For the uninitiated, these two people are married and write an extremely popular and unintimidating wine column for the Wall Street Journal and have been doing so since 1998. They have turned their former mundane journalistic duties into a different style of reporting, one of sampling the goods they love to enjoy and reporting on the findings, hoping and obviously succeeding to educate people on one of the joys of life. What is interesting, especially within the business executive and executive wannabe culture of more is better and even more surprising and inspiring within a questionable structure of the new influences of Rupert Murdock and his penchant for junk journalism at any popular cost, they are expressing the necessity for finding good, complex, thought provoking, and inexpensive juice for the masses. Go figure.
After closing the shop last night and sloshing sloppily homeward in the rain, listening to NPR and there they were, being interviewed on what to look for at the local wine shop that is really tasty and low priced. If we were located in Seattle, I would have turned around and reopened, waiting for the curious to line up for those $12 and under delights they mentioned in the interview that are tucked in every nook and cranny on our shelves. But this is not Seattle, and I had some delicious homemade turkey soup waiting.
One question that was fielded was about just how low of a price can a bottle of wine go to where it’s not any good. The answer was that they had never had anything good under $4.oo a bottle. That says quite a bit. They also mentioned that it is difficult to find real good expressive domestic wine, still 2/3 of which is from California, anywhere near the price offered by producers in South America, South Africa, the South Pacific, and even Europe. Why? Several reasons including labor and land cost, but a more interesting one including the higher price charged for assuming our undying support for the local industry. Gaiter and Brecher are constantly trying to educate the wineries that this philosophy is only sustainable if the product is any good. Below $10 a bottle, it is rare to find a domestic wine that can compete in quality with many imports of the same price. We have known this for at least a couple of years and frustrate many distributors that try to push cheap local wine on us because it’s “local”. There really is no substitute for quality which is why you’ll find most of our domestic wine to be pricier. Of course, that doesn’t mean there are no really nasty imports lurking about. There are. We’ve been able to weed through quite of few of them and keep them at bay for the most part. We are tasting today and tomorrow for when the distributive cartels come by to peddle their wares. We hope there are some real good deals out there we can pass on. Even though we carry such wines, we still feel a bottle over $30 should really knock your socks off.
rdustin
in2wine
