Psst…stick with me and I’ll tell you a big wine
secret. But before I do, I’m going to take a little me-time.
The Sweet Partner in Crime and I bonded early in
our relationship over the “Windows on the World Complete Wine Course” – a book
by Kevin Zraly which included information about wines of all countries and,
most importantly, appropriate foods to pair with those wines. We cooked and
drank up a storm.
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| The Naked Vine Team then... |
Then we took a trip together to Sonoma County and
wine truly became part of our lifestyle. The die was cast on our oenological
obsession for the next decade. Zins and Pinots, Cabs and Chardonnays, Shiraz
and Sauvignon Blanc – we worked our way through regions and grapes willy-nilly,
loving the learning of it all.
Then came the infamous happy hour at a local place
called the Beer Sellar. An old friend dropped the line that became my mantra. I
quote my buddy Scott: “It’s easy to find a good fifty-dollar bottle of wine.
The trick is to find a good ten-dollar bottle of wine.”
The Naked Vine sprouted from the Stone
IPA-drenched corners of my mind. I built the blog and posted my first column
not long after, back in the days when the Internet wasn’t accessible from most
phones, much less your refrigerator or thermostat. The idea of being a
“blogger” still had a certain geek stigma. In tasting rooms, wineries didn’t
really know what to make of someone who wrote “where only a few people could
read it.”
Times changed. I pumped out my content, did a
little self-promotion, and was lucky enough to have my then-online-only column
picked up by several print outlets, which I felt finally gave me some
legitimacy.
Everything didn’t go smoothly at first. I was
still learning about wine (and I still am, honestly!) as I was cranking out
columns, so I made some early mistakes. I wrote a column once where I mixed up
Burgundy and Bordeaux, stating the latter was made from pinot noir. (It’s not.)
I name checked Rioja multiple times as a Spanish grape. (It’s not.) And I can’t
tell you how many times I misspelled Riesling. (Still do.)
The SPinC and I ate picked up steam and our
palates improved enough to be dangerous. I got asked to sample some wines
before they went into wide release from time to time, which is cool.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet some truly
intriguing people. From pourers at tasting rooms to winemakers and grape
growers, there aren’t many industries where you’ll meet as broad a spectrum of
humanity. They’ve all got fascinating stories. Almost none of them intended to
go into the wine industry. In previous lives, they were engineers, chefs,
bankers, artists – all of whom got seduced along the way by The Grape.
We’ve watched wine trends come and go – watching
chardonnay go from big and buttery to thin and unoaked and back again. High
alcohol Zinfandel gave way to lighter-styled, earthy pinots. Merlot has finally
started to come back out from under its Sideways-placed
rock. And the breadth of “Old World” wine has expanded beyond Italy, France,
and Germany to any number of other countries in the EU and Eurasia. If you like
options, there’s never been a better time to be a wine drinker.
That brings us to today. So, you ready for the
secret? You wanna know the One Big Thing I’ve learned over the last decade?
Finding a decent $10 bottle of wine isn’t
tricky anymore.
When I’ve written in this space about countries
expanding and modernizing their respective wine industries, the regular refrain
is, “Improvements in technology have increased the quality and output of
[insert country]’s wine.” This technological improvement allowed South America,
Australia, and other countries to export very decent juice at low cost.
As decent, low cost wine from the global
marketplace began filling store US shelves, large domestic winemakers realized
that they couldn’t continue mass producing cheap-ass, low quality plonk when a
discerning drinker could slap seven or eight bucks down on the counter for a
decent bottle of Malbec from Argentina or Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. Overall
quality kept rising.
These days, stores are filled with decent,
inexpensive wines. Mind you, these aren’t the greatest wines on the planet.
Fifteen to twenty dollars is the general price point where there’s a real jump
in a wine’s caliber, and these less expensive wines aren’t usually all that
distinguishable from one another except in label design. For ten smackers, though,
you’re not likely to crack a bottle and say, “That’s completely awful.”
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| The Naked Vine Team now. |
With all that in mind, I’m proud to say that this
little corner of the wine world is still going strong. There’s always something
new – new production techniques, new grapes, new blends – coming down the pike.
The Naked Vine will be here to help you navigate as long as my liver holds out.
I’d like to offer my hearty thanks to the hundreds
(thousands, some days) of people who make their way to the Vine each day for
some oenological nugget or other. It’s still my pleasure to be drinkin’ with
you.
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