B and B - Molto Vegas Style

  

When you hear B and B you think of some charming Victorian farm house in a beautiful and peaceful setting. There is nothing beautiful and peaceful about Las Vegas so as you might expect B and B  means something absolutely different. The B & B here is part of the edible empire of Mario Batali and his partner, Joseph Bastianich. These two have created an intertwined empire that includes restaurants, wineries, books, television shows and consumer products.

Their two newest ventures are located in the massive Venetian Hotel on the Vegas strip. I was prepared to hate these corporate eateries packaged in the faux glitz of the casinos, but I was won over by the food. The prices as you would expect are painful unless you just hit the jackpot.

Located in Piazza San Marco itself is Enoteca San Marco, the more casual version of the two. In the photo above Proscuitto di Parma is thinly sliced while the pageant that is San Marco rolls on in the background. My meal here started with an Insalata Caprese and this dish was the only disappointment of either meal. Not that there was anything wrong with any of the ingredients as each was wonderful, but they just did not fit together. Instead of simple fresh basil, they used pesto, which, while it was excellent, overpowered the delicate flavors of the spectacular mozzarella di bufala. Some dishes just can’t be improved. This was followed by an almost perfect bavette cacio e pepe. A more simple dish you won’t find and they blissfully left it alone presenting it in all its simple glory. This was like eating pasta in Italy as it was perfectly cooked and sauced. It’s not cheap to eat here, but then it’s not cheap to eat on the real San Marco either. You have to give them credit as they could have offered mediocre food and the tourists would still crowd the tables just for the view, but this restaurant is the real thing and offers better food than most restaurants in Venice itself.

The big show is B & B , which is located just off the Venetian casino floor. Filled to the brim with beautiful people with beautiful bank accounts every night, this would have been another easy opportunity to offer less than exciting food to an audience more interested in the Mario brand than the food itself. Yet this is an outstanding restaurant with food that both challenges and caresses your palate. I started  with refreshing marinated fresh anchovies giardiniera, which mixed crisp veggies with delicately flavored anchovies. These kind of anchovies are a revelation for those that have only tasted the canned version. Next was another pasta wonder, spaghetti alla chittara with heirloom tomato and miszuna. The fresh pasta was once again cooked perfectly and the richness of the tomato could not have been challenged by a tomato from your own garden. So few restaurants can resist the urge to over sauce their pasta dishes, but Mario grants his wonderful pasta equal billing with his sauces. It was a tough act to follow such a fine pasta, but the rabbit with baby carrots, pearl onions and carrot vinaigrette stayed true to the essence of Italian cooking in its clean and simple preparation and presentation. The rich caramelized flavors of the meat and carrots were countered by the sweet tartness of the vinaigrette. Once again the dish was expertly cooked arriving juicy and tender throughout.

As you would expect both restaurants have extensive and expensive wine lists. However, there are plenty of excellent wines available at moderate prices for those with a sharp eye. You can also rely on the surprisingly enthusiastic wait staff or one of the sommeliers to find you a bottle if you’ve left a little more money than you wanted at the craps table. However, if you won big there are plenty of big names with big prices to relieve you of your ill gotten gains. At the Enoteca I had the 2005 Bastianich Refosco Rosé and the 2004 Cerasuolo di Vittoria, Maskario, Terre di Gurfo, both were pleasant, but  that’s about it. At the Enoteca they offer their wines by the glass by the quartino or quarter bottle, which is a great way to share and try several wines. At B & B we set our sights a bit higher, but still found a reasonable buy in the outstanding 1998 Cavallotto Barolo Bricco Boschis, which is everything a great Barolo should be: unbelievably aromatic, dramatically complex and not ready to drink. This is simply a great wine that should be ready to drink in another five years or so. That being said, it was so delicious we loved and enjoyed every sip.

The bigger than life image of Molto Mario fits in well with glitter of Las Vegas, but it’s no gamble when it comes to eating at his two Vegas ventures.

KIVA -www.kiva.org

Most of the things we hear about the internet are either bad or stupid. Pornography, phishing, junk mail and inanities like You Tube dominate the presence of the internet in our lives. However, someone finally figured out something that the internet can really do to make this world a better place and that’s Kiva. Kiva is “loans that change lives” and is a website that enables anyone, with any amount of money to give to make a difference in the world.

From their website:

We let you loan to the working poor

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

We partner with organizations all over the world

Kiva partners with existing microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified borrowers. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva.org, our partners upload their borrower profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them.

Take a minute of your life to visit Kiva and make a difference in the world you live in. 

Beauty and the Wine

You hear the story often, someone tastes a wine while on the most romantic trip of their lives and loves it. They sip from the wonderful bottle at a cozy table at a little restaurant high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. The wine is the best they’ve ever had and they buy every bottle they can, but when they open their treasure upon their return to Des Moines they find that the wine has transformed itself into something a bit less magical.

Recently, on a spectacular sun drenched afternoon, I enjoyed a delicious bottle of 2006 King Estate Oregon Pinot Gris with a lovely lady at my favorite seafood restaurant on Oregon’s coast, Local Ocean, in Newport. The day was perfect, we started with stroll  through the Yaquina Head Lighthouse (pictured) and after drinking in the gorgeous views proceeded to sip on the King Estate at Local Ocean alongside some perfect Dungeness Crab Cocktail, Crab Po’boys and grilled blonde salmon.

I thought the wine was excellent, but hope you’ll forgive me if you enjoy it in less perfect circumstances and it disappoints. However, I’m confident it won’t. The King Estate Pinot Gris is reliably exactly what you want from both pinot gris and Northwest white wines. That is bright, crisp, dry and refreshing. It is a great companion to the bounty of the Oregon coast matching crab, clams, fried oysters, razor clams and rockfish with refreshing precision.

Coteaux du Languedoc, Domaine Le Pas de l'Escalette Les Clapas Rouge, 2004

Coteaux du Languedoc, Domaine Le Pas de l’Escalette Les Clapas Rouge, 2004 Produced from old vines including the varieties ” Les vieux Carignan en gobelets complantés de quelques Aramon et Alicante Bouschet.” That’s right, not a noble variety there and the much maligned aramon, the bain of southern France is a respected component. Once again terroir and the passion of the growers create wonderful wine from varieties and vineyards that only produce commercial plonk for most others. Here owners Julien Zernott and Delphine Rousseau craft gorgeous wines full of rich fruit, complexity and irresistible pleasure.  Yet another under $20 wine that puts new world wines in this price range to shame. This wine has real personality instead of the cookie cutter industrial wine produced by American wine corporations who have learned that catchy names and cute labels go a lot farther with consumers than character.

St. Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, Vieilles Vignes, Joël Taluau, 2003

It was a very busy week and the next is sure to be busier. I was happy to arrive home for a relaxing Friday night with a kitchen full of the bounty from this week’s farmer’s market. Dinner tonight was to start with some Insalata Caprese made with some local heirloom tomatoes absolutely bursting with flavor followed by a grilled Carlton Farms pork chop sented with fresh thyme from my garden and corn-on-the-cob so sweet that it may have been better suited to dessert.

From the cellar came a bottle of St. Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, Vieilles Vignes, Joël Taluau, 2003 and just as I pulled the cork and served the caprese Bill Maher came on HBO.  This lovely cabernet franc washed down both the meal and the political commentary beautifully. An hour later, at the end of the show and the meal, I noticed that the bottle was three quarters gone while I was not. Yet another of the pleasures of drinking wine with moderate alcohol, in this case 12.5%.

This is an easy, seductively charming wine with concentrated mouthwatering fruit. There is complexity here, but that’s not the main attraction, which is the zesty purity of the fruit. Produced from vines closing in on their 75th birthday, these old vines speak eloquently for themselves without requiring artificial amplification from oak or other manipulations that would only distract.

By the way, this wine cost less than $14. What did you drink with dinner tonight and what did it cost? If you’d tasted this wine you’d feel a bit ripped off. Me, I’m very happy. 

Drinking Local

When I travel I am committed to eating and drinking local. Whenever I’m in a wine region I make a special effort to seek out new and interesting wines. A week in California recently put this to the test. Food friendly wines were few and far between and after just a few days I was suffering from serious palate fatigue.

Upon my return home, I immediately pulled the cork on a bottle of the  Domaine Domaine des Terres Dorées Moulin a Vent 2005 by Jean-Paul Brun. I have written about this wine several times before, but the first sip of this wine after a week of palate busters was an extraordinary experience. This wine was so vibrant, alive and exciting after the ponderous wines of the week before that I was absolutely transfixed by its energy.

Its at moments like this that I realize just how far my own tastes are out of sync with what’s hot in the world of wine today. 

One wine did stand out from my week of California drinkin’, the 2002 Iron Horse Vineyards Classic Vintage Brut is a stunning example of California sparkling wine. Rich, racy and toasty with perfect creamy texture on the palate and a long complex finish, this wine is a great pleasure to drink. Iron Horse long ago discovered how to make California sparkling wines that show their own unique personality instead of being poor copies of Champagne. On top of that it’s a great value at $31 a bottle.

What makes the Iron Horse such a interesting wine to drink is that is displayed the richness and ripeness that defines California wine without excess. It is a wine that is naturally rich without giving up its balance. It is a wine that is comfortable in its own skin instead of bursting at the seams like most California wines these days. 

Farallon: France or California

I have had the pleasure of eating at San Francisco’s Farallon Restaurant many times. Last week I ate there one more time and the food was once again wonderful. However, I could not help but be struck by the wine list, from which it was far easier to pick a bottle of wine from Europe than from California. How is this possible in a city surrounded by California’s most famous vineyards?

I can understand that an Italian or Spanish restaurant may want to feature wines from those countries as part of their ambiance, but a restaurant specializing in fresh local seafood? How can they justify not featuring the wines of their area, which are highly respected.

Anyone who reads this blog knows of my love of the wines of Europe, but I often see this type of reverse snobbism that infers that the wines of Europe are somehow inherently superior. Maybe the wine buyer of Farallon prefers the crisper, dryer style of European wine , as do I, but I don’t believe that such wines cannot be found in California. They may be hard to find, but they can be found.

A California cuisine restaurant in San Francisco featuring local ingredients should not have a better selection of white Burgundy than it does of west coast chardonnay. 

Riesling, Dr. L, Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, Loosen Bros., 2006

Riesling, Dr. L, Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, Loosen Bros., 2006

If you want proof that the best wine values are to found in wines from Europe, not the new world, just taste this delicious riesling. With far more complexity, riesling character and charm than American rieslings at twice the price, this is an incredible bargain. Fragrant and racy with just a touch of sweetness and laced with fresh peach and juicy apricot flavors and aromas all tied together with a mouthwatering acidity. Priced well under $20 this is a wine to buy by the case so you can always have a bottle waiting in the fridge when you get home from work. On top of it all is a screw cap so you’ll know each bottle will be perfect.

Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, Vieilles Vignes, Domaine des Dorices, Sur Lie, Eermine d'Or, 2004

Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, Vieilles Vignes, Domaine des Dorices, Sur Lie, Ermine d’Or, 2004

It’s hard to imagine a more wonderful dry white wine for under $20. Light gold in color with layers of flavor and complexity throughout. Firm slate, chalk and wet stone aromas float over delicate, bright green apple and ripe pear flavors and aromas. The finish long and perfectly balanced without a trace of the residual sugar that mars the finish of so many new world whites. Offered by the every reliable importer Christopher Cannan. 

Drinking and Tasting

Having just completed the triathalon of pinot noir tastings, Oregon Pinot Camp, the Steamboat winemaker’s conference and the International Pinot Noir Celebration, the contrast between the tastings and the lunches and dinners could not be more clear. During tastings people look for faults and drama, while during meals people look for pleasure.

We have ended up with a system, the 100 point scale, that only measures how wines taste with other wines, while ignoring their primary reason for existence - pleasure at the table. Buying wines selected in this way is a bit like buying a car after sitting in it with0ut ever driving it. When you sit in it you can see all the bells and whistles, but without driving it you can’t really get the feel of it. That’s what our critics offer us, wines ranked without ever really getting a feel for them. Can there be a less pleasant picture of enjoying wine than someone speed tasting dozens of bottles in an attempt to rank them in numerical order?

Anyone that pays even the slightest attention to the wines they drink knows that over the course of a meal fine wines evolve tantalizingly and this evolution is exactly what makes the best wines most exciting. Power, speed tastings to give wines a ranking based on points ignores this most beautiful aspect of enjoying wine. Hiding under a guise of helping the consumer, today’s critics point consumers to wines that are too expensive and not very good with food. What’s that protecting the consumer from?

Automobile writers drive a car for hours or days before reviewing it, while major wine writers may spend mere seconds with a wine. Would you want to buy a car based on the review of a writer that only sat in the car for a few seconds? This is exactly how wine criticism works today. 

Dunn Gone Too Far

Randy Dunn makes big wines. At least he used to make big wines, but now most other winemakers have left him in the dust. It’s hard to think of a Dunn Howell Mountain wine as medium bodied, but that’s exactly what has happened. The alcoholic powerhouses of today are over-the-top for even Dunn and recently he sent a mass email to the press decrying the 15% ethanol Port-like wines being produced by so many of his compatriots. You can read that email and other coverage on Appellation America at:

http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/447/Winemaker-Randy-Dunn.html

 A telling point in all of this is that Dunn notes that his famed Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon has consistently come in between 13.2 and 13.8% alcohol over the years. That’s how far things have swung out of control in just a few years as those levels used to be thought of as big, while today they seem restrained. Dunn’s Cabernet is certainly a substantial wine, but gains its complexity and power though the distinctive character of that vineyard and the fruit grown there instead of using overripe fruit flavors and big alcohol to fool consumers with sweet upfront flavors that masquerade as complexity to inexperienced tasters or palates overwhelmed by tasting too many wines in one session.

Dunn is to be applauded for taking such a public stand on a topic that is sure to displease many of his neighbors. I hope it makes a few winemakers think about this issue of out-of-control alcohol levels before flaming shots of cabernet become the next college fad. 

A Boléro Bottle

Starting out deceptively simple, understated and lithe it slowly built to a dramatic crescendo over the course of the meal. The wine was 2001 La Chapelle di La Mission Haut Brion, Pessac Léognan, the second wine of Chateau La Misson Haut Brion and it is a wonderful, classically styled Bordeaux.

Wines like this are so differently conceived that it is hard to compare them to today’s powerhouse style of winemaking. I can see how someone accustomed to the obvious charms of Napa Cabernet or Australian Shiraz would find such a wine hard to understand. The La Chapelle was all about nuance and finesse and, most of all, it is designed to be a harmonious component of a meal. As you sip this wine with your food it weaves a web of complexity that expands and focuses your senses on the complete experience of dining. Perhaps the biggest contrast that such wines have with so many of today’s wines is that the La Chapelle was actually refreshing to drink. The 12.5% alcohol also is a big difference enabling you to enjoy several glasses and to really experience it’s swirling, changing characteristics as you get to know this wine better.

The best wines should become more complex as you drink them. However, all to many wines are one-trick-ponies that offer little after the first bombastic sip. Like Boléro, the end should be more exciting than the beginning.

North-Westrey Cuisine

It was a beautifully warm July night with a gorgeous sunset expanding over the horizon. A fillet of very fresh, wild-caught Copper River Salmon was looking for a good partner and out of my cellar came a 2004 Westrey Reserve Pinot Noir, Willamette Valleyfor the occasion.

Such a full-flavored fish needs little additional fanfare, so I just sprinkled the fillet with fresh Savory from my garden along with a spattering of red sea salt and fresh ground pepper and quickly pan-roasted it to medium-rare. Then served it with a baby arugula salad from a local farm stand and some crusty, warm bread from the famous (in McMinnville anyway) Red Fox Bakery.

The Westrey seemed a bit harsh at first, but soon opened into a silky complexity that brought alive the palate in a perfect counterpoint to the dense, rich salmon. A spot-on example of the wired, electric richness that makes for great Oregon pinot noir this 04 Westrey Reserve is not only delicious, but a bargain at under $30. The initial tightness of this pinot underscores the necessity of decanting young Oregon pinot noir. A short exposure to oxygen will give you a wine with more complexity and balance. The reductive style of winemaking required to make outstanding pinot noir means that decanting young wines should be a standard practice. Let’s face it, with the entry level price for good pinot noir at $20 and well over $30 for real complexity, to not take the time to decant these wines if you’re drinking them young is a waste of good money and good wine.

As the last bite of this sumptuous salmon crossed my lips, the Westrey just hit its stride and a good stride it was as this pinot noir will challenge far more expensive wines.  Winemakers AmyWesselman and David Autrey (get the name of the wine?) continue to not only produce great values, but great pinot noir in Oregon. 

Three Beauties

It was a blind tasting and I guessed a mix of Napa and Washington cabernets. Wrong I was. They were all Washington wines and there were three beauties that are not to be missed, but I recommend waiting at least 3 or 4 years before you pull their corks.  Below are the unanimous top wines of the evening:

• 2003 L’Ecole No. 41, Apogee, Pepper Bridge Vineyard, Walla Walla Vineyard (47% cabernet sauvignon, 45% merlot, 5% malbec, 3% cabernet franc) Frankly I love this wine. There is a incredible combination of elegance and power trapped in this bottle that would seem to defy the laws of physics. A case of this wine is going into my cellar for sure. This is one of those wines that are difficult to drink because you can’t get your nose out of the glass. No brooding monster here, but a silky beauty that will only get better and better, but is pretty damn good right now. (My wine of the night)
  
• 2003 Carriage House, Côte Bonneville, DuBrul Vineyard (cabernet sauvignon 77%, cabernet franc 13%, merlot 10%)  This just blew the other wines it its flight away and it was a very good flight of wines. The balance of this wine is almost perfect with aromatics and textures that are completely seductive. Perfectly structured for aging and anyone with the patience will be well rewarded. (everybody else’s wine of the night)
  
• 2003 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon - With all the hype you almost want to not like this wine, but alas it’s great. This is a big brooding wine that should not be drunk for at least five (if not more) years.  Even with all this intensity you can just feel the complexity lurking in the background waiting to explode. It’s too bad, but with the scores this wine got, you can believe that 90% (or more) of the bottles already have their corks pulled.  What a waste, because someday this will be a truly astounding wine.
  

Demon Alcohol

They say you can’t argue taste. I believed that until I read a recent column titled Demon Alcohol by The Wine Spectator’s James Laube. In his article he argues that the 2004 Martinelli Zinfandel Giuesppe & Luisa at 16.9% alcohol is a balanced wine. Balanced for what? Perhaps month-old hung wild boar with a sauce of aged Stilton served while you’re smoking a big cigar? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“If you taste a wine and it seems to be balanced, the alcohol content shouldn’t matter,” writes Laube. I could not agree more, but if someone thinks a dry wine, destined for the dinner table, that has 16.9% alcohol is balanced, I just have to question what their standards of taste are, one thing for sure, they do not mirror my own.

So in this case I will argue taste with Mr. Laube and fundamentally disagree. Balance in wine is not like a balance scale. It does not mean that if there is enough massive big fruit on one side of the scale that it will naturally balance the massive big alcohol on the other. Port is balanced because it has both fruit and sweetness to carry the alcohol, take the sweetness out of Port and you’ll have a raw, harsh wine. Keeping the scale in balance is not so simple and is not dependent on the wine alone, that is unless you believe  a wine’s purpose is to be consumed with no accompaniment or, perhaps, only with other wines.

Ultimately it’s true, you can’t argue taste and if Mr. Laube loves the Martinelli Zinfandel at that alcohol level so be it. However, trying to convince the rest of us that such a wine is truly balanced seems to be taking things a bit far. Perhaps it’s understandable. Lord knows what I would write after drinking a wine with 16.9% alcohol. 

Burn Baby Burn

The finish just would not end. The length of the finish is one of the defining characteristics of a great wine and this one had a doozy. It started out great with an earthy, deeply fruity nose and concentrated flavors that flowed into a finish of epic proportions. The only problem is that this wine had a finish more appropriate to Bourbon than wine.

The 2003 Jade Mountain Napa Valley Syrah has much to commend it up front, but as soon as you swallow, Dante’s Inferno overtakes whatever there was to like about this wine. The big fruit is soon sucked down and overwhelmed by an intense alcohol burn that would be more appropriate at a cigar bar than the dinner table.

I had this wine with a giant steak at Morton’s and it was too big even for that much fat. If it can’t match that, it can’t match anything. Yes it had a finish that wouldn’t stop, but the problem was that I wanted it to. In fact, the Cognac we had after dinner had less burn that this Molotov Cocktail of a wine.

Wine by the Glass Heaven

Available by the glass, quarter bottle, half bottle and full bottle:

• Zwiegelt, Burgenland, Austria
• 2005 Bourgueil, Breton, France
  
• 2004 Pic-Saint-Loup, La Coste d’ Aleyrac, France
  
• Collioure, La Rectorie, France
  
• Gamay, Vallee d’Aoste, Grosjean, Italy
• 2002 Montevertine, Tuscany
• Bizkaiko Txakolina, Gorrondona, Spain
  

… and that’s less than half of just the red wines by the glass at Portland’s Navarre restaurant.

The white, rosé and sparkling wines offered are equally interesting and delicious. Here is a restaurant with not only courage, but a firm knowledge about what it wants to be. They serve hearty, honest food based on the best ingredients from Oregon and Washington all complimented by a wine by the glass program that embarrasses America’s most elite restaurants. Navarre offers cutting edge wines that other restaurants just don’t have the guts, knowledge or work ethic to offer. Not one snooty sommelier is in sight, but the eager to please wait staff is willing to share their enthusiasm with you. All of this in a storefront restaurant with absolutely no style, pretense or ego. They put all of their passion into real food and real wine and don’t waste their energy on the Paris Hilton frills that seem to define so many restaurants.

The dedication that goes into the food at Navarre is evidenced by the superb wines they offer. The food is humble, but intensely deliciously humble. Their wine list lifts that experience to memorable heights.

The wine list is so good here you almost don’t care about the food - fortunately the food lives up to the wine.

Merlot and Wings

One of the wine pleasures of living in Oregon is the weekly wine column in The Oregonian by the excellent wine writer Matt Kramer. Matt is constantly championing wine by small, terroir-driven producers who have little clout in the market, but make wines that are wonderful to drink and great values besides. Inexplicably, Matt also works for The Wine Spectator, which of course promotes exactly the opposite style of wine as the champion of the big, power-marketing side of the wine business.

In a recent column in The Oregonian, Matt points out an amazing statistic, that is that red wine consumption has overtaken white as the national wine drink. Matt cites Nielsen statistics putting red wine sales at 52.9 % of all wine sales in the first 16 weeks of this year. This is amazing because not so many years ago this was the land of chablis and brie.

This is a big problem for winemakers and helps explain the state of red wine in America today. The fact of the matter is that most wine consumption in America, unlike Europe,  is not as a part of a meal, but as a cocktail. A quick visual survey of any popular upscale restaurant will confirm this. First of all most consumers don’t have any wine with their lunch, so that meal is out. Then stop by the bar after work and you’ll see glass after glass of red wine, grasped by the bowl like a beer, being gulped without a bite of food in sight. American’s drink a lot, if not most, wine as a cocktail and that means that big brand winemakers don’t make their wines to taste good with any food beyond bar food. It means they make it to taste good by itself. It  means wines that are fruity, a little sweet and most of all not complex. Complexity is a confusing distraction to bar conversation and must be avoided.

Because red wine has become a cocktail instead of compliment to a meal in America, you will be hard pressed to find many inexpensive red wines produced here worth drinking. They are all bland, sweet and indistinguishable from each other with variety being irrelevant. The same goes for most reds from Australia. For good red wine values you must look to Europe, where they still make wine to go with food.

In just a few years we’ve gone from the land of chablis and brie to the land of merlot and wings. That’s progress?

Virtual Corky Paranoia

Corky paranoia, the fear of getting hassled for returning a corked bottle of wine, was an ongoing problem that we had learned to live with. We just accepted that look of contempt from a waiter or store clerk as they refunded your money or replaced your bottle as part of being a wine aficionado. I remember one experience in Chicago when I returned a spoiled bottle only to have the restaurant refuse to bring me a bottle of the same wine assuming that there was nothing wrong with the wine and that I just didn’t like it. Even with all these hassles over the years there was always a real person there to whom I could actually return the bad bottle to prove my point. In fact, I always kind of enjoyed watching the restaurant manager or store clerk taste one of these stinky bottles to check on me. As a grimace of disgust crossed their face, I could hardly resist the urge to pleasantly quip, “I told you so.” Of course, the reason we have corky paranoia  in the first place is because all to often they taste a brutally bad bottle only to respond, “It seems fine to me.” before they grudgingly refund your money or bring you a new bottle.

Now that I am buying quite a bit of wine via the internet, the new issue of virtual corky paranoia has settled in. Now when I get a bad bottle there’s no one to hand the offending bottle back to and the best you can do is call and complain. All to often I have shrugged my shoulders as I poured a bottle down the drain that I have purchased online and just let it go, but this kind of attitude can make things quite expensive. After all, if you buy 6 bottles for $20 and one of them is bad, you just increased your purchase price to $24 a bottle. When you remember you also had to pay shipping on these wines it can soon become a very bad deal to buy online. Considering that the minimum number of corked bottles you’ll get is 5%, not being able to return spoiled bottles purchased online could put a good dent in your wine budget.

Last week a bottle I had purchased from Chambers Street Wines was corked and, after I poured it down the drain, I decided to shoot them off an email to see what would happen. Within the hour I had a return email where they gave me  a credit to apply on my next purchase. Now, I know that Chambers Street is no ordinary wine merchant, but what this proves is that it’s well worth your time to seek out a real wine merchant like Chambers Street as they understand the issue and can respond appropriately.

Merchants like Chambers Street are the only proven therapy for corky paranoia. 

America's Ultimate Wine Merchant

The Offer to End all Offers: A Massive Vertical of F.X. Pichler

As far as we know there has never been an offer of this magnitude from any retailer in the United States; even in Austria mature wine from older vintages is extremely difficult to find. These are not the most expensive wines out there, but they are among the rarest!

Move over Hubert … .Here comes Lignier-Michelot and his startling 2005’s.

The ‘05 Lignier-Michelot’s have arrived and they are sensational. The 2005’s are by far the best wines that have ever been made at the estate. From the stellar Bourgogne Rouge to the extremely underrated Clos de la Roche these wines are absolutely overflowing with luscious 2005 fruit.

 

Mature German Spatlese for under $30: 1994 Wegeler Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spatlese

After the resounding success of our mature German Kabinett e-mail we have sourced a mature German Spatlese and it is spectacular. It is extremely difficult to find older German wine in the marketplace today as the wines are mostly small production (10-1200 cases)and usually gobbled up on release by savvy consumers. So this offer today is a rare treat. Many estates in Germany do keep an extensive library of older wines. Von Schubert, Zilliken, Karthauserhof to name but a few of the top guys. The condition and provenance of many of these wines is perfect

 

The three excerpts above are from the newsletter of Chambers Street Wines in Manhattan, certainly America’s finest wine merchant if you are seeking interesting wines at prices that surprisingly enough don’t break your  wine budget. Never in my life have I seen a store that thinks so independently, ignoring fashion and the pointy wines from the big wine publications in a search for wines of true distinction. Instead Chambers Street Wines offers its customers some of the most unique, exciting wines in the world - often offered at bargain basement prices. I cannot urge you enough to go to their website and subscribe to their email newsletters. These newsletters are an inside track to wines that will change the way you think about wine. You will see many names and places you don’t know, but your wine world will be opened to wines with a range of complexity that is beyond the comprehension of The Wine Spectator and other such publications whose superficially pointy recommendations only dull your palate, your mind and your meals.

 

There are many dedicated wine merchants throughout the United States (not one of them large) that share the spirit and dedication of Chambers Street Wines and you should do your best to seek them out and support them. However, Chambers Street Wines not only has the desire to seek out the best, but are lucky enough to be located in New York City, which gives them an unparalleled access to some of the world’s most unique wines.  This access combined with intelligent, well trained palates and open minds makes Chambers Street Wines a wine merchant without equal.

 

Chambers Street Wines 

160 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
Phone: 212-227-1434
Fax: 212-227-7978