Wine Blogging Wednesday #31: Box Wine.
It’s all relative. That’s what they say.
Ask a wine critic what makes a great wine experience. You’ll probably hear words like balance, power, elegance, subtlety, beauty, depth. All expected, to some degree. All defensible. Respectable. Words you’d find yourself nodding along to as you hear them. But thing about your own wine experiences – your truly memorable wine experiences. (If you have had any – maybe you’ve never had a glass of wine before in your life. In that case, onward, ye temperate soldier! Cast not thine eyes upon the vines of treachery as thou drivest up Highway 29!) I’d be willing to bet that for nearly all of them, there’s a good story to go along with that wine.
Think about it – how many great wine experience stories go something like, “I bought this wine at the store. I took it home and drank it. It was great. It changed my life.” Probably not many – at least not that indistinct. If the wine really was that great, you probably remember what time of year it was, if not what day, who you were with, where you were, if you ate anything with it, and how long it took you to finish it off. Just like Tolstoy says, it’s all about context. Well first he says it’s about transitions, then context, but I can’t think of a good way to fit transitions into this discussion so forget that part. Who cares about Tolstoy anyway. Anna Karenina is overrated. That’s right, Nabokov, I said it!
All right, time for this post to go somewhere. Point is, wine is as much about the environment it is enjoyed in as it is about the quantitative pleasure that it itself can bring. And all of this goes a great deal toward explaining why I found the 2004 Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon, my contribution for this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday event, not all that bad of a wine. As box wines go, it probably isn’t the best you can find, or even the near-best, but under the right circumstances it can be enjoyed as a good sub-$10 bottle.
What’s that, you say? You’ve had Killer Juice Cab and it tastes like someone poured a gallon of grape juice into a pot, boiled it down to half its size, then left it to its own devices for a year in a basement? OK, that’s a valid opinion. I’m not here to say you’re wrong. As I said, it’s all about context. Let me set the scene for my tasting: We were on a bus halfway up a mountain in the middle of the Mendocino County woods. Middle of the night. No electricity – not even a flashlight. A few candles so we could see what we were doing. For food, we had a takeout pizza we’d picked up from town half an hour back. That bus is a place I’ve spent a great deal of time in and around over the last five years, much of it spent with the two friends of mine whom I happened to be sharing the bus with at the time. So I was in a good place, but certainly not the kind of place one would normally conduct any kind of wine tasting. Did the context affect my perception of the wine? Hell yes. Do I care? Nope.
Oh right, tasting note. The Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon came in a three-liter box painted black with a wacky flaming logo. (Too dark in the bus for photos, sorry.) The spigot took some work to extract, which was mildly annoying, but we didn’t experience any drip problems like boxwines.org did. Once poured (into coffee mugs), this wine has a much more purplish tinge than most cabernet; at first glance one might take it for a petite sirah. Not much of a nose; grapey, a little sweet. On the palate, well, fermented grape juice…no harsh metallic taste or alcoholic burn, but not much other than some unassuming fruit, maybe of the blueberry variety. No finish to speak of. Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll make this buy for my own kitchen any time soon. But as we huddled around the candles in the bus and ate cold pizza, it worked for us.
Thanks for the great topic, boxwines.org!
Open for business.
After at least six months (and probably more) of delays, setbacks, postponements, setponements, and postbacks, K&L Wines finally opened their Hollywood branch this past weekend. Huzzah.
I’m a big fan of K&L. I like their selections, I like their prices, but more importantly I like the way they think about wine and the way they talk about wine. When K&L wholeheartedly recommends a wine, I can feel reasonably certain that it’s because they like the wine in the same way that I would like it – that is, as an expression of the grapes grown for the wine and the way that the land they were grown on affected them. Read Greg St. Clair’s thoughts about Brunello di Montalcino, for example, and you’ll understand that the wines he cares the most for are the wines that serve as windows to what the sangiovese grape truly is in Tuscany, not simply the wines that are seamless, international, fruit-driven efforts. The same goes for Clyde Beffa and the wines of Bordeaux, and a lot of the other senior K&L staff members think along the same lines as far as I can tell. K&L also has one of the best online presences in the wine selling community, with a comprehensive site, a fun blog, and detailed descriptions of a lot of their wines (although some of their notes are simply taken from the winemaker’s notes, but whatever).
So you can see why the prospect of K&L, which was usually a sort of bonus trip for me whenever I found myself in the Bay Area for a weekend with a little cash and some spare time, coming to LA was a pretty cool thing for me. And on Monday, J and I took a trip over to the new store – less than 10 minutes away in Hollywood traffic! – to see what’s what. First impression: it’s got a parking lot! Always a huge plus at the Sunset and Vine catastrophe. And it’s alarmingly close to my gym. I can see that going one of two ways: either I set up some system of pain and reward by working out and only then allowing myself to go grab a bottle, or I start out driving to the gym, but end up sneaking back into the house twenty minutes later with two bottles of Leoville-Poyferre stuffed under my shirt. “No hon, those are just my awesome abs that I’ve been working on since I go to the gym so often. Hey, where’s the bottle opener? I have to…uh…do something…over here…with the door closed. Don’t come in!”
Inside, it’s a bit smaller than I thought it would be. Not to say that it’s small, but the Wine House doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing its advantage of comprehensiveness. It’s a very big, open space, and at the moment it feels rather hollow – hopefully with time, it’ll have more of a lived-in vibe. They also look like they’re still in the process of stocking the aisles; you can see the empty spaces on the shelves in the photo. So far it looks like they’re going to have a considerable French wine selection (the biggest section of the store by far), a good number of Italian wines (not surprising considering that Greg St. Clair is running this newest location), and a decent helping of everything else. The staff was friendly, albeit a little harried as it seemed like there were still some kinks to be worked out with the cashier computers.
They’re offering tastings on a semi-regular basis on the weekends, which I’m looking forward to. In fact, next weekend features an Italian wine tasting with Greg St. Clair! Sweet.
I ended up getting a couple bottles of one wine that I’m very happy with, but unfortunately I can’t share it with you because one of them is a gift and that person will probably read this before they get the gift, so…sorry. In any case, however, if you’re in the LA area and you are feeling like you could use yet another wine store in your life – who couldn’t?! – give K&L a spin. It’s good times.
Cab franc of the week. Again.
Oh friends, it has been too long, I know. All four of you probably spent a collective 8.4 seconds checking this page for something new over the last two weeks. Sorry about that. But look – I come bearing excuses! Like a trip to Northern California, to a land without cell phone reception, let alone internet service, a bad cold that left my taste buds as dead as others’, and an unusually busy period in my non-job workload. All in all, I should have managed a few posts here and there regardless, but a lot of the things I had planned on blogging about simply fell through or I was forced to postpone. But they will come!
I’m back now, though. It’s a little odd to be writing again after the layoff – like taking that first run after a layoff of a few months – you move a little gingerly, not quite in the zone yet. The first run’s a short one, since you don’t want to sprain something your first time back. Feels good to stretch the legs, though. OK, enough running metaphors. Even if nothing else comes together soon, I’ll at least have the cab francs to fall back on – I ordered a whole bushel of them from the Wine Library last week (with free shipping!). It was a great opportunity to nab some wines that just don’t make it out to the West Coast very often, if at all. So we’re packed to the rafters with Bourgueil, Chinon, and Saumur-Champigny. I couldn’t be happier.
So without further ado, here’s this week’s cab franc of the week.
This week’s wine wasn’t actually part of the parcel that came in the mail. I picked up the 2005 Philippe Alliet Chinon at the San Francisco Wine Trading Company, a terrific little store out on Taraval in the city. If you’re ever in the area, I recommend heading out that way to check out their stuff – a lot of interesting French and Italian wines, plus interesting bottles from all over.
Chinon is a town in the Indre-et-Loire area of the Loire region. The Chinon reds are traditionally served a little on the cold side, but not as cold as, say, Lambrusco. The reds from this area are predominantly cabernet franc-based, of course.
Trying the Alliet Chinon for the first time was an interesting experience, because as soon as the cork came out this wine came at me with some serious barnyard action. Not just barnyard, actually. More like…manure. Yep, barnyard, manure, some dark green vegetables…quite the aroma! Almost enough to put one off, except that despite the, uh, eccentricity of the bouquet, it sill seemed very much like a composed aroma, like the wine was intentionally structured this way, as opposed to natural yeasts running amok in the wine and turning each bottle into a farmland crapshoot (no pun intended). There was a force here, and hand that seemed to shape the nose, so to speak, so I decided not to knock any points off for it…but if you’re not into truly rustic bouquets in your wine, I would avoid this bottle. If you see it on the rack at your favorite wine store, pinch your nose as you walk by, just to be safe.
On the palate, though, this wine really shows its stuff, with notes of chocolate and vegetables like asparagus and bell pepper, integrated in that way that only makes sense in a cab franc. It’s a very smooth wine that coats the palate without overpowering it – very pleasurable to hold in the mouth. There are firm tannins here, but I’m not quite sure how much longer it should be kept – it’s drinking very well right now, although I suppose a couple years in the bottle might not hurt it. A great example of a unique wine that expressed a well-composed idea of grape, vintner, and place. It definitely marches to the beat of its own drummer, which is a good thing, even if that drummer could probably use a bath.
All in all, this is a distinctly idiosyncratic wine that I found very enjoyable, and if you like French cab francs, I recommend you seek this bottle out. At around $18, it’s not a huge investment and it’s a great example of the good value coming out of the Loire Valley right now.
