Meet Sauvignon Blanc - The Rebel

When I think about Sauvignon Blanc, I remember that guy who went against every imaginable grain. He didn’t play sports or join clubs because it was too normal – he was an individual. If everyone was wearing red that year, he wore blue or black. Instead of a letter jacket, he rocked a

tough leather and perhaps some chains. When all his friends were listening to pop and hip hop, he preferred grunge and painted his fingernails black. A true rebel. Not the boy next door.

When I put my nose into a great glass of Sauvignon Blanc, my reaction is usually “What the funk???” Because it gives you what you wouldn’t expect from a wine – freshly cut grass, green bell pepper, scallions, etc on the nose, and if it isn’t a lower end Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, or something similarly new world, you will be shocked and appalled by the austerity on the palate! And that’s the way he wants you to react when he enters a room. Just like he wasn’t interested in team sports or clubs in school, he’s not for corporate – he owns his own Harley Davidson shop so he can dress however the funk he wants and talk bikes all day. Sancerre, located at the inland end of the Loire Valley in France, is the official homeland of Sauvignon Blanc. It is also grown in Bordeaux, and when blended with Semillon and sometimes Muscadelle (not related to Muscat, Muscadet or Muscadine) it is Graves (pronounced Grahv) the official white wine of the region. Sancerre set the standard for grassy Sauvignon Blanc, that beloved “cat’s pee” swag that true Sauvignon fans look for in their glass. From these wines you can experience citrus flavors, particularly lemon or lemon zest and grapefruit, and they’re invariably bone dry.

On a different vein, Sauvignon Blanc proliferates in the Marlborough region of New Zealand’s South Island, brand new world. More audacity – of all the random places to take root! Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc can be grassy with that cat’s pee vibe as well, but on the palate they take on a distinct passion fruit flavor, with less austerity than their French contemporaries. They’re much more user friendly, in their own rebellious way.

In general, because of characteristically high acidity, Sauvignon Blanc is a great food wine. I like it with fried foods, anything salty or creamy like baked macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, fried clams, fried fish, French fries, eggs benedict – yes, why not have a glass of wine with breakfast, it’s a wonderful way to start a day! Also I love Sauvignon Blanc with dried sausage or cured meats, and semi-soft cheeses (avoid blues, the acidity in those cheeses will clash with the high acidity in the wine).

Your homework for this week and weekend is to drink six Sauvignon Blanc. You are excused from this assignment on Thursday, as September 1 is #CabernetDay, but then you must dive back into your devoirs! Sancerre or Pouilly Fumé (the other Loire Valley Sauvignon benchmark) are highly recommended. Quincy is a less expensive alternative to these, not quite like the authentic article but at least you will be drinking from

the same region at about half the price. Marlborough is also a must. These are ubiquitous and plentiful – shop in the US$13-$18 range, you can almost pick blind because they are so consistent! If you can get a Graves or another white Bordeaux called Entre-Deux-Mers, grab one for a unique experience. Then see what is produced near you. Sauvignon Blanc can pack up and move anywhere to thrive, so you’ll find wines from various US States, Austria, South Africa, Italy, Chile and various other locals in your store or on your fave wine website.

Then just for kicks, treat yourself to a Sauternes. This is the celebrated dessert wine of Bordeaux, the only place in the world famous for making sweet Sauvignon Blanc (blended also with Semillon and Muscadelle). You deserve dessert! Do Tweet your notes to @wineLIFE_ #SauvBlancHW. Tell us which one was your favorite (please include the wine’s name, vintage and region), how much you paid for it and its best qualities. You can also post notes on the wineLIFE Facebook wall. Bottoms up!

Meet Cabernet Sauvignon - Team Captain

When I think about Cabernet Sauvignon, I think about the jock. The guy who played three sports and was six feet tall with a great body and a handsome face with chiseled features. He probably rocked the gridiron, as well as either baseball or soccer, and he was on the wrestling team. He was captain of all of them. He is grown up now but he still has that winning smile that captured the attention of almost every girl in school (and some boys).

As a member of those teams, and as a top sales manager in his firm today, he relies heavily upon his teammates for success – Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot are usually his MVPs. But he can definitely hold his own with little or no help. He’s a strong character, but he gets along with everyone – he is well liked. Nonetheless, he doesn’t bend to anyone’s whim. He is who he is no matter what playing field (wine region), or what combination of teammates (blend), or what coaching (winemaking) style. Cabernet is always reliably Cabernet.

When buying Cabernet Sauvignon you can start with these two benchmarks:
Bordeaux from the Left Bank that are blends in which Cabernet is usually the main ingredient and the strongest character
California (particularly Napa Valley) varietally labeled Cabernet

If you are intrigued by wines and foods that have great balance and acidity and are not overtly fruity, Bordeaux is a good way to go. You can find pretty decent Left Bank Bordeaux, particularly Bordeaux Superieur, between US$10-$20 that will suit your taste. If you’re feeling special, look for wines labeled Première Côtes de Bordeaux, Pomerol, Haut-Medoc, Grand Cru and Grand Cru Classé. You will spend more money but in most cases, you do get more for your dollar out of those bottles. They are usually a bit fuller bodied with more layers of interesting flavors.

If you prefer wines and foods that are very flavorful and rich, especially if you are an unabashed lover of meat, then Napa Valley Cabernet should make you happy. You can find good Napa Cab starting around $15. Below that, you may see Cabernet simply labeled as “California” which means the grapes came from various unspecified regions in that great big state. I can’t vouch for these as suitable substitutes. Go for Napa. In general the more expensive the Napa Cab, the bigger a wine it will be on your palate. A couple of C-notes will score you a linebacker!

Nonetheless, there is Cabernet Sauvignon coming out of every corner of this great wine world! And the truth is most of it, even if it is labeled Cabernet Sauvignon, is blended. Cabernet tends to have trouble filling your palate by itself, so he usually teams up with Merlot to fill out the center for you with yummy berry fruit. (in the US a wine can be labeled varietally as long as it contains at least 75% of that grape variety, so Napa Cabernet can contain up to 25% Merlot or other varieties) But he is usually the backbone of a blend, the go-to guy.

Your homework for this week is to try 5 Cabernet Sauvignons. You should have one Napa Cabernet, one Bordeaux from the Left Bank, and three others from totally different places - South Africa, Argentina, New York, Italy, Texas, New Zealand - and tweet your notes to @wineLIFE_ #CabSauvHW. Tell us which one was ur fave (please include the wine’s name, vintage and region), how much u paid for it and its best qualities. You can also post notes on the wineLIFE Facebook wall. We would love to keep up with what you are drinking!!

How We Select Wine

How do we Select Wine for wineLIFE Wine Shop?

The short answer is that we taste. We’ve tasted every single wine in the store at least once. People bring us wine to taste, and we try them, and based on their cost, we decide whether we can a. stand behind it as a wine of quality and value for money and b. fit it into our growing catalog of wines (gratuitous plug).

The long answer is still simple. In our store, we want to offer our customers a well chosen selection of wines. So we started by categorizing everything we tasted - first just into groupings like white, red, rosé, sparkling, then into grape variety categories. And so evolved our Chardonnay (including a lovely, oaky-buttery number from upstate New York and an Unoaked refresher from Australia), Sauvignon Blanc (including an austere white Bordeaux and a fruity Argentine darling), Riesling (including both sweet and dry versions and a great 3L Bag-in-Box), Pinot Noir (including one great Chilean under $15 that actually tastes great) and Malbec (including one with a few years of age on it) sections. Thus we began filling in other areas - Sparkling wines with simple sweeties, crisp Cavas and a Blanc de Blanc Champagne, Cabernet and Bordeaux Red blends.

We also wanted to support local as much as possible, so we made sure to fit in a strong offering of wines from the North Fork of Long Island and the Finger Lakes. Rounded out with some great Italian reds, which will expand into a World Reds section (because honestly, we’re probably not going to have a Sangiovese section in the store), an international selection of rosés, some Pinot Gris and Grigio and some great stickies, we have a store we can be proud of.

Now if we could just wean our customers off that damned Bitch Bubbly...

Bringing Wine

So you've been invited over for dinner and you're not sure what wine to bring?  I got you!  There are several ways you can arrive at a decision of what to buy, and its a good idea to have a sense for what you want BEFORE heading down to the wine shop (in this case, wineLIFE, I'm sure) to make your purchase.  Just follow this easy wine buying strategy, and you'll be in and out of the store in no time with the perfect bottle for the event!

When thinking about what wine to buy, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who will I be drinking this bottle of wine with?
If you're visiting good friends, and you're not particularly worried about what they will think when you pull the bottle out of the bag, then skip to question 3.
If this is your first time to someone's home and don't know what's for dinner, go red. Think Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah - these wines have wide appeal. 
If you want to impress - meeting the parents, going to the boss's holiday dinner, wowing a client - go with a wine that has a good reputation, whether red or white, still or sparkling.

2. What food will I be drinking this bottle of wine with? 
If you know what's for dinner, go with rules of thumb that work - whites and lighter reds for fish, pork and poultry, richer reds and bold whites for red meat and game.  If you know me, you’ll know that I abhor wine rules, but in cases when you’re not sure what’s being served, it helps to narrow down the choices.
3. How much should I spend?
In most cases, $15.00 can get you a great bottle of wine. 
If you are eager to impress, be prepared to spend at least $20.00
If you know what is being served, go with the tone of the menu. If your host is just having hors d'oeuvres or making guacamole, a bottle around the $10 mark should be fine, but if he's going to town with confit duck and wild mushroom risotto, your bottle should live up to his efforts. 

4. Should I gift wrap it?
Yes you should! Presentation makes all the difference - a fun wine bag or just wrapping the bottle in nice tissue paper shows you really appreciate being invited over and the wine purchase wasn't strictly obligatory. 

A Few More Tips...

Be open to the possibility that your host may have the wine for dinner taken care of and that they may put your bottle on the rack to enjoy another time - that's a great way to offer a wine gift!  

The wine, your experience buying the wine, even the bag you brought it in can all be great fodder for conversation. Consider this when making your buying decisions. 

Sparkling wine is always fun and is not necessarily just for celebrations - they go great with foods that call for crisp whites. Champagne is usually $30.00 or more per bottle. If you don't want to spend that much, Cava and Prosecco are other popular alternatives that cost a lot less. 

Happy shopping!

Uses for Cheap Wine #17 - Wine Rack Filler

You LOVE wine! You’re the kind of collector who never has a full rack or wine fridge - you just can’t not drink it! Well, here’s my advice for how to keep your wine indulgence satisfied and still maintain a full rack, because let’s face it, an empty wine rack or wine fridge is NOT acceptable.

On a $500.00 budget:

Take some of your allocations from your favorite California mailing list wineries, perhaps wait until you get your tax refund, and buy:

2 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir @ $54.00 each (or you can split this up into a Pinot Noir and a Zinfandel for more variety, although you would get variety if you got two different Pinot Noirs from WS - the cuvées from different vineyards offer different flavor profiles)

1 Vie Les Amours Syrah @$42.00

1 Anomaly Cabernet Sauvignon $89.00

Treat yourself to a couple of special bottles from the Old World:

1 Chateau Calon Ségur St. Estephe 2005 $90.00

1 Guiseppe Quintarelli Valpolicella $100.00

And then...

you could pick up 4-6 more bottles at your favorite local wine retailer for $45.00 or less TOTAL COST, because the market is abundant with cheap wine, and a lot of it is surprisingly decent!

2 Mia Prosecco, (dry sparkling wine from Italy) $6.99

1 Mil Piedras Malbec, Argentina $8.99

1 OCD Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand $9.99

1 Amour Vin de Pays de Vaucluse, France $4.99

1 Falkensteiner Rieden Zweigelt (dry red wine from Austria) $8.99 for a 1 liter bottle

Total expenditure to fill your rack: $468.95 + tax. And you didn’t even have to buy Yellow Tail!

The truth is there is a lot of flexibility in what you can fill your rack with. Personally, if I didn’t have a toddler running rampant in my apartment, I would do the above, and put all those fabulous pricey bottles on top, reserving the bottom spaces for a revolving supply of good, cheap vino. And no, I don’t let my higher end stuff sit around too long either, because let’s face it, a special occasion can be the evening I come home to a my warm apartment and I’m feeling extra thankful, and then I’m popping the cork on my $89.00 Anomaly Cab to enjoy with leftover Truffle Risotto with Pork and I’m pouring some into my daughter’s sippy cup and mixing it with a little water.

Also, based on the above, you could actually fill the whole rack for $100.00 or less!

My final piece of advice: Always leave one or two spaces open for those unexpected bottles you get as gifts. Whoever said it’s better to give than to received obviously never got anything, and unlike in France, we are happy to accept a bottle from a friend around here!

Tasting While Congested

If you ever wondered if you could party yourself sick, you can. I partied so hard this past weekend, I woke up Tuesday morning with a sore throat, swollen tonsils, and my nose completely clogged. That evening, I was due to taste the wines of Palmaz Vineyards, a small Napa Valley concern down by the city of Napa with just a handful of wineries nearby (most of Napa Valley’s wineries are further north near the towns of Rutherford, Yountville, Oakville, St Helena and Calistoga)

Palmaz is another intense wine story of family, money, change and fortune (see my June 4th blog on Charles Krug). The property, originally a little stone house on a hill, was founded in 1800’s by a gent who was actually distilling, rather than making wine. Henry Hagen, a German immigrant who was a Napa Valley winemaking pioneer, purchased the property in 1881, built a magnificent 4 floor mansion, and took the property from moonshine to wine under the name Cedar Knoll. Sadly, Prohibition would force him out of the business and the property, and when the bank foreclosed on his home and land, he and his family took all that they could carry and left. For 85 years, no wine was made there.

Fast forward to the 1970’s when Dr. Julio Palmaz, a surgeon from Argentina, came to the University of California at Davis to study - who knew UC Davis had a medical school? Inevitably, he met many winemakers and caught the wine bug, but he and his young wife Amalia soon moved south to Texas where he would build his medical career. Their fortunes turned when Dr. Palmaz made a discovery that would revolutionize heart surgery. He created the Heart Stent, a device that holds the artery open to improve blood flow. He sold his invention to Johnson and Johnson, and treated himself to this fantastic property back in Napa, where he and his family now live and work as winemakers.

At a table in the lobby of the swank Ace Hotel in Flatiron, Alan Greenberg, the company’s East Coast representative, told us this captivating story over olives, salami and cheese. Samantha, Betty and I, three of the five board members of Women for WineSense NYC Chapter were about to be treated to a tasting of 5 of this winery’s 6 wines, including a rare vertical of three vintages of their $100.00 Palmaz Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley. But alas, my nose could not cooperate.

I sniffed and I snuffed and I blew but I could only get a tiny bit of air through one nostril. Through that portal I took a deep whiff of the Palmaz Chardonnay Napa Valley 2007 - success! It came though! Crisp green apple, citrus and cream aromas were lovely! On the palate, the acidity was perfect - not so soft as to be flabby from the malolactic, not sharp. Fabulous. I had a lot less luck with wines that were a lot more expensive. I could smell fresh red berry, cassis and hints of cinnamon in a very youthful 2005 Cabernet, and leathery cedar and tobacco aromas in a more mature 2003, but the 2002 was kinda lost on me. I could just cry!!

The Palmaz Muscat Canelli 2007 was spectacular, though. Grapey as Muscat can be, laced with lovely floral aromas. The sweetness was delightful on the attack, but it subsided as it progressed across my palate to a clean finish, and had a nice vein of acidity to balance it out. Very impressed, as were Samantha and Betty.

The moral of the story? Well, I guess there could be several:

Don’t schedule an important wine tasting the day after a big party weekend.

Don’t skip a wine tasting just because your nose is stuffy - you may surprise yourself.

If you can’t control the scheduling of a tasting, bring along other trusted palates to help you evaluate the wines.

A beautiful dessert wine can conquer flooded sinuses!

I can’t wait to taste the wines with a clear nose!