I'm a bit late to this tasting party, but I just had to talk about the bottle of CertaPro Wine I just opened.

CertaPro is a commercial house painting company we used. When we gave a reference to a neighbor they sent us a bottle of CertaPro wine.

The label looks just like their company logo. Pretty industrial.

I kept the bottle for a couple years so it's a 3 year old wine now.

Tastes pretty much like most well-blended under $10 California wines these days.

CertaPro. Timeless good taste in wine, and paint.

quote:

Originally posted by Bongwater Q. Liberalstein:

CertaPro. Timeless good taste in wine, and paint.

Doesn't have quite the same ring as Nuits St Georges, does it!

quote:

Originally posted by maryrose:

quote:

Originally posted by Bongwater Q. Liberalstein:

CertaPro. Timeless good taste in wine, and paint.

Doesn't have quite the same ring as Nuits St Georges, does it!

Perhaps not, but it's still easier to pronounce than Pouilly-Fuissé, even for the French!

SCREW TOPS

Have you noticed? The wine industry...after gently telling us, for many years, that screw tops are a better choice for a great many wines than corks...is now using them on more and more wines, whether we like them or not.

What I think...yep, they're probably right. But it's hard for consumers to change. Not to mention that consumers were trained over decades to associate them with cheap and lousy wine. And I know there sure are problems with corks; who hasn't had a spoiled, corky wine or dried-out, crumbling cork?

I see good wines now with screw tops that used to have corks. One that comes to mind is A Mano Primitivo from Puglia.

I kind of prefer the plastic corks that still allow me the ritual of using a corkscrew.

Most of the New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs come with a screw top and you just don't find better wine for $10-$17 than those.

jf

Ah, yes, NZ Sauv. Blancs. I remember the days of $4.50 a bottle...

But speaking of Sauvignon Blanc, and $4.50 a bottle, I picked up -- with some hesitation -- a Sutter Home 2005 S.V. yesterday. You know, it wasn't bad. Certainly better than some cheapo Chileans. Decent summer slurping. And it even had a cork!

Would have been cheaper still in a magnum.

I'm getting a lot of 'artificial cork' bottles. Not that they or screwtops bother me.

I haven't tried a box wine yet, but I intend to. As I understand it, the lining collapses as the box is drained, thus preventing the wine from oxydizing before you are ready to pour it. For someone like me who doesn't necessarily drink a whole bottle at a sitting, it seems like a good idea. Of course, they have to put something decent in the box to make it worth drinking.

I know they have rigs one can buy to evacuate the air from an opened bottle, but it seems kind of fussy and expensive.

Bong, do report back if you find any decent box wines. I've encountered a few at other people's parties, but none that excited me so far.

I bought a VacuVin awhile back. You know, the vacuum pump to extract air from an open bottle. It was cheap, about $10. I thought it was making a difference at first, but lately I've been going back to just sticking the cork back in and storing the bottle in the fridge till the next day. Refrigerating makes a bigger difference than getting the air out, I think. YMMV.

I might go back to the VacuVin for my cobwebbed bottles of Chateau Lafite, as added insurance.

I have one of those little pump stoppers for (those rare) unfinished bottles. I doubt it really does much, but it makes me think I'm doing something.

There was a bit of reluctance on my part to buy bottles with screw caps. "It's just conditioning," I kept telling myself. So, now, after dozens of bottles of screw-capped wines, I really can't discern any difference between a cork and a Stelvin in terms of which keeps the wine better. Still, though, I'm not convinced of the ability of wine with a screw cap to react to cellaring. I haven't kept any around long enough to find out yet.

I do feel I must rant, though. I am really annoyed at some of the newer plastic and rubberized corks. You know, depending on the quality of the natural cork, the corks used may be waxed to ease their removal. But some of the artificial ones stick to the glass in the throat of the bottle and make their removal a decided pain. Several times now I have broken the rim of the bottle while trying to pull some of these intractable imposters!

This paragraph from an article in yesterday's NYT's about a small winery in France highlights the enormous markup of wine sold in restaurants. It's something I already knew, but seeing it in black and white print made it stand out (bold emphasis is mine)...


"But there is one country in the world where rosé is loved and consumed in vast quantities: Britain. It was a case of export or die. It was a complex business, but eventually a wine importer in London was so impressed with the samples of rosé we gave him to taste that he took the lot. And here the figures become more interesting. Exported rosé is more expensive; Thierry sold him our entire stock at around $3.50 a bottle. The importer then doubled that, or more, and sold it wholesale to restaurants. In the few London restaurants that sell Château Pécachard rosé, it will cost you around $40 a bottle. Clearly there is money to be made in selling wine, after all."


From $3.50/bottle to $40.00/bottle!!

quote:

Originally posted by Bernard:
This paragraph from an article in yesterday's NYT's about a small winery in France highlights the enormous markup of wine sold in restaurants.

This is so true. Some years back -- this might have been just regional, or NY State -- there was some concern among the wine industry that these high restaurant prices were hurting their market, and some restaurants agreed and cut their wine prices drastically. I guess that idea died out because wine prices are still pretty high in every restaurant I go to.

It's a pretty good rule of thumb that a bottle of wine at a restaurant will cost twice what it costs retail. In one case, I noticed a bottle that I purchase frequently on a restaurant's list. But rather than twice retail, it closer to triple the retail price, and this on a very modest wine.

So, I asked our server to ask the owner to come to our table. I asked the owner why it was necessary to triple the price of such a wine. His answer was very interesting, and one that I've tried to remember whenever perusing a restaurant's wine list.

He said that at the wholesale level there is a pretty large range of prices per bottle. Further, he said, the owner and chef (or sommelier at fancier places) try to match the wine selections to the menu. Some of the wines aren't necessarily of the highest echelons, but even so, if a wine or two are offered at considerably lower prices, they will seldom be ordered, regardless of their actual quality.

Nearly anyone in the restaurant business that sells wine by the bottle will tell you that most folks will have little idea what they're ordering. They'll typically play it safe by choosing something of "average" price on the list, or perhaps a bit lower. But the cheapest wine on the list is typically viewed as inferior, especially if it considerably cheaper than the next higher priced wine.

In this particular case, I knew the wine to be a bargain at retail, yet it wasn't being offered as the least expensive selection. But, to put this wine near the middle of the pack, the owner had priced it far higher than its normal wholesale or retail selling price would indicate. It seems this was one of the owner's favorite wines of all time, and he wanted to be sure that the largest number of his customers would choose it from the wine list.

I told him how much I liked that wine, too, and how I had purchased it by the case on a number of occasions. We discussed its merits and shortcomings for a few minutes and determined that we were in nearly total agreement in our opinions. Our table ended up ordering three bottles of it over the course of that particular dinner.

Before our bill arrived at the table, the owner came by and asked to speak privately with me. He told me he was going to provide our party's wine gratis. He also told me that his restaurant's wine markup was a significant source of the restaurant's profitability, and that providing our party with complimentary wine was not a problem. He said he appreciated my honesty with him and wanted to do something for me.

I know the profit margin on restaurants is exceedingly thin, even at the most upscale of places. Bar drinks and wine are one area where the restaurant's owners can make a little more profit, giving them a safety cushion when other costs may go haywire temporarily.

Just a quick note on a wine that I think merits mention, not least because of its inexpensiveness.

"The Stump Jump" from D'Arenberg comes to us from South Australia's Barossa Valley. It's a classic Rhône blend of Grenache, Syrah/Shiraz and Mourvèdre. Like its French brethren, there is plenty of fruit up front, thanks to the Grenache, while the Shiraz adds peppery spice and the Mourvèdre adds darker complexity.

It comes in a handy Stelvin-closure bottle and retails for about $8. It's a delicious bargain.

Have you all heard about this? The Subjectivity of Wine

Excerpt:
In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

-rf (who must now confess that she buys wine from the bargain room)

tonight I'm drinking a Cab from 2005 made by Eberle. They're out of Paso Robles in the Central Coast of California.
It is heaven. Later tonight, fiancee and I are going to open a Muscat Canelli from same Eberle for the spa tonight!