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.

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.

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.

We had a fairly common objective yesterday. Given a $100 budget, find 3 bottles of wine that could pair with london broil, red potatoes and squash.

Given time constraints we found ourselves at Ralphs in 4S Ranch…..yes a grocery store. Luckily this grocery store has a better wine selection then any other chain grocery store I’ve seen, but it’s still not going to have the best options.

We tried to make it into an official tasting, each trying a small amount of each wine followed by a short discussion about what we each we able to taste…..no there isn’t a Robert Parker in the group either.

What we drank:

Ghost Pine Merlot 2006 $21.99

Wood Winery Cab 2004 $25.99

Stag’s Leap Petite Syrah 2006 $39.99

We were only able to accurately poll six of the eight of us the next morning about which wine was the best, but there was something conclusions which only lead me to believe that wine is complicated.

All three men liked the Cab from Wood Winery the best.

Two of the women said they liked the petite syrah the best, while my wife said she liked the merlot the best with appetizers(including artichokes) and the petite Syrah the best with dinner.

To be honest the Syrah from Stag’s Leap is the best wine of the group, but I felt the Cab helped bring out some of the marinate on the steak(which was well done, not my favorite)

Additionally I am partial myself to Cab’s.

Truthfully we did not correctly pair our wine with food, which is something that generally helps make the meal that much more enjoyable.

If I could go back and find a normal wine store, or into a wine cellar that had been appointed over the past few years with the types of wines our clubs will provide…. with my $100 what would I do?

For our main wine I’d head into the cellar for Casa Lapostolle’s Clos Apalta which is a Chilean red wine. It was scored at 95 points by Wine Spectator and at one point was selling for $40 per bottle before the maker figured out the type of product he had-which now retails at over $100 in the US. Again Chile and other younger wine regions typically make bigger red’s then Napa and Bordeaux even with the same type of grapes so be careful what it is paired with. This is a great example of the type of young wineries that produce great product and then get more expensive as they age. It’s amazing when you find these deals early on and see the winery grow and change over the years.

I’d also offer a Napa Merlot becuase everyone always likes Merlot at least ok…except that guy on sideways.

Looking back pairing with the artichoke was a problem. I had originally picked the Merlot because I thought we were grilling the artichoke…the thinking being that the grill would give a certain bitterness that would stand up to the red wine. In fact it was steamed, so pairing it with a Chardonnay or a Sauvignon Blanc would have been a better bet.

As always we try and enjoy our food and wine but this was a good example that simply running out to the grocery store because your in laws don’t cellar anything isn’t going to give you the best return on your wine investment.

To that end we’ll be providing pairing ideas with easy to follow recipe’s with all of our bottles.

Enjoy!