Wine

Not sure of the year but Wolf Blass/Berringer were both bought out by Fosters. Berringer used to be used by Nestle prior to that one.

Can anyone recommend anything on the plcb list for twenty bucks or under that I might like to drink?

saintsbury pinot noir carneros 375 ml

someone please recommend me a good Riesling thats 20-30 bux

dry, semi-dry, or sweet?

semi-dry

Where are you? Are there wine stores or do you have to go to a state-run store (lol, Pennsylvania)?
Dry to sweet - for German, QBA-> Kabinett-> Spatlese; some years will be sweeter than others.

Try a Hugel & Fils or Trimbach.

I am in Texas, i was thinking about hitting up the nearest Spec's if the World Market was too pricey

Hugel & Fils, 2005 should run you about $16-20

Trimbach 2005 about the same. My wine stroe loves the Trimbach.

World Market's online selections are not very convincing: Boony Doon Pacific Rim is okay, Hogue is not to my taste, Polka Dot is probably cheapish and maybe too sweet for me (I have a rule of thumb to not by rielsing that is in blue bottles!), and I don't know Moselland Ars Vitis.

Spec's site has a couple of nice rieslings in the $20-30 range, Selbach Oster, Christoffel, Dr. Pauly, Kerpen:
http://tinyurl.com/mkjjo7
(sorted low to high)

I prefer Alsatians like Trimbach and Hugel, myself.

i like the pacific rim dry riesling for a nice cheap one. have for years, ever since someone brought me a bottle based on liking the label!

i must try this .. Trimbach

i just bought this 2006 Kendall Jackson Grand Reserve Chardonnay instead of the Trimbach because HEB didnt have that grand of a riesling selection, plus someone told me most ppl like Chardonnay

is it good or wat?

Had my first beaujolais noveau ever this last weekend and I liked it. Was sent home with a bottle and am quaffing like a barrel full of quaffing monkeys.

The Price of Wine

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine

In 2012, top French wines (including the premier cru Château Mouton Rothschild) barely defeated wines from New Jersey in a professional tasting. The Jersey wines cost 5% as much as the French wines.

Surprisingly light colored semi-transparent blood color for its 14% alcohol and it's youth. Nose is attractive raspberry fresh fruit, a hint of lamb's blood and a backbone of fresh-sawn plank wood. Surprisingly little heat given the high alcohol. Palate is soft plummy Merlot-driven fruit with firm but well-balanced young tannins and a finish of dry fresh-sawn plank wood.

what kind of plank wood?

Is there a reasonable way of sending someone one bottle of not-expensive wine, in the UK?

Anyone ever shopped from NakedWines.com?

Any good or vinegar?

Anyone tried these?

https://www.buonvino.co.uk/winifred-rose-gut-oggau

https://www.buonvino.co.uk/joschuari-gut-oggau-2011

yes! i went to a gut oggau lunch at a restaurant a month or so ago. they were all fucking great. bought a bottle of the winifred, but havent had it yet.

I have bought a boxed pinotage that was pretty decent. Really, in the UK at least (and with new world wines at least) they're a totally viable alternative. The first time I bought a box was specifically to use it for mulled wine (i.e. it was cheap) but it was so decent I drank 3/4 of it unbastardised.
― Markelby (Mark C), Friday, October 29, 2004 5:20 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boxed wine in american has not made the same leap forward, unfortunately.
― lauren (laurenp), Friday, October 29, 2004 5:28 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boxed wine has really become mainstream and more upscale in the last decade

x-post

I have to confess that I clocked the Gut Oggau wines in here:

http://cityslang.frocksteady.com/shop/music/flotus-box.html (A deluxe edition of the new Lambchop album)

and, having Googled the wines, was intrigued.

The only problem with boxes of wine is that is harder to kid yourself that they are units when the doc asks how many you drink a week.

I once bumped into my GP at the bottle bank. * awkward *

that lambchop thing is fun

boxed wine has really become mainstream and more upscale in the last decade

― Pull your head on out your hippy haze (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

I'm starting to see a lot of canned wine here (SoCal), 375-500 ml sizes, and not cheap. Haven't tried any yet since I don't need that packing convenience for wine.

Anyone bought wine from here before? https://www.buonvino.co.uk/shopby?manufacturer=119

Any recommendations from the cheaper end of the scale? (Pondering buying a red and a white from Gut Oggau, rounding up a case with cheaper wines).

i've had this one before, and really liked it - https://www.buonvino.co.uk/raisins-gaulois-gamay-lapierre-2014

Have ordered a bottle of Atanasius. Will report back.

Every natural wine I've tasted thus far has been garbage.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/15/has-wine-gone-bad-organic-biodynamic-natural-wine

With anything that gets super trendy, there is a lot of bad stuff that ends up being produced and distributed. I like natural wine a lot but like with everything else it's on a spectrum (plus natural wine has more bottle variability). There is extreme natural wine making and there is natural wine making that still adheres to traditional palates. You just have to be prepared for what you are going to taste. I get excited when I get a super funky, weird bottle.

my favourite recent (in the last year) discovery is crémant. that stuff is delicious

Yeah, cremant de whatever is my go to usually for sparkling. French wine made in the champenoise method but without the champagne price. And it's usually a little more interesting.

I've had lots of good natural wine

it's also cheap

this isn't your father's oenophilia

http://www.executivestyle.com.au/content/dam/images/g/j/3/e/8/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gj2lpn.png/1440376164101.jpg

Ive had this conversation a couple of times but wine has a lot of parallels with record collecting/audiophiles. Some people like lo-fi or field recordings and some people don't like that style. You may have to put in the work to search out the best of the bunch. Or just be surprised by the bottle.

I'm OK with a lot of wine surprises, but draw the line at wine that veers strongly to kombucha.

yeah, cremant de loire/bourgogne/jura... all that stuff is sooo tasty

natural wine can get back to me when it makes up its mind about what it is.

i'm totally willing to try a bottle here and there but there's a crazy amount of variance under the natural wine umbrella. and it's falsely being presented as a black/white thing with conventional wine by a lot of enthusiasts which doesn't ring true. the farming practices and limited intervention make a ton of sense to me, but i'm definitely not convinced that spontaneous fermentation is always the right answer.

i had a natural rosé at a tasting last weekend and it started off innocuously before diving into a weird slate and graphite rockiness. it was interesting, which is the most i can say for several nws i've had.

Aldi

Heh, I was kind of drunk last night. Sorry. I still do think, though that the huge popularity of craft beer is still pretty America (and ok Canada) male centric. And natural wine, I don't really think of no sulfites, I think more about no filtering or fining (this may be the first thing you notice about the bottle before you even drink. It's basically just letting the grapes express themselves with very little interaction from the winemaker but there are different levels from mild to extreme styles.

The price of wine is a lot of things: how it's produced (new barrels are expensive), buying grapes vs. growing it on your own land, storage on site during aging (loss of income), all the regular overhead of running a business, demand. This is why a few wine regions are starting a beaujolais nouveau style festival/release of bottles. It's the most recent harvest, fresh, simple, no wood, no storage, get income within 2-3 months of harvest

I don't think Chapoutier is on the natural wine kick. He makes a crapload of wine though.

Chris B4tes, who is a master somm was trying to diffuse a fight about natural wine vs. crafted wine (kind of confusing in light of the term craft beer). And he used bbq to kind of explain the differences between the extremes of each style. This is kind of long, the relevant part that I am pasting.

In an ideal world:
Natural Winemaking version of BBQ- Start a fire, season a locally raised (ideally by the person cooking it), responsibly farmed, healthy, humanly butchered brisket with salt and pepper, hang brisket over a few feet from the the coals, turn occasionally until ready to eat. Serve to friends and neighbors.

Crafted Winemaking version of BBQ-Dry rub and rest an A5 Kobe beef brisket with 2% salt and 1% pepper over night. Begin fire 12 hours before you plan to serve. Once coals are ready, adjust airflow to stabilize temp at 225F and load brisket fat cap up. Hold at 225 for 7 hours, making sure internal temp hits 136 within hours of loading. Use K-type thermocouple to ensure internal temp never exceeds 148 and air temp stays between 210-235 at 60% humidity (set out of range alarm if leaving the cooking area). Wrap in foil and damper down coals, and leave brisket to rest in foil, cap up, for 1 hour before serving. Serve to friends and neighbors.

In an idealogical sence, that more or less sums it up.

In practice though, it can become extreme in either direction very easily, and it is easy to become cynical about the camp on the other side of the spectrum. In the real world, it all too often becomes:

Extreme Natural Winemaking version of bbq- Dig pit. Light fire in pit. Take brisket from animal raised by cook, without any medication, slaughtered because it started to wheeze a little, by the cook in their garage with unsanitized tools. Throw leaves from the yard onto the fire, throw unseasoned brisket on top, and throw on more leaves. Cover with dirt and close pit. Leave 48 hours. Invite all the people you know who have tattoos and mustaches. Unearth the brisket pit, remove brisket to the unsanitzed board you trimmed it on 2 days prior, and slice it and serve it, wether it is cooked through or not, tender or tough, safe or spoiled. Ignoring any comments or questions of its quality or soundness by explaining how naturally it is made.

Extreme Crafted Winemaking version of brisket-Take beef trimmings and mechanically separated chicken from whichever countries are producing the cheapest usda allowed version. Mix with corn syrup, potassium lactate, sodium phosphates, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Diacetate, Sodium Nitrate, and flavors, as well as liquid smoke, granulated onion, etc, and form it into brisket like shape using Transglutimate (Meat glue) to add a fat like layer to the top. Cook in giant steam injection ovens before cooling, slicing and shipping to Arby's for their new Texas Smoke House Sandwich.

Both practices/camps can make fantastic wines, each with strengths for certain needs in wine world. Both can, and are, easily taken to negative extremes.

That’s a neat analogy.

And yeah a quick google sees M. Chapoutier call all natural wine ‘defective’ so I dunno what I was thinking of there. I’m sure there are relatively large operations out there who will prove my point tho! (Zind-Humbrecht?)

On a recommendation from a very nice member of bar staff in a good bar in San Sebastian, I found myself drinking this: https://www.decantalo.com/en/ube-miraflores.html

I thought it was absolutely outstanding, I don't know that I fully understand the process(es) by which it's made but I think it's kind of manzanilla without the fortification process, which winds up with a v dry white with lots of sherry notes but also amazingly fresh and zingy.

(This comment not in respect of natural wine, just a bottle of wine I was excited about. the natural wine stuff is v interesting but I don't have much to add.)

Great recommendation! I know v little about sherry, and have only really drunk the sweet stuff (which I enjoy a lot) - I’ll keep my eyes peeled...

If you find any in the UK (and particularly SE15/ SE22 :)) let me know.

sherry is so good and such a great way to get legitimately high quality wines at very reasonable prices (due to its relative unfashionability (in the mainstream))

here is the pet nat we had: https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/2b0Q3i2T0w1a2a3Q3Q0M/IMG_8581.jpg

warning my wife likes ipas and kombucha

^^^That label is so charming.

I am going to be on the lookout for the Ube or a similir wine from that region. Dry sherries used to freak me a out a lot because I thought they tasted like bone broth. That salty umami.

I always think of sherry as something I should avoid because of its association with with a local bus station legend who was known as QC Mary. Might try some out this week, under the dodgy pretext that it is needed for a risotto!

I was into tawny port for a while a few years ago, but have drifted away. Good with many cheeses. Hardys (Australia) was one I liked that was affordable, US$12-14.

Tawny is my preferred port, particularly 40 yr OF COURSE

xpost There are some nice sherry cocktails.

The uk supermarket premium sherry brands aren’t bad at all. Sainsbury Taste the Difference and Morrisons’ equivalent are both made by Lustau which is a reliably good maker. In both cases the dry oloroso is decent and I like the fino too. Tesco’s was Barbadillo iirc but they’ve stopped stocking that at the local big Tesco.

I haven't had a cream sherry in decades, sometimes I wonder whether it's nice.

The folklore regarding cider armadillos is long-forgotten around here but that is what comes to my mind whenever anyone mentions sherry cocktails (I've tried a few proper sherry cocktails at reputable places but I can rarely detect the sherry involved).

Yeah, a lot of people still associate sherry with Harveys Bristol cream from the 1970s.

Sommelier cheating scandal!

http://www.laist.com/2018/10/10/sommelier_cheating_scandal_23_master_sommeliers_stripped_of_titles.php

Some of them already took the tasting retest and passed.

My boss was one of those stripped of his MS status after the scandal--my heart hurt so badly for him! We had congrats banners hanging in the restaurant...general jubilation and then the title got yanked away. CMS fast tracked a new tasting trial a few months later which he didn't pass. He's going again this fall.

oh damn. I know some people opened and drank once in a lifetime bottles, printed up new business cards, accepted $$$ gifts and higher speaking fees related to the new title. SUX.

Gruner Veltliner is the best white wine grape.

Cancel me if you want, this is my opinion.

It's okay I like Napa cabs more than Bordeaux so you can judge my suburban mom or shallow businessman tastes to make yourself feel better.

If someone wants to buy me some 1er cru to try and sway me, please do!

In recent blind tastings organized by the Austrian Wine Marketing Board, Grüner Veltliners have beaten world-class Chardonnays from the likes of Mondavi and Maison Louis Latour.[1]

Gruner Veltliner is a good, cold picnic wine and I like that most bottles are actually liters and not 750ml

I know there are high-end Gruners but I've mostly quaffed the sub-$20 bottles, which are nice and crisp