Mark's Wine Blog

Happy New Year-Feliz Ano Nuevo!

I’ve been thinking quite a bit the past few days about what I want to continue talking about as business at Uncorked Ventures changes forever in the next few days. Given the new year I considered writing about some of my goals for the new year whether those are business related (wine club members, export time tables) or interpersonal (blogging more often, continuing to be open about our business) or even personal.

I realized after watching Julie and Julia with my wife that one of the reasons people are interested in blogs is because they give you some insight into a person’s life. I don’t ever want this space to become a corporate blog that sounds like a series of press releases or marketing pieces. Frankly, when I see those types of blogs I don’t go back and read them ever again. A generation ago being able to interact in this type of medium was unheard of, but why not embrace it completely?

So, in short order some of my resolutions for the new year:

-To blog each work day, even if it is 5 sentences long.

-To interact with my readers more, what are you interested in hearing about this business?

-To continue building lasting friendships.

-To appreciate all that my wife does each and every day.

-To Export a container of wine at some point in 2010.

-To build a wine club list of the most satisfied members in the industry.

Ok, so what are we doing today? Fun stuff actually, we’re working to set up our affiliate program. Excuse the marketing talk for a while but an affiliate program is basically a way for a web based company to gain a sales force that you pay only based on sales (commission basically).

In this case, if you find an Uncorked Ventures wine club or wine gift that you like by coming through a different site, like the Wine Club Directory we pay that website owner a commission.

It’s a simple set up and frankly we’re excited to get started. Given our ability to purchase wine directly from wineries, instead of going through a distributor like most, if not all of, our competitors we can offer affiliates a generous commission without sacrificing quality to our customers.

Ugh….Spammers have found my blog.

So I awoke today to 65+ spam comments on my blog. I had a good laugh at some of the stuff people thought were going to be ok…..I’m not interested in men’s Gucci shoes, prescription drugs, cheap handbags or even male enhancement. Ok, small rant over, but come on spammers if you’re going to take the time to leave a comment at least act like you’ve read the post first, ok?

As for Uncorked Ventures we continue to work with our web development team to have our new site up and running as soon as humanly possible. Getting the back end to work correctly is taking a while longer then we initially thought, but the end result will certainly be worth the wait.

We’ve also begun to write/craft our initial newsletter that will be going out to the corporate gift orders we’ve received, plus a little bonus to everyone on our interest list that signs up for one of our wine clubs.

It’s a fun time and I’m very much looking forward to January when we get to do it all for real, for the first time.

So you know the old phrase life is what happens while you’re making plans? I got a little bit of a taste of that over the past week or two, seems to be the way things work with Uncorked Ventures lol!

Thanksgiving was quite nice and we enjoyed a few standout bottles of wine including a Copain with our Thanksgiving meal, as well as Audelssa reserve Cab and a Carlisle Zinfandel. All quite good, as well as some chepos from Trader Joe’s.

I mention life happening while we’re making plans becuase it seems as if we’ve been waiting forever for alcohol beverage control to approve our permits here in California. Well it finally happened on Monday, however my enjoyment of the day was dampened because I was feeling AWFUL. We’re talking 101 fever, sick to stomach etc etc. Funny how you wait so long and then the day comes and instead of being re-energized to really get to work….you’re stuck in bed sleeping 18+ hours on both Monday and Tuesday.

Luckily I’m feeling quite a bit better today, glad to have fought off the stomach flu because I literally have tons to do, marketing pieces, more SEO (which never ends), talking with wineries and other within the industry etc etc.

I should have a couple of actual wine reviews over the next couple of days.

To effectively answer the question posed on my previous post, you’re looking at a mechanical harvester. I have never seen one running in person because the wineries we work with are generally smaller and most, if not all, believe in sorting slower and by hand. Wine is a labor intensive process, which is generally not as glamorous as the general public believes.

I was reminded of my first impressions of the wine industry by a conversation with my wife yesterday after she returned from a day long tour of Sony Pictures with a group of her high school students. To start, yes not everything in movies is, as they appear which is similar to the wine industry. Things are often not as fancy, sophisticated and pretentious as they seem. I know she enjoyed her trip and I appreciate Sony providing a scholarship for one of her very deserving students whom have overcome so much on their way to college. Very cool that she got to see some of the voiceover effects and part of the Spiderman 4 set being built, let alone being able to hold an academy award….which evidently is quite heavy.

The other thing on my mind from yesterday is the fact that California makes some really good wine. Last night we had part of a very cheap bottle of Merlot marked simply with the California AVA. For more information on AVA’s please click here. So often I think people forget that wine, improves from the company of both good people and good food. Although this bottle wasn’t anything I would ever suggest to a friend, or ship to a club member, we enjoyed it along with each others company.

I hope everyone has a nice weekend! As always please stop by and join our interest list over at Uncorked Ventures.

So I’ve been saving a specific bottle of wine to enjoy with my wife since my first trip to Napa and Sonoma after starting Uncorked Ventures, a Copain 2007 Monument Tree Pinot Noir.

I believe I’ve talked a little about Copain before in this space, but I am a fan of much of the wine they make and their winemaker Wells Guthrie. He has a rather unique style for the area and has really been at the forefront of pushing other winemakers to attempt to control the alcohol levels in their wine. Much of the wine that Copain makes ends up with alcohol content 1-2% lower then the competition. They’re able to do this by being very careful about where they source their grapes(usually colder climates) as well as how/when the fruit is harvested(middle of the night when possible to control heat transfer during fermentation).

From a business to business perspective I appreciate the way that they’ve treated us as a start up and as a consumer I greatly appreciate the fact that their wines occupy a range of prices starting at around $20 for their Tous Ensambles series. I do believe they leave some money on the table on a number of their wines which are sold in the $40-$50 range-which are consistently great values many scoring 90+ ratings from Parker and the Wine Entusiast.

Ok so about that Pinot…..as good as I remember it. In fact maybe a bit better given the 6 months or so of rest as well as the thirty minutes of decanting(yeah, yeah I know not ideal). On the nose it’s hard to pick up individual flavors, but it definitely is a dark berry type of smell. On the palate it is noticeably brighter then you’d imagine with cherry being the predominant flavor-the structure of the wine is quite good and really shows Wells ability as most Pinot’s don’t hold up this well.

Overall at around $50, to me it is a clear buy. I am an unapologetic Pinot Noir fan(both because of the flavor profiles and the story of the grape itself) which comes sometimes much to my business partner and father in laws dismay, but I will be interested in comparing this Pinot to some of the more highly hyped Oregon versions.

Lastly I would be remiss if I did not mention where the Monument Tree moniker comes from. Monument Tree is a vineyard about a two hour drive north of San Francisco. Since Copain aims to trim alcohol levels they source fruit from both the Central Coast of California(think on the ocean just north of Santa Barbara) as well as some of the cooler valley’s north of SF. As you can see Monument Tree vineyard is named after a redwood tree which still stands in the middle of the vineyard.

As always thank you for reading-I look forward to making the announcement soon about our initial shipping date.

This past Friday night was the first of what we hope will be a series in tasting events brought to you by Uncorked Ventures. We had planned this evening with the help of our friends Sarah and Chris to bring together a group of their friends who are self professed wino’s in an effort to legitimize the choices that Matt and I have begun to make about the wines that we’d like to source in our first few shipments.

To start we’d like to say a short thank-you to Sarah and Chris for hosting and providing food-it’s was a nice event and we hope to do it again sometime soon when schedules allow.

We had a group of about ten people tasting, we tasted everything blind in combination with appetizers that included prosciutto wrapped figs, bread, cheeses and other various items…all of which were very good.

We started the evening offering two different Napa Valley Chardonnay’s. The first was purchased from Beverages and More for around $22, it was a 2005 Bouchaine Napa Valley Chardonnay. The second was a free sample sent to me from Prime Vineyards in Napa. Prime sent over their 2008 Chardonnay.

The Prime Chardonnay came out with a score about 5% better than the Bouchaine.

We asked everyone to score each wine on sight(2pts), aroma(5pts), taste(9pts) and overall quality(4pts).

Prime scored 1 point better in total than Bouchaine on average per taster, however most people thought that although Prime had the potential to be a much, much better Chardonnay it was too young to be a real winner. Additionally, although the nose of the wine was outstanding, the taste was too tropical for most people’s tastes. We came to an agreement that both wines were probably being oversold by a few dollars.

To me, I see a lot of potential in the Prime Chardonnay. Yes, the flavors are complicated, but given their success with the wine’s nose and their Cabernet Sauvignon (coming later) it is a wine I will be tracking over their next few vintages. I’d also like to try the wine after it had been set down for a year or two to see how the flavors evolve in that time. I do give them a lot of credit in that they didn’t follow the standard Napa Chardonnay route and simply make the main flavors consistent with oak/butter….the experimentation is something that I think can lead to much better wine down the road.

We had assumed that the white wine tasting would end up being more of a warm up for the reds as we’ve spent much more time working to find workable red wines for our club. We were happy to see that a small, boutique winery was able to come out with better scores then a nationally distributed wine. In some way I felt that started to legitimize our business model.

Before I spend some time going over our second day in Napa, I thought it might be interesting to talk about what we’re doing this week.

Matt is running down some options for Uncorked Ventures to be able to ship into three tier states. Three tier is basically bureaucratic nonsense meant to make sure the distributors make their cut of the money, but the idea is that a winery sells their wine to a distributor, the distributor sells to a retailer and the retailer sells directly to the consumer. As you can imagine, for a 3rd party wine club this isn’t a good set up for us. Unlike a few of our competitors we won’t be breaking the law in any state, there are some options for us to ship directly to our customers in places like Florida and New York which employ the three tier system. We hope to have partnerships set up at some point in the next couple of weeks.

On my end, although still largely focused on SEO efforts (up to #4 for our first search term), I have also been planning for our first wine tasting even this Friday evening. I’m a little disappointed that my wife will miss the first part of the tasting, but being able to bring together a group of 10+ people who know wine (only 2 of which I know) is going to not only be a good opportunity to get feedback on the wine that we have sourced, but also an opportunity to pick up a few new clients. Frankly, having some data about the wine is going to be something I’ll want more of moving forward. We’ll be pouring a combination of wine we’re planning on shipping, wine we’ve been sent as a sample and wine we frankly think is over-hyped.

As Matt and I wade deeper and deeper into state specific shipping laws I realize how unnecessarily complicated some state governments can be. Does it make sense to anyone to only allow direct shipments to consumers only if they have already visited a winery? Other then blatant protectionism, is there really any reason for this? Simply put, I believe a customer receiving a referral from an internet source, or an online wine club for that matter, is just as valid as a referral from their local liquor/wine store that may not have the same depth of knowledge, or access to world class wines.

Ok, so I digress quite a bit. Let’s talk some about my first day in Napa.

Our day started with an 11am appointment at Larkmeade Vineyards. Although my business partner had made this appointment I was interested to try the wine from Larkmeade for a couple of reasons. To start they’ve received some great scores from every professional wine judge. Their 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon received 94 points from Robert Parker and has had a string of 90+ point vintages since the year 2000 when the modern age of Larkmeade effectively began. Some basic research also informed me that they were a main supplier of fruit to the likes of Duckhorn and Cakebread. I know if I owned the winery, my competitors would be hard pressed to purchase my best grapes.

The history of Larkmeade is heavily tied to that of the Valley itself and San Francisco. A short version goes something like this: Lillie Hitchcok Hoite (yes, the tower in SF is named after her) started the winery sometime between the time she bought the land in 1875, and 1885 when the local newspaper (the St. Helena Star) made mention of the winery called Larkmeade Cellar. Fast forwarding a bit, Larkmeade was one of the 7 initial members of the Napa Valley Vintners Association: names that include Beaulieu, Mondavi, Louis Martini and the Napa Valley Wine Co. The winery itself was sold in the 1950’s….but the family kept the vineyards. They started making wine again in 1990, with current operations being finalized in 2000….including a new tasting room in 2006. It’s a beautiful spot by the way as you can see from the pictures.

At Larkmeade we were fortunate to have an appointment at the same time as Dana Jackson whom was at Larkmeade doing research for his new IPhone Application called AOC Travel Guides. One of, if not the most impressive wine applications I have seen for the Iphone it will help you plan your trips in wine country. He takes time to give you information on less known locations…do you really need to be told about French Laundry? If you’re from the east coast though you might be interested in the most family friendly wine tasting rooms, or the best Mexican food cart in Sonoma. His app also gives interviews with winemakers and true insider information that most people won’t get during a normal tasting experience. To me, it is bound to be a success and for the $4.99 that he’s planning on charging, I’m sure you’d be happy with the purchase instead of an old, out of date travel book that you spent close to $20 for.

Can you tell I enjoy new media?

Ok, so how about the wine at Larkmeade? I was extremely impressed by the Estate Cab Sauvignon, especially at the price point they are charging. Their proprietary red is also a very, very good wine. We were impressed and enjoyed having the chance to see their operation up close. I love history and having a chance to see a historic Napa vineyard that is producing true world class wine, in a gorgeous setting is an experience I think any wine lover would enjoy. After a quick stop in by the winery general manager, Collin, they also poured a sample of their Salon red wine, which I believe they are currently sold out of. It’s complex, but simply put an amazing wine that I’d rate higher then the estate Cab Sauv. I was very impressed by the quality and also the quality/price ratio we saw at Larkmeade.

After Larkmeade we headed out to lunch at the All Season Café in downtown Calistoga. The meal was good and the price was right(around $10 per plate).

Since we had been so appreciably late on our previous meeting with Audelssa, we decided to make sure to leave ourselves enough time…..especially since their ranch is back on the South-West side(or Sonoma side) of Mt. Veeder. The drive was an interesting one as we wound our way through backroad after backroad and both of us being convinced multiple times that we were not only lost, but would probably never find it. As it turns out, the ranch is fairly easy to find and well worth the trip. From most of the ranch you can not only see the city of San Francisco, but also the Golden Gate Bridge. As Matt said when it was pointed out to us(it appears surprisingly far away from the city because of the angle) Very Cool. Pictures can’t do it justice.

We tasted through an entire range of their wines, again and were impressed by what we found. They are perhaps trending completely right bank with their entry level blends, which I find to be a good thing. We have found three bottles that we plan to source for our different wine clubs, which is an impressive number for a smaller production winery.

After tasting with Mike we were on the way to the car and asked for a short tour. There was quite a bit of activity outside with grapes coming in, being sorted and samples being taken from fermenting grapes. At this point we were introduced to their winemaker Erich who was kind enough to give us a quick tour, talk a little about his winemaking philosophy. We enjoyed the conversation and really realized the next afternoon how similar the winemaker styles are at Audlessa and Alpha Omega, both of whom believe in longer fermentation cycles and only naturally occurring yeast.

After finishing our conversations and driving off the mountain we got ourselves checked into our hotel.
Matt and I finished our night at Barbers Q. One of the best BBQ experiences I’ve had. We split (yes, split) a sampler platter which has ribs, sausage, brisket, pork, onion ring strings…..we added a side order of fries. The fries were great, everything else was among the best BBQ of its type I’ve ever had….except the brisket which fell below what I’ve had in trips to Texas. The brisket was much better the next day…more on that later….but yes we are there two days in a row.

All together it was a very enjoyable day, it was nice to see and taste Audelssa again…Larkmeade is a standout and good company always makes the trip more fun being it Matt, Dana or Mike from Audelssa.

I’ve talked at some depth about a couple of our winery visits in Napa, but as I’ve said we’re especially pleased to be moving forward with Copain (as Matt states very nicely in his blog) Alpha Omega and of course Audelssa.

Audelssa was a winery that I was looking forward to tasting with at the end of our trip for a couple of reasons. Like most of the other wineries on our list they are family owned and have been very open to talking with us. I’ve appreciated the time Dan gave me on the phone, including his stories of previous frustrations with exporting wine, especially the taxes and exploding prices involved, I’ve gotten to know Gloria a little bit from both Twitter and email (we are at a similar place, how do you correctly use Twitter to actually sell a product?). Lastly I am pretty much fascinated with their V 27 concept.

A quick run-down of V 27 and remember I worked in real estate for a while, so this is probably especially interesting to me. V 27 explained simply is a timeshare. They are building a Tuscan Villa on their mountain ranch (where they grow most of their grapes) after buying into the concept you’d have the right to stay there, I believe 4 weeks a year, plus the capacity to create your own red wine blend with their resident winemaker. Please don’t hold me to exact details, but I’ll say I think it is underpriced for what they’re charging….how many people do you know that would love to have a second home in wine country? What about a 2nd home that comes with the ability to bottle your own wine? Pretty interesting concept huh? I’m guessing you know more then a few people who would be interested depending on price….. and this is going to put you back well less, well much less, then a 1 bedroom condo in Napa/Sonoma. Plus, check out the view:

Ok, so we were set to meet with Mike at their Glenn Ellen tasting room at 2pm on Thursday Aug 13th. Matt and I thought we would have plenty of time since our Copain tasting was at 10am and the trip, according to Mapquest, would take about 45 minutes. We left Copain around 12:30 thinking we’d still have time to get a quick lunch at a small cafe in Glen Ellen and decided we would take, what we thought at the time, the safe route to the tasting room. The safe route takes us down the 101 south to the 12 east and then right on Arnold Drive….more on that later.

After being on the 101 for some time and discussing our previous meetings, both the positive and negative, we realized that we were seeing signs such as Welcome to Petaluma. I’m not a bay area resident but I do now that Petaluma is about 30 miles north of San Francisco….we were suppose to catch the 12 somewhere around Santa Rosa…..which is 17 miles further north.

Needless to say that meant we weren’t going to have time for lunch…..so just make that right on Arnold. Well to make a long story short we missed Arnold…mostly because it isn’t marked Arnold from the 12….it’s marked Glen Ellen….yeah we should have known better, but what can you do.

In any case we arrived at the Audelssa tasting room at least an hour late, Mike was still waiting for us, which was quite kind especially because the air conditioning was being worked on. It was set up to be a bad tasting, we hadn’t eaten all day, were hot, tired and frustrated.

We sat down and got a chance to try all the different wines(which are all red) and we were impressed by all of them.

We started with the Tephora which is a $25 retail bottle, we hadn’t seen the price point yet and were guessing that it came in around $40 which has been backed up by other friends and family when we’ve had them try it as well, except one family member who named the $25 price tag exactly, but I’ll let her stay anonomous for now.

In fact we opened one of the bottles I brought home last night and my mother in law (who knows her high end wine, especially those of French varietals) said quite simply that for $25 she’d definitely buy more of this wine which is a nice compliment in my book. My wife agreed that it was certainly worth more then the $25 that Audelssa is charging. The bottle went very, very well with a steak from the BBQ and also with a couple of pieces of dark chocolate for dessert.

The two real standout wines for my palate were the Zephyr which is a right bank Rhone blend which was an interesting wine. I don’t believe I’ve tried any, at least not many, wines from Napa/Sonoma that come from volcanic soil like this one does. You definitely get a stronger fruit taste then you do from many Napa/Sonoma wines, we were told it is because the grapes are grown at altitude which leads to a much smaller yield and more intense flavors of the fruit then you get at the valley floor.

Lastly Matt and I both quite enjoyed the Summit estate wine. Like many great blends it takes some of the major parts of all its components like the Cab Sauv, Merlot and Cab Franc. I’d hesitate to try and describe it in detail here, but I will say that it is very nice wine. I’m having a moderate size dinner party over the weekend to finish up my 30th bday activities and will be bringing a bottle with me. Of anything we smelled the entire week, this was perhaps the best and I do enjoy complicated tastes in my wine….so this was a real winner and one that I’m looking forward to trying to figure out more about this weekend.

Overall Audelssa was a good tasting experience and offer a nice series of wines that we can feature in our wine clubs. Despite our experiences their Glen Ellen tasting room is pretty easy to find. At Uncorked Ventures we’re looking forward to working with Audelssa and featuring their wines in one of our first wine club shipments.

I haven’t had a chance to go into more detail about the wineries we visited on our Napa trip, I’m certainly excited to move forward with great names like Alpha Omega, Audelssa and Copain but I do find sometimes that it helps me get some clarity about a business trip if I sleep on it for a couple of days.

With that in mind I spent last night at my wife and I’d favorite Mexican restaurant, Miguel’s which has two locations in the San Diego area: Point Loma and Coronado.

We chose Coronado-the Crown City. A couple of reasons for going there even though it’s about a 45 minute drive for us now; To start we lived there for about a year before a job change necessitated a move and secondly it is one of the most beautiful areas in southern California. Coronado is an “island” (actually it does connect to Imperial Beach by the Silver Strand which is a very thin strip of land, made somewhat famous by it being the home of Navy Seal training) with about 20,000 residents just about a mile off downtown San Diego. It’s basically split into two parts, one part residential with a great main street style set up and the other North Island-a large Navy base where two carriers and about 20k seamen are based at any one time. Coronado’s best known feature is the Hotel Del Coronado, but my wife and I love spending time out there because it gives a truly small town feel which is getting extremely hard to find in and around San Diego. It also is one of the places where the local community and military really do live hand in hand which is always great to see, especially with so many service men spending so much time away from their families.

Ok so what is Miguel’s? It started in the early 80’s from a pretty famous restaurateur family in San Diego, but last night was kind of nice in that my wife, my mother in law and myself were seated back in a new addition to the Coronado location which has for sale artwork and is a sort of boutique store in and around the tables which makes for a pleasing visual experience.

So generally speaking the food is excellent, I can definitely suggest the carne asada plate which is more of a traditional marinated steak then some of you may be used to. How often do you order something at a Mexican restaurant to be asked how you want it cooked?

Overall we had a great time, one small snafu on the drink front was that the bartender was new and did not know how to make my wife’s margarita which was a combo of pineapple juice and cranberry(I believe) anyway after waiting for it for a while….well it actually came after the food…..it sort of resembled jungle juice that a lot of us used to make in college. On the good side, they removed it from the bill and the other two margaritas were both quite good.

Again, you can’t drink wine all the time and we had a nice evening out in a beautiful area. I’ll be going into some more wine depth over the next couple of days but Matt and I have been invited to work a day of harvest which we are both very much looking forward to, it should be quite the experience!