Cabernet Sauvignon Smackdown

Posted by Keith Wallace on Jun 15, 2012 in Wine Reviews | 0 comments

In an office cluttered with wine bottles, both full and empty, it’s hard not to think of myself as Mayor of Boozeville.  Every once in awhile, an editor will stroll in and talk shop. Someone else will poke in to pour themselves a glass or two. Other than those few moments, it’s just me and the wine for hours and hours.  It’s a lovely job writing wine reviews, but also a bit solitary: a drunken cage of corks, so to speak.

Today, there are more empty Cabernet bottles than anything else on my desk, and that is a very good thing.  A mentor of mine once told me that the best way to learn about wine was to pick a grape and dive in. That’s what I have done.

I have been drinking nothing but Cabernet Sauvignon from across the world: from Tuscany to Bordeaux to Napa Valley to South Africa. They all tasted dramatically different, yet each retained a “cab-ishness” quality. One of the most important things I remember from wine school was that each grape varietal has a unique fingerprint. For Cabernet Sauvignon, that fingerprint is an aroma of pencil shavings and green pepper. Sounds gross, but that’s the funny thing about great wine:  it unites crazy smells and flavor in surprisingly delicious ways.

The following are our current top picks. This list gets updated on a weekly and monthly schedule, so check back!

• Merryvale 2008 "Starmont" Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
  The top bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon reviewed at Epikur Magazine. From Tuscany to Bordeaux to Napa Valley and South Africa: This list includes the best of the best bottles of Cab Sauv currently available, and the ones with the best quality to price ratio.
• Erasmo 2006 Viña La Reserva de Caliboro, Maule Valley, Chile
  The top bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon reviewed at Epikur Magazine. From Tuscany to Bordeaux to Napa Valley and South Africa: This list includes the best of the best bottles of Cab Sauv currently available, and the ones with the best quality to price ratio.
• Cabernet Sauvignon Smackdown
  

  The top bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon reviewed at Epikur Magazine. From Tuscany to Bordeaux to Napa Valley and South Africa: This list includes the best of the best bottles of Cab Sauv currently available, and the ones with the best quality to price ratio.

• CrossBarn 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon
  

  The “CrossBarn” is remarkably similar to the “Paul Hobbs,” but at half the price. It is lush and dense with richly soft tannins, it stains the glass with a deep crimson. Full bodied, it offers up rich flavors of blackberry and burnt oak that are deeply embedded into a savory impression of fresh bay laurel and roses.

• Andrew Will Winery 2007 Two Blondes Vineyard
  

  Figs and cassis meld with coffee and campfire notes, along with a strong impression of Herbes de Provence. The midpalate brings in fresher red fruits, and serious oak-influenced flavors of chocolate and allspice. The finish rolls on and on, bringing more pleasure than anyone could expect from a glass of wine.

Bols for Kopstootje

Posted by Keith Wallace on Mar 11, 2012 in Beer Reviews, Spirits and Coctails | 0 comments

Ah, genever, you are a pretty one. The last time we met up, I was face down in an infamous brown bar near The Hague.  The Dutch know how to drink, and I had spent much of the night in a Kopstootje session.  Loosely translated as a “little head butt”,  it’s the equivalent of a boilermaker: a shot of  liquor with a beer back, always a  lager.

WTF genever? Funny you should ask. It’s the booze that  inspired the Brits to invent Gin, and both are flavored with Juniper and other botanicals. The difference is that genever is  based  on an unaged whiskey, rather than a neutral spirit. It’s also dangerously easy to drink. If you can find it, Bols “1820″ Genever is a lovely  and malty example of the spirit.

I hadn’t dared seek out genever since that fateful trip to the Netherlands. So, when Tal Nadari of  Bols Genever invited me to a Kopstootje  session at Farmer’s Cabinet here in Philly, I jumped at the chance.  Tal is the definition of a gentleman, with a distinct Dutch manner.  What I didn’t expect from the evening was a bit of sacrilege from Tal. Instead of a standard lager, Tal poured me a new beer from Baltimore’s Stillwater Artisinal Ales.

Brian Strumke of Stillwater is something of a mad genius. The beer he crafted  is a deconstruction of Bol’s classic genever.   The beer offers up a fresh malt note married with wood and spice flavors; a finish of juniper and hops gives the beer a deep savory note.  Based on a classic Saison style,  the beer remains light and fresh with a moderate level of carbonation. Highly Recommended.

Liquor Bored

Posted by Mike Madaio on Mar 5, 2012 in Reviews | 4 comments

To say that the PLCB is not known for embracing innovative technology would be a rather large understatement. They did, however, recently launch an iPhone app (with Android coming soon), so, there’s that. On the surface, if it were not for my inherent skepticism of anything coming from the PLCB, this sounds like something that might actually be useful, being a Pennsylvania resident and all. And, as surprising as it may sound, the result is a flawed but ultimately usable app that most PA wine lovers should probably have on their iPhones.

In general, the app is nicely designed and easy to navigate. It being a mobile app, the best use for it is, not surprisingly, while mobile. A bottle scanner, which allows customers to scan bottle barcodes and bring up the product page for a wine while in store, may help deal with the lack of information typically offered on the shelves (assuming there is info on the website – not always a safe assumption).  Combined with our own app for wine reviews, it’s a vital tool for wine lovers in Pennsylvania.

For those looking for a nearby store, there’s a handy feature which uses geo-location to bring up directions to the nearest one, or directions to the store of your choice. In addition, the nearest store that carries a wine (or all nearby stores) can be accessed from any in-store wine’s product page.

The App’s biggest issues are duplicates of flaws from the LCB website, most of which relate to the lack of a quality inventory system. To find the availability of a single wine, for example, one must search online, in-store, and SLO (special order) separately – there is no way to search across the three options. Perhaps even more egregious is the inability to view wines that are available nearby. A bottle only available in Pittsburgh stores, for example, does not help Philadelphians, yet it clutters the search results. Especially with the geo-location capabilities of the phone, this lack of refinement is ridiculous.

These, of course, are systematic issues that plague the website as well and thus aren’t really the fault of the app designers. That said, the app is not without little bugs and annoyances:

• An alert notifying users that they need an account to place an order comes up every time the app is used (and often multiple times per session
• Online products are the default in search, as if online ordering should take precedence over in-store for a mobile app.
• Though there are some powerful refinement tools for product listings, the system offers choices that aren’t available – for example, region before a country is selected – without any messaging as to why the choices are blank.
• Most iOS menus (the black buttons at the bottom of the app) contain a “more” button that brings up a full-screen list of additional menu choices. In this app, “more” is actually a toggle between two menus, hiding choices in a seemingly haphazard manner.
• Lastly, it does have a penchant for crashing whenever I try to do anything complex.

Despite these gripes, I do find myself using the app regularly, and think anyone with an iPhone who shops for wine in PA should give it a whirl… at least until there’s an app for privatizing liquor sales.

Krunch went Yelp

Posted by Keith Wallace on Jan 14, 2012 in News | 6 comments

A small little wine school in Chicago is getting a whole lot of attention. Master Sommelier (and runner up in the International Silly Name Contest)  Krunch Kretschmar has unwittingly discovered how to build a virtual nuclear warhead with nothing but social media.

Krunch owns Bottled Grapes, a tiny wine school in Chicago. He recently opted to do a Groupon promotion.  That alone was a bit crazy, since there is a growing amount of proof that a poorly conceived Groupon promotion can bankrupt a small businesses. For his Groupon, he sold  $35 tickets for $17.50 each. Since Groupon takes 50% of the revenue of each sale, that means Krunch earned $8.75  per ticket.  At that price, he was loosing money for every groupon sold, and there was over three thousand of these deals sold. Since he only offers an average of  four classes a month, he was looking at loosing money for a few years.  That sucks, big time.

Add to the mix a Yelper. Yelp is a powerful thing. Yelp and it’s aggregated reviews are widely trusted as a barometer of quality. Large businesses will have hundreds of reviews, so a single review won’t affect them. However, a single bad review can cause major damage to business with less than ten reviews, thousands of dollars of lost sales to a small company. That is the type of power that should be handled carefully and gently. Unfortunately, the power of Yelp  is largely wielded by the most callous groups in America: affluent white twenty-somethings.

So, the Yelper in question, Cecelia Groark, bought a Groupon. She didn’t like the customer support she received, so she left a scathing Yelp review.  If facing bankruptcy via  Groupon wasn’t enough, now Krunch’s reputation was tarnished, too. Yelp plus Groupon is a volatile mix, that’s for sure: it can implode a business in a few short months.

What turned this from a sad tale to a nuclear chain reaction was Krunch himself. He figured out the identity of the Yelper, and engaged in the type of  payback every small business owner dreams of, but never does: he struck back. He created a blog under her name, and according to the Chicago Sun-Times he “accused her of ‘embezzling’ from her employer, of having a drug addiction and of “turning to the oldest profession to gain funds need[ed] to support her habits.”

Unfortunately for Krunch, he seems to be something of a dumbass. After creating the blog (which included her cell phone number), he emailed a link to Ms. Groark. Now he is facing a half million dollar lawsuit.  Oh, and dozens of other Yelpers are trashing his reputation. While Krunch “I hope to God your middle name isn’t Kris” Kretschmar is not much of a protagonist, this is one of those stories that every small business owner should take notice of.

Italian Pick of the Week : Signore Dettori

Posted by Keith Wallace on Jan 2, 2011 in Wine Reviews | 0 comments

Tenute Dettori 2003 Tudori “Badde Nigolosu”, Sardegna

Attending a large scale wine tasting with over 150 producers represented reminds me of a major league tryout camp – there are the usual suspects who always turn up, a couple of can’t miss prospects that are showing well, and that unexpected gem that appears from out of nowhere. Except in this case nowhere is Sardinia.

Those who have read previous reviews have probably noticed that I often favor wines that are authentic, that are the creations of makers who take the road less traveled rather than the superstrada of standardization. Alessandro Dettori freely admits, and takes pride in the fact, that his wines are what they are and are not crafted to the expectations of others.

Tudori is 100% Cannonau, and from the moment it spills into the glass it is obviously not ordinary. Its tomato juice color and consistancy are tell tale signs that it hasn’t been fined, filtered or clarified and would be an immediate deal killer for those used to more extracted versions of the grape.

The production philosophy is to play down tannic strength and remove any semblance of heaviness in the texture and mouthfeel, allowing the true nature of Cannonau to emerge. The result is hard to define. There is definately less of a “garrigue” presence and bite. The fruits are mellow and roll smoothly across the tongue. It doesn’t exactly have finesse in contrast to other Sardinian reds… maybe less rough and rustic? Put it like this..you try it, and in the spirit of Signore Dettori, you nod in satisfaction or put it down and walk away.