Archives for November 2006

Well, now – it seems I’ve received a visit from one of the bloggers over at The Contra-Crunchy Conservative, a blog which recently saw a dustup over this post on Beaujolais Nouveau. As it happens, comments regular Cubeland Mystic also posted about Beaujolais, and included this bit of advice:

“The reason for this post was due to my post about the bogus Beaujolais Nouveau tradition that everyone gets excited about once a year. Last time I had the Beaujolais Nouveau I thought the bottle was prettier than the wine. It was pretty sour as I recall, well worth passing up. For nine dollars why not have a couple of really great beers instead of a bad red wine? If you must have wine with your Thanksgiving dinner blow-off the Duboeuf, and invest your money in Three Thieves. Even better if you live in a wine growing region like California, New York, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, North Carolina, or Texas buy a local wine and really show your support for the local economy.”

You know, I often say “go local” when people ask for wine-buying advice, but I mean something quite different. I mean, ask your local retailer, at a shop that is small enough for him to know something about the wines he’s got on his shelves. (And no, you don’t have to be in a major urban center for this. JOB once took me to a fantabulous wine shop in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Sadly, it’s gone now, but only because the owner retired – not because there wasn’t a market.) Case in point: last night I drank a 1996 Chateau Lanessan, a Bordeaux from the Haut-Medoc. Now, Lanessan is not a famous producer – I’d certainly never heard of them – but ’96 was a stellar year in Bordeaux. And the price? $18.95. To pay so little for a Bordeaux from a great year with ten years of bottle age on it? My alarms were going off: surely some distributor had this sitting in an overheated warehouse, and just needed to dump it? Surely it was cooked, tired, and not very good to begin with?

Happily, it was being sold in my local wine shop, and I could ask the proprietor about it. He assured me that it came straight from the chateau – had been stored under optimal conditions in the winery’s cellar until now. He also assured me that he had tasted the wine, and that it was really everything you might hope for in a bargain-Bordeaux from a great year. And he was right. (Though, sadly, the wine adhered to Murphy’s first law of good wine: it always opens up and starts tasting its best right around the time you’re down to your last three sips.) As usual, I was happy I bought small and bought local – but here, “small” and “local” referred to the shop, not the producer. Still, I was supporting the local economy – the local distributor, the local retailer.