got to really wow me to make me want to buy it.  This was... plain.  Simple.  For less -- far less -- I have had easily a dozen wines that are better, from appellations as near as Napa and as far away as Stellenbosch.  And I was forced to have to talk to the man; he wanted to know how I liked the wine.  "Oh, it's very complex, showing secondary notes of dried fruit and flower, some suede around the edges, but still retaining some fresh fruit at the core.  Special-occasion wine."  In other words, I didn't say what I was thinking, to wit, "why the hell is this $40?  It's worth $18 at best, and that's just so it doesn't get caught up in the price points of $15 and $20, which are pretty crowded with good stuff.  All in all, I'd rather have a number of other wines."

Then, the Bordeaux blend, his "premier" wine.  According to the vintner, "if we had any more of this vintage at the winery, we'd sell it for $95 a bottle."  The list on it was $70.

And, again, it was good.  But, nowhere nearly as good as he seemed to think it was.  In fact, given that this wine was nearly the list price of a new release of Chateau St. Jean's Cinq Cepages (and, $30 more than I paid for the new release of Cinq Cepages last fall...), and my thoughts on that wine -- it's quite good, and very worth the $40 I paid for it -- all things considered, I'd rather have 5 bottles of Cinq Cepages than 3 of this winery's "premier" wine... and you can keep the $10 in change.

So, why is this not value?  Simple.  For one, this winery is a specific sub-appellation of Napa, and indeed, it's all estate-grown.  So, it's very geographically specific, and that's going to raise the price (let's face it, "an Oakville cab," costs more than "a Napa cab.") Secondarily, the vintner seems to think much more of his wine than it's worth -- and price is, at least in part, a reflection of what the vintner thinks of his wine.  Finally, this winery is a bit of a darling to certain critics, and those 90+ ratings raise the price.

Yet another reason not to follow the herd -- you wind up paying too much, in my opinion, for too little.

So how do you not find value?  Shop in the premium regions, buying only highly-rated wines, and buy wine from vintners who feel strongly that their wines are worth what they say it is, rather than what the market dictates it is.  That's a recipe for overpriced wine.

Finding values: going off the beaten path

One of the common complaints in wine shops across the country is, "Oh, [insert_wine_here] has gotten so expensive, I remember when it cost half as much!"  This often refers to American wines, and generally some Big Name Winery from California.  Think Heitz, Cakebread, Turnbull, Ferrari-Carano etcetra.  There's also a refrain of "Oh, [insert_wine_here] was so much better back before they were popular!"

And, strangely enough, most of that is correct.

The solution, of course, is go off-list.  Just because a winery isn't a Big Name, doesn't mean it's any less good.  In fact, often, the smaller guys can be better.  When a winery is starting out, there's little to no brand identity, so there's less demand.  Correspondingly, the winery can be much more selective with their sources for fruit (be it estate-grown or negociant fruit), as they don't need as much to meet demand.  Price can be lower, as demand drives price significantly in the wine business.  So you've got (often) higher-quality wine at a lower cost.

Then, enter a critic.  Someone in a magazine puts a score on the wine, a 93.  It gets featured as a "best buy," or "critic's choice," or some such.  Demand goes up.  The first thing that happens is the retail price will go up -- the exact thing that happened to Seghesio Zinfandel Sonoma 2007 when it was featured on Wine Spectator's Top 100 list (the wine jumped from $20 to $25 overnight) -- and it disappears from shelves as people get convinced they must buy this wine.

Which is weird; I've never known anyone to go to a $8 movie because Leonard Maltin or Gene Shalit say they must, but I do know people who buy $80 wine because Robert Parker or James Laube say they should.

So, now our hypothetical winery now has a brand identity, and some loyal customers following them.  At this point, they've got to do one of two things (or even both) -- make more wine than in previous vintages, to meet their higher demand, or raise prices.  The former will allow the winery to keep up with demand and keep prices steady, but it means that they've got to be just a little less selective with their fruit (premium grapes are a finite resource, after all).  The latter will tend to discourage new customers from purchasing the wine, but truly brand-loyal customers will still pay the premium.

And, now, "oh, it was so much better before it got recognized," and "wow, it's so expensive now!"

So you find value by looking beyond the Big Names... both in appellation and branding.  Just because a Pinot Noir doesn't come from Oregon, doesn't mean it's not potentially worthwhile (in fact, in my humble opinion, Oregon is overpriced right now -- the top-level wines from Oregon are more expensive than the corresponding top-level wines from any premium region save Burgundy... but Burgundy has a tradition of great wine stretching back longer than Oregon has been a state, while Oregon has only been making high-quality wine for a couple of decades.).  Cabernet from Napa carries a premium, while correspondingly good wine from Paso Robles does not.

The same goes for branding.  If you want to buy, say, Cakebread chardonnay... well, if you can find it (Cakebread is allocated in most retail markets, so the supply is artificially limited)... expect to pay a premium for it.

How do you find good wines in oddball places?  Simple.  Ask.  If your wine shop doesn't have a knowledgeable staff, don't shop there.  Taste.  Most places have tastings for free, or at least a minimal fee.  Keep an eye on websites like localwineevents.com, which lists (you guessed it!) local wine events, where you can try new stuff, generally less expensively.

By way of example, within an easy drive from where I live, there are 3 sites of one chain wine and liquor store that holds tastings on a quarterly basis that cost $10, and have around 50 wines to try.  There's another chain that has a single site, where tastings are monthly and $10.  There's two sites of another chain that has free tastings every weekend, occasionally has some during the week when a producer or importer comes by, and has in-depth classes for $25 about once a month.  There's three wine bars with enomatic machines (one with about 15 selections that rotate weekly, another with about 40 changed biweekly, and the final one has about 30 changing weekly), and another by-the pour bar.  Oh, and a grocery store that has a great wine selection (and cheese shop, but that's another matter), that does weekly tastings for free.

Yeah, I'm lucky like that.  But, the odds are, there's more going on near you than you know.  So find out!

With all that wine to taste -- comparatively inexpensively! -- there's bound to be something new, something off the map, and something great.

And then, we can all complain in five or ten years, "Oh, [insert_formerly_obscure_wine_here] was so much better and inexpensive before everyone knew about it!"