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.

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.

So over the next couple of days I’ll be packing for my second major trip to Northern California since the launch of Uncorked Ventures. I’m looking forward to the trip for a number of reasons, it will certainly be busy but I’m sure on the way home on Sunday, we’ll be closer to shipping then we have been before.

Monday will be an interesting day. We have two meetings in SF to help get our permits moved along. Frankly I’m glad I can be there for them and I do agree with my business partner Matt in that these two meetings are going to be the most important part of the trip.

Tuesday morning we’re planning on heading out fairly early. We’ve debated doing some formal tastings with small producers we’re interested in, but given the number of wineries we have mutual interest in already, we may simply go and taste a few places with the intention of approaching them formally around the new year. Again, we won’t ever ship something we wouldn’t buy for our own cellars and getting out in the field is an important part of the wine club business. We don’t ever want to simply wait at the office and only work with suppliers that ship us samples, we want to be out there, literally looking for new, high quality wineries before anyone else knows about them.

Wednesday brings us the real reason for the trip and something I’m incredibly excited to have the opportunity to do. We’ll be working a day of harvest at Alpha Omega. Exactly what we’ll be doing, we honestly have no idea, but we have heard that Cab Franc and Merlot are close to ready to picked so given good temperatures over the weekend, we may get to be involved with some interesting red wine grapes.

For me personally, I’m also interested in having the chance to compare and contrast the set ups at Alpha Omega and Eagles Nest. I know the two wineries would both freely admit that they probably don’t have much in common and I honestly don’t expect to find much of anything in common at all, but I think it will continue to give me an idea of the challenges facing the wine industry and of course the triumphs.

I think the more I can understand the process and ultimately the concerns of winemakers and their staffs the better we’ll be able to tailor our business to insure our customers(both domestic and international) get the highest quality product each and every year no matter how good, or bad, the overall economy is.
Thursday brings a sort of family obligation, which I won’t mention here (it’s a good thing, that I’m happy to be there for) and then my wife will arrive on Friday.

All in all, I’m very excited for the trip….we should have plenty of pictures and blogs both during and after it has concluded.

Over the past few 60 days or so of working to start Uncorked Ventures I’ve found so many things to enjoy about working with wineries, I count myself very lucky to be in the field. Looking back at our progress, we’ve been able to move ahead much quicker then we even originally planned. I just got to think back at where we’ve come from because one of our free trials of a software (that was 60 days long) has expired and added another $15 per month to our cash outlay.

What comes up for us in the next 60 days?

To start I’ll assume what we’ve heard about the permitting process is accurate and that we’ll have all of our federal paperwork completed and our paperwork with the state of California will either be approved, or be very, very close to being approved. We’ll certainly have our warehouse location built out completely and ready to store wine. I also believe we’ll be on the first page of Google for at least two of our target search terms. Lastly I think we’ll have made significant progress with our export side of the business, which has probably taken more a back seat over these past 60 days than we originally planned.

We’re certainly moving forward with that process as quickly as possible, with some help both from world trade organizations as well as the US government. At this point, it looks like we have our options for export down to three countries each one with its own tax, ease of forming a business and geo-political concerns.

Of course we’ll keep you updated. Again, thanks for reading.

A couple of days ago I ran an interested experiment. We had a bottle of French Chardonnay (from Costco) that I wanted to set up some sort of blind taste test with. It was a Pouilly-Fusse from Louis Latour Inc. I wasn’t that happy with the bottle, but I am a stereotypical Californian in that I tend to enjoy the oak/butter flavors that are typical of California Chardonnay and less of the fruit flavors that are more easily French, especially when fermented in steel instead of oak. A picture from the label:

A bigger issue was that the only other white wine I had in the house was a screw top individual pouch(from 7-11) that was given to me as a joke by a couple of friends. I had joked with them that I’d only stop by their house for a drink on my way to pick my sister in law up from the airport, if they actually had good wine (they drink great wine, usually) so the next time I saw them they showed up with this “bottle”. Honestly I’m not even really sure what to call the package.

Ok, so I asked my wife to review the two wines. Not surprisingly, since she has a habit of selecting the most expensive bottle in the bunch she was able to tell which bottle was French.

So my reviews of the wines-let’s start by saying I’m not the biggest white wine fan. Well, I do like Italian whites more, probably because they are typically more earthy and complex, but I wouldn’t buy either wine we tried again. Neither one was memorable, for the prices I wouldn’t expect that, but wine should be enjoyable and I didn’t enjoy either bottle.

So the other night we opened a 2006 Ghost Block Cabernet Sauvignon. When Matt and I had first discussed Uncorked Ventures I had asked him to give me a list of target wineries that he’d like to work with given they’d want to work with us.

Ghost Block was on that list. Ghost Block is one of the labels owned by Bonded Winery Number 9 in Napa, California. This is truly one of the great stories in wine country, 100 consecutive harvests as well as being organically certified and still family owned. Needless to say, I was very excited to finally get a chance to try the wine after finding it at a Beverages and More run.

I have always struggled with how to write a review when although there wasn’t anything bad about the wine, it just didn’t excite us. This Cab was definitely one that would have benefitted from time in the cellar, it continued to open well past two hours after we opened it. To say that with four people drinking that we still had wine left after over 2 hours says a lot I think. I’d like to try some of the other products from Winery #9 as I think there were elements in the bottle that could work very well together….in a different bottle. At $55-$70 though I can’t suggest this bottle for your table, or your cellar. Again, nothing wrong, just nothing that screamed out at any of us that this is a great bottle. It’s odd because the bottle has gotten great reviews elsewhere, up to 93 points from a number of different sources, even being listed as a top 100 bottle for the year. Maybe it just didn’t agree with our palates.

Hope everyone is doing well, we also opened a French white over the weekend which was generally positive, I’ll get a review of it tomorrow.

Like most of America I woke up to the news that Teddy Kennedy had passed away. Given the news attention that this is going to receive, for good reason, and frankly the man’s 40+ years of service I couldn’t imagine writing a blog without mentioning his passing.

Teddy Kennedy Picture

Additionally for me personally I have grown to appreciate his life story in that although he made his fair share of mistakes, that his actions and good deeds after those mistakes are what people will remember the man for. I think that we all can appreciate some the achievements that he helped through the senate no matter our political persuasion including civil rights and education among more contentious issues like immigration and health care.

The one thing that has struck me about the news reports early this morning were the comparisons between Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, something I would have never expected to hear. That being said, I can understand that long standing politicians that never turn cynical are few and far between….in fact that club may only have two members.

Ok, so back to wine and my life for a couple short moments. As you can tell I’ve moved the blog from WordPress.com’s free hosting over to my own hosting account….it gives me a new URL as well as a lot more control over the types of features here as well as the theme of the site. To me, it is a worthwhile upgrade for a number of reasons. To start the theme is more search engine friendly, as well as looking a ton better and much more professional according to my wife.

Secondly I’ve gained a lot of knowledge from various blogs and sites in my quest to turn Uncorked Ventures into a company with a real web presence. One thing I can do to give back slightly is to allow Google to follow comment links left in my blog-this is referred to as do-follow. I’m happy to help others leave their links on this site as long as the comments are on topic……and that after a couple of months of moderating comments that we’ve gained some additional business from it.

I think the Uncorked Ventures website is looking pretty good. We’ve got some small changes to make and I, frankly have a lot of work to do in order to get our shopping cart ready for when we begin shipping orders in September…..I’ll probably take most of the day today to continue updating the education section.

As always, thanks for reading.

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!

Just another fairly quick update before some more substancial notes over the weekend, but we spent yesterday in wine country with Copain in the morning and then after getting thoroughly lost…..Audelssa in the afternoon.

We started our day at Copain which is one of the most beautiful sites you’ll ever find. Their vistas are gorgeous and the people from Juliana their tasting room manager to Jennifer their sales director, to John the assistant winemaker were available and happy to answer questions and generally talk about the way they make wine and how they do business. We tasted perhaps ten different wines over about two and a half hours, all of which were excellent and in our opinion…..under priced. I’ll give more detailed reviews of the wines at a later date, but we’re very excited to continue working with Copain.

After leaving Copain we had thought that the easiest way to head to Sonoma for our afternoon meeting would be to take the 12 across. Of course we somehow missed the turn off for the 12 and ended up in Petaluma(about 20 miles too far south) before realizing what we’d done. On the way to the Audelssa tasting room we saw a sign for Glen Ellen(the small town where the tasting room is located) but our directions were for a turn off at Arnold Drive. Well after a couple of wrong turns and another 15 miles in the wrong direction we spoke to Mike who gave us a better idea where to turn. We eventually found our way to the Audelssa tasting room……about an hour late.

Audelssa is one of those wineries that when you look into the quality of wine they produce frankly you’re surprised that you’ve never heard of them….at least I was. They have multiple varietals rated 90+ points by Robert Parker and honestly I had never tried the wine before ending up in their tasting room. Neither Matt nor I were disappointed with the wine, far from it. In fact it was certainly competitive with everything else we tasted/ Audelssa has a great family story and great wine which I’m looking forward to explaining in more detail some time in the next week. We had an enjoyable conversation with Mike in their tasting room and really look forward to featuring their wines as part of our wine clubs and export services in the future.

We finished our day at the Girl in the Fig restaurant on the square in downtown Sonoma. Great meal at my sister in laws favorite restaurant.

Needless to say it’s been a very fun trip and also extremely productive as well for Uncorked Ventures. I honestly did not think that about 45 days into this new business venture that we’d be able to source this type of wine from 4 top notch wineries.

More to come, but this is an exciting time.