No Wine Over $20-Reviews and the LA Wine Scene

It is axiomatic to oenophiles that you have to sit on some wines for awhile so the wine can develop in the bottle. I am coming to the conclusion that this is just one more corollary to the magic chef and the hallowed ground marketing themes that have created the Parker/Rolland two headed monster. Wine does age in the bottle. But does it get better? Recent pourings/tasting have concluded otherwise. The 1996 Burgundies flopped like Vlade Divac taking a charge. And here we have some pinot noir bottlings from the fabled Santa Rita Hills that also fell well below high expectations when purchased on release.

To be fair, tBoW must own being swept up willingly in the SRH hype and falling for the bombastic fruit forward styles that came from the region. How times and palates change.

This was a somewhat free-form tasting that began with white wines of curious interest and closed with five "heavy hitters". Be sure to check out very good friend David McMillan's delirious and delicious political content at the end of this post.

2006 Treana Central Coast Mer Soleil Monterey $10: Purchased online at wines.com. 55% Viognier 45% Marsanne. Dotoré asks "what are they aiming for with this wine"? Too much oak, alcohol, everything. More like a California chardonnay than a white Rhone blend. Awful. Whatever they were aiming for it could not have been this wine. 14.5%

2005 Andre Perret St Joseph $40: A Robert Chadderton selection and the first I have found unimpressive. Highly regarded producer. Would like to taste his reds. Foxy flavors make the Marsanne Rousanne blend taste more like a Viognier. Worth $15 but not what tBoW paid. At least the alcohol is a decent level. 13%

1999 Jean Luc Colombo Le Rouet Blanc Hermitage: Online press on this winemaker is appealing; terroir driven, opinionated, non-traditional. However, this wine did not show well. Acidic and lean out of the bottle. Out of balance. "Nun piss" says an irreverent taster who will never be on Chris Matthews. Somewhat madeirized. Parker says "mature". Soiled flavor as in earth. Not a very good wine. [ed. had to go with red label]

2006 Curran Grenache Blanc $26: tBoW is a Curran fan. This 2006 has been reviewed on two other occasions prior. It may be heading over the hill. Fruit presence more pronounced than old world wines squeezing life from our tongues. Marked contrast to the Rhone efforts. But the wine is out of whack. Enough time has passed to come around as these wines seem to need 12 months. We are struck by how generally mediocre are the white wines, despite expectations.

2005 Lamargue Costieries de Nimes $10: At the insistence of our honored guest we opened this delightful bottle from Languedoc. 50% Grenache Blanc, 50% Rousanne in the blend, reasonably balanced, gentle enough to sip gently, low enough alcohol to sip again and again, and easily the best of class on this day. Great value. 13.5%

disappointed and unimpressed with the white Rhones we moved on to the featured showing...Santa Rita Hills pinot noir.

These wines came right out of the tBoW cellars of yours truly and Dotoré where they have been since release.

2002 Ojai Clos Pepe $40: What could be better than pairing the original Santa Barbara/Central Coast winemaker Adam Tolmach with one of the premium new era growers (and winemaker) Wes Hagen of Clos Pepe. The wine is awkward and even a bit vegetal. Truly Adam Tolmach is somewhat of a tortured soul. Take a moment to read his own notes on this wine. I prefer his Syrah wines.

2002 Sea Smoke Southing $50: Rich, dense pinot fruit. Very smoky even though that has nothing to do with the label name. Let's pretend it does. Entry level for the most collectable SRH label. But not the best wine from the region!! 14.3%

2004 Kenneth Crawford Clos Pepe Pinot Noir $40: Thin, acidic, more like a vin ordinaire Syrah from southwest France. Something happened here between the vintage, harvest and vinification. Further evidence that Syrah is the wine to seek from SRH? I'm convinced. [ed. I never noticed how similar are the Sea Smoke and K-C labels.]

2002 Melville Carrie's VIneyard Pinot Noir $60: That is correct sir. We ponied up three Jacksons for this monster wine. It is rich. It is ripe. It is eating the little dog. This wine, alcohol and all, was preferred to the K-C, Sea Smoke and Ojai efforts. Nobody would ever confuse this with an old world pinot noir. But they might confuse it with a zinfandel port from Sonoma. 15.1%

2004 Paul Lato Goldcoast Pinot Noir $30: Elegant, balanced, delicate, smooth, silky, some smoke. Paul gets it right every time. In the vintages tBoW owns he made 75 cases. Why didn't we buy more? That's right, we had a limit. Dumbkopf!! 14.5%

So here is the real question. Given the recent tastings of SRH and Burgundy (avoiding impulse to write French Burgundy), from which region is tBoW likely to pick his next pinot noir wine? Domestic, and in the following order....Williams Selyem and Paul Lato in a dead heat; then select Oregon bottlings, then select SRH bottlings. If we go "old world" we will be looking for recent vintages from less fashionable regions....from Becky Wasserman and North Berkeley Wines.

Still have a taste for satire and a contemporary POV? Try David McMillan's News In Color on youtube. 75 entires and climbing. Here is one of my currents faves. WARNING: this material can be political.

The wine economy update:When I wrote this post about a month ago in advance of this publication preceded the greatest economic event in our lifetlme. The current financial crisis in world markets has bearing upon what we will be buying and drinking over the next couple years. It is more important than ever to find value wines and avoid the vinous equivalents of institutions deep into credit debt swaps

The end-of-days folks are getting new airtime. tBoW finds that contemplating the mass psychology of cataclysmic disaster scenarios makes it all the more important to attend to more rational minds breaking new ground in their own way.

New York Times wine columnist Eric Asimov recently published a column that addressed the "intersection of price and value". It is definitely worth a read. With the economy slipping into darkness we are going to be reading a lot more about the broader issue of price and value - a favorite and frequent tBoW subject. Click here to read a pdf version of "Modest Luxuries for Lean Times" posted with permission from Mr. A.

tBoW interviewed an industry insider who has seen plenty of ebb and flow over the past 30 years. Here is what he sees in his looking glass. (1) Trophy wines are a dead market and have been for 6 months. After all, even Sumner Redstone had to sell off stock at depreciated values to cover his margin calls. (2) We will be seeing more and more wines form South Africa and South America because they are the only wine producing nations that can compete at the sub-$10 level with Two Buck Chuck. (3) California wines have to recalibrate and re-negotiate in order to avoid pricing themselves almost completely out of a declining consumer market. Look for this to be a painful process that will not be realized until 2010 as California vintners hang on to the vapor from their Mondavi-style hangover.

And this is just the start. Here is what tBoW was thinking about a few weeks ago.

The Canyon Bistro in Topanga Canyon has been open less than a year. The history of dining establishments in Topanga Canyon is checkered, to be blunt. Topanga is the canyon where time stands still. I suppose time also stands still in East LA where mariachis and homies have been alive and kicking for more than 60 years. The Topanga equivalent is hippies, pot and artists...since the 60s.

The last decent restaurant predictably folded [ed. ca 1993] undone by Topanga's finest hippies, artists and reefer. The place was a home with a fireplace masquerading as a dining establishment. Dining was very relaxed.
Steaks were broiled on a grill in the fireplace in the dining room. [ed. That had to be out of code] Sometimes you had to remind the waiter the steak was ready to come off. Service was a direct function of what weed was in the canyon that month. All the servers were stoned. We saw Steve Guttenberg in there a couple of times [ed. and Rebecca Romijn in Canyon Bistro]. Now it's an "antique" clothing store.

The Canyon Bistro is sober and quite charming. The tBoW team hopes they make it. Service is alert, food is prepared well, and the wine list is decent. One recent evening we brought in a wine and ordered one off their list.

1996 Rochioli Little Hill Pinot Noir $475 (today online): If I had to pick a favorite Rochioli pinot noir this would be it. 1996 was a very good vintage in Russian River. The lineup used to be East Block, West Block, Three Corners and Little Hill. The color on this 12 year old wine is cherry red. The nose is exotic in the way Broadbent describes the exotic nose of Mouton as Chinese spices. We have tea, truffles (funk), cardamon. Indian spices? There is acid in the front. Fruit is high toned. It all settles down and wasn't this a very fine bottle of wine? 13%

2006 Louis Latour Macon Lugny "Les Genievres" $42 (on the list, $20 retail): Stony, citric. Green apples. Mineral-like and lean. No oak. tBoW prefers this style of Chardonnay. Very nice bottle. 13.5%

2005 Grange des Rouquette Marsanne Viognier$8: A Robert Kacher Selection from the Languedoc. Chalky nose, lightly woody, call it balsa. On the lean side. Some honeydew melon emerges but it is too late. Lost interest. Probably one year past prime! 13%

I know what you're thinking. Where is Steve Guttenberg now? Find out easy enough online. Just turned 50. Hot work period was in the 80s. Still works on stage, Dancing With The Stars showing off a "hot press" facelift. Playing it a little safe. Best line from his IMDb bio "Spent a week volunteering at the Houston Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina hit". Bravo.