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Harvest 2008
This year's harvest started on Saturday, August 23, 2008 with the arrival of zinfandel grapes from Paso Robles and the Whitten Ranch (Geyserville) at the Monte Bello winery. In the photo below, assistant winemaker Jerry Widing oversees a zinfandel grape delivery (15 tons from East Bench) at the Lytton Springs winery on Tuesday, August 26, 2008.
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Exceptional bottles for less than 150 bucks.
Great Wine Bargains
Exceptional bottles for less than 150 bucks.
By Mike Steinberger, www.slate.com
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2008, at 12:56 PM ET
If you think oil and food are pricey, just try buying a top-of-the-line Burgundy or Bordeaux. Recent years have brought dizzying price hikes for the most sought-after names, and many wine buffs have been knocked off the luxury ladder as a result. I've certainly slipped a few rungs. Lately I've had to kiss goodbye to some dear old friends (a process hastened, admittedly, by my wife's discovery of a few eye-popping receipts I'd meant to burn). Chave, Raveneau, Mugnier, and Giacosa are all too rich for me now.
A few weeks ago, tired of dwelling on the growing imbalance between my wallet and my palate, I decided to draw up a list of world-class wines still within reach of proles like me. The exact criteria were as follows: The wines had to be among the finest expressions of their grapes, styles, regions, or some combination thereof; had to exhibit the kind of profundity that separates the truly great from the merely very good; had to be underpriced relative to the (very few) wines that could be considered their equals; and had to be affordable enough that nonbillionaires could realistically contemplate splurging on them.
I didn't have an exact price ceiling in mind, but $150 struck me as a reasonable outer limit for a splurge wine. (Not eligible, for example, was the great 1990 Château Haut-Brion, which, at $650 to $900 a bottle, is arguably underpriced relative to the marginally better 1989 Haut-Brion, which sells for $1,200 to $1,500. But the point is purely an academic one for our purposes.) I figured I might identify four or five wines that satisfied my requirements. But I reached five pretty easily, and with additional sober reflection (wine writers are capable of it from time to time), I was able to come up with 10 wines that met my criteria. They also happen to be wines that I personally adore.
Six are white, four are red (and not a red Bordeaux or red Burgundy among them, which speaks to just how much those prices have jumped). For two of the whites, I haven't cited specific wines but have instead named the producers; each of these estates turns out a bevy of great wines, nearly all of which are very attractively priced. Be advised: These wines will almost always improve with aging, and some of them, when first released, need to be put in the cellar for at least a few years.
Herewith, then, a list of head-spinning wines that I'd be stashing away if I weren't observing a marriage-saving moratorium on wine buying:
REDS
Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon. The iconic American wine, produced in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Silicon Valley, and the one California cabernet that can unquestionably hold its own against the best of Bordeaux and has proved it time and again in blind tastings. Depending on the vintage and the store, the Monte Bello sells for between $90 and $150 a bottle, compared with more than $1,000 for the Bordeaux First Growths (the 2005s, anyway, save Mouton Rothschild) and upward of $500 for some Napa Valley cabernets that don't come close to matching the Monte Bello's track record. Sooner or later, the market is going to realize there is something wrong with this picture. My advice: Buy now.
The 2005 Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon ($145) is still an infant, but the seeds of greatness are manifest. The wine is showing lots of everything at the moment—black currant fruit, tannins, oak—but there's not a hair out of place. The Monte Bello has long been a paragon of refinement and complexity, and the '05 is no exception. It is almost a cliché, but this really is California's First Growth.
Read the full article at slate.com.
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