Occupy Napa Valley

At Drink Better Wine, we’re in the business of helping clients obtain wines and spirits that will blow them away.  We specialize in labels that represent the fruit of a time and a place, created by artisans blending tradition and technique.  But every day we deal in a reality straight out of Dickens – it’s the best of times and the worst of times for the wine collector.  The wine press (paper and cyber) brings every corner of the wine world to our consciousness:   on the acquisition front, websites abound, wine retailers are everywhere, and – at least in our corner of the universe – even grocery stores have an obligatory wine department.  But the frustrating irony of the new wine world is that just as we have so much information, and so many possibilities tempt us, the same forces affecting nearly every industry have permeated our quest for new beverage experiences.

Even the seasoned wine lover has to look bewilderingly at the hundreds of racked bottles at the wine superstore, or the dozens of pages on the corporate online shopping cart.  As international conglomerates snap up every successful label, state wholesalers tighten their stranglehold on what can be legally sold in each state, and they will choose what can most easily be mass-marketed and resupplied.  The result:  just about every bottle you see on the supermarket shelf represents hundreds of thousands of cases in production.

If you want to enjoy wine and spirits the way the best artisans make them in miniscule quantities, loyal to their home soil and climate and crafted to bring out the finest nuances over many years, devoid of shortcut chemicals and processes, getting your hands on them can be pretty tricky.  That’s what Drink Better Wine, and this blog, is all about.  We use only suppliers that purchase directly from independent producers making tiny batches (from a few dozen to a couple thousand cases) of craft wines and spirits using safe and natural components and methodologies.

Occupy Napa Valley?  I guess consolidation and corporatization can be expected throughout the hills of California, but these days it’s hard to find an old line independent family producer of Bordeaux or Burgundy, Rioja or the Rheinhessen.  You can’t blame a struggling winemaker for selling his fermented soul for economic security and the promise of great prosperity, but it means that those who persevere making wines the way they are called to do – instead of what corporate marketing teams dictate – should be supported and rewarded for their dedication, their courage and their risk.

We Highly Recommend…

We hope you enjoy our offerings both liquid and literary, and feel free to respond with questions and comments at 224-795-7866.

2005 Bordeaux – Right Bank (extreme) Rarities   The 2005 vintage was terrific all over France, but some very famous wine writers were late to the party.  Vintage number ratings (and some individual label ratings) are often adjusted over time by the more conscientious wine experts, and 2005s have been maturing much better than anticipated.  Bordeaux in particular can be subject to revisiting, as many breathless initial reports are based on barrel samples that can be quite different from the bottle you open many years later.  Unfortunately, commodity pricing of prominent Bordeaux upon release can result in overcharging at the bottle, often measured in hundreds of dollars.  This is an argument for the virtues of buying older vintages where hopefully the market has wielded some pricing justice, but the market can quickly be empty of those vintages.

Likewise you can find serious bargains in underrated labels, and downright steals in little-known ones.   As it happens, our dedication to limited-production, artisan wines puts us in the enviable position to frequently obtain tremendous deals on wines unavailable anywhere else, at prices contracted before the hype.  As the 2005s are nearly gone in many categories, we are fortunate to offer two 2005 Right Bank Bordeaux, the ones that traditionally take so long to mature they tell you to buy them for your kids.  The ideal conditions of 2005 has made these treasures far more accessible much earlier than usual, as reflected in constant upgrades in popular Vintage Ratings.

Wine Guru Robert Parker now rates 2005 Pomerol a “95,” and St Emilion a “99.”  Our two 2005 Bordeaux offerings aren’t famous, partly because the estate names are nearly unpronounceable even for French wines, and partly because the Pomerol has a production of only 2000 cases, the St Emilion under 1000 cases.  Here are the thumbnail specs:  2005 Chateau Petit Frombrauge Pomerol ($70)  a 17^th Century estate originally a monastery, one of the oldest properties in the oldest district of Bordeaux.   Oddly, it’s considered an up-and-coming operation!  Merlot with some Cabernet Franc in different amounts each vintage.

2005 Vieux Chateau Ferron St Emilion ($53), named for the iron content in the soil.  To the usual Merlot, It adds 5% each Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot, both mostly for aromatics, all from minimum 40-year-old vines.  This is old-time winemaking at its best, including fining with egg whites, aged 18 months in oak, based on constant monitoring of each individual barrel as it matures.

Both of these wines should have at this point 1-2 hours of decanting, and honestly exact flavors are difficult to predict.  Both are big, powerful, tannic wines that let loose many flavors as they open – the St Emilion more red cassis, the Pomerol more vanilla, but it’s so much more.  We suggest taking this rare opportunity to compare two hand-made masterpieces from a great year in the most famous wine region on earth, and enough to cellar for tasting a bit of local Bordeaux history years from now!

Go to the website now.

Drink Better Wine Team

Soirée has been a happy-go-lucky story. The core to Soirée is the 3 partners (I’m one) which were all intrinsic, in their own right, to the development of Soirée.

At the crux of it, the genesis for Soirée came when I (Andrew Lazorchak) got the opportunity to design a home Wine Bar for long-time family friends, now business partners. That was in 2004, by 2005 we were sitting around the Wine Bar that I designed, and were drinking some Napa Cab.

My NYC cynical side was poking around at some of the accoutrements that they had received as gifts, one of which I gave to them. We started to talk about these wine accessories and how they helped wine, I was barely a wine novice at this time. And can you blame me, I was most baffled by a pewter Sea Horse that hangs in a decanter and agitates the wine as the wine gets poured in. Who thought of this?

Anyway, after a few more occasions at the bar and the ever-infamous cocktail napkin sketches (note I was/am an architect), we looked at each other and said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to make our own.” And as I love to say, “3-years later, we were right, It’s a lot of fun!” The development of Soirée seems like it took a few weeks in hind-sight, but we spent 1 year and a half in development with our Factory. Personally, I was intrigued in the branding packaging, and stylization of a consumer good. And what was crucial, is that I had the capability and desire to do all of the 3-D modeling prototypes, graphics.

As a team we developed Soirée casually at nights for seven months. And ultimately we had designed a much more complex object then what we currently sell. It took us a bit to realize how fragile wine is, and that we had to respect the way wine is handled by an “aerator”. It was really fun though, and the fact that we all enjoyed the struggle and massive learning curve, keep in mind none of us have ever brought a product to market, made every little success that much bigger. And the reality of glass production was what really defined the ultimate design – we realized that glass can only do so much without costing a fortune. And we never considered plastic, we have always been adamant about glass, I will remain stunned at the amount of plastic wine aerators on the market.

How long has it been in existence?

We started in 2006 – we had our first samples in-hand by summer 2007 and sales waiting to go. We made our official debut in 2008 at the Boston Wine Expo – the biggest show in North America. (we sold out at that show and were located in the absolute back corner, it was awesome!)

I see Soirée called an aerator and a decanter?
(1) What’s the difference in the 2 names
(2) Why is it so important to decant?

Great questions:

(1) A decanter is traditionally used to remove sediment from wine. Soirée is truly an aerator – a device that rapidly and conveniently adds air to wine. As the vast majority of wines are clear fined (filtered), sediment is rarely an issue. And I find that most wines 8 years of age or older will start to give off sediment (Sediment is either residual from the winemaking process or is the chemical result of wine “melding” or aging. We mix up the terms, as most people intuitively get the idea of decanting to mean to air-out a wine.

(2) I just finished a wine show in Texas, and got this question from a lot of people, as Aeration is still a new concept to most people. My token answer goes as follows: Have you ever heard the expression, “You have to let the wine breathe.”? I ask this to a lot of people, and they all say, “ya.” So I point to a sealed bottle of wine and say that this bottle is hermetically sealed, devoid of oxygen. It has been in slumber for X years. Like everything else in our atmosphere it is activated by the presence of oxygen, and when you uncork the bottle, it is just now seeing oxygen. Like a bear coming out of hibernation or doing aerobics in the morning, you need to get oxygen going through its veins to allow the wine to come to life. That is the simple idea – the Soirée adds air – in turn it makes wine taste better. And to be thorough, I want people to know yes you can aerate all wines, even whites? Really, Whites? Yes!

My rule of thumb is any wine 8 years old or younger can handle aeration, if it’s older aerate to taste. That is a great thing about an aerator like Soirée – if you have drank half the bottle and the wine is drinking well you can always pull off the Soirée and finish the bottle normally. Soirée let’s you customize how much air you want in the wine, something you can not do with a decanter. And a fun fact is that 90% of all bottles are drunk within 24 hours of purchase, and young wines (despite some erroneous blogs) benefit MOST from aeration (ask a winemaker if they ever shook a wine bottle or put wine in a blender, they’ll all have a story about this.). And yes whites can benefit with aeration, white wines jump aromatically with aeration, and reds increase aromatically but more so have increased mid-palate expression and finesse on the finish. (this is a deep topic, as acidity, sediment, and wine structure are all factors, I could go on for a while and put most people to sleep with these details.)

You talk about Active Decanting vs Passive Decanting on your website, can you explain this more?

Well first off cheers for perusing our website! We also got praise from enobytes.com that awarded Soirée The Best Bet and gave us a nod for having passionate content. I am glad to know people are reading it!

Traditional decanting: The process was invented to “clear” the wine or pour the wine into a decanting vessel, leaving sediment in the bottle. The wine then sits and passively decants for a period of time. Soirée by its physics – causes the wine to open up every time you pour by having air bubbling up into the bottle (think of the glugging of milk). This bubbling takes place when the wine bottle is being poured Up-Side Down and air “glugs” up into the bottle.

Then, when the bottle is turned right-side up, the wine then sloshes back down mixing up the wine in the bottle. As a result – the wine in the bottle will get exposed to more oxygen with very pour – allowing the whole bottle to actively “decant” as you pour. And the sharp question here, is if one pours a glass or two with the Soirée is the bottle then safe to save for another day. The answer is yes, of course we always recommend that you finish the bottle (that’s our joking answer) but yes as long as you have better than a third of the bottle left, seal the bottle, refrigerate it, and even use an inert gas like Vineyard Fresh (these are the proper ways to store wine for max preservation), your wine will be good for a day or 5.

J&C is now a proud retailer of the Wine Soiree…whats the price?

$22.99 is your price as we agreed. We, Soirée, like to retail for $24.99 + S&H as we aim to not compete with our retailers. We love to give our retailers every advantage as they, like you, are our best advocates. (check it out in the Joseph & Curtis store)

What’s on the horizon for the soiree?

Global domination, just kidding, well, hopefully not. But from the get-go people have encouraged us to diversify and make variations on a theme. Even some of or our retailers are like – what miracle product are you going to invent next? We have decided to stay a single SKU company until we have the confidence that we are clearly the leader or a strong rival. I like to say if we can be what Pepsi is to Coke, I am cool with that, we just better be Pepsi or Coke. And you can bet we’ll work like rust until we are.

It’s hard enough to introduce one product to the world, why make more work? We have ideas “on the drawing board” that will compliment Soirée, and keep in mind I am an architect turned wine lover (mid-level sommelier), with a passion for branding. So you can bet we’ll do something involving design, brand, and wine – ya that’s vague. But honestly – this whole endeavor has been one lucky move to the next (supported by little sleep and lots of work), but if I were to guess I’d live in Napa Valley and be flying around the country selling Soirée back in 2007 when we started – I’d say you’re nuts but I am an “anything’s possible” kind of guy. So there will surely be new endeavors – but none that are going into action just yet.

What’s the funniest story about the soiree?

Hmmm, this question is a tough one. I am split on this answer, cause I’ll never stop getting funny names that people call Soirée and well the fact that we are doing so well stupefies me sometimes. But, you wouldn’t believe how many people come up to me at a tasting and ask, “Hey is that a Wine Bong?” and what makes this funny, is that they are commonly over the age of 60, – I love to retort, “What’s a bong?” They never expect that answer – and then we all laugh.

And then there’s OneWineDude.com who said in his review, ” The Soirée looks like a glass Christmas tree ornament, or a sex toy for the very, very adventurous. Or an elegant alien spacecraft for extraterrestrial fleas…Soirée does indeed seem to aerate the wine…” This review was before some other aerators came out, I’ll leave that one alone, but this was a hell of a review to read, not knowing Joe’s sense of humor – but without getting too mushy, the overall craziest thing is that we have made it happen – my business partners and I look at each other sometimes and say, “All this because of a glass ball.”

And we are not referring to money, we got time before this is paying mortgages. But such a novel, Yet Effective, product has enabled so much fun, opportunity, great employees, international distribution, and a lifestyle that most people mock me for. Ohh ya, my friends love to tease me, “Ohh work must have been real tough today, another wine tasting or “sales” in wine country.”

Ya, I get a lot of crap –but as Gary Vaynerchuk is promoting in “Crush It”– when work is 100% passion you don’t need a vacation and weekends don’t exist – and that is because you don’t need them – you are 100% happy with everything you do. And to my friends that call me a workaholic – they’re right – but they can’t say I am not having fun.

Thanks again for this opportunity to talk about Soirée, we are so excited for all of our growth and the many loyal fans and friends we have made along the way. We look forward to the coming years and thank every one that has helped make us what we are today. Try every wine you can, and drink every bottle like it is your last.

A former real estate attorney, Jim sacrificed everything to realize his dream of creating the perfect hand-crafted chardonnay. His business, however, is struggling, and he’s not only trying to overcome differences with his stoner son, but is also fighting off the banks.

Meanwhile in Paris, unwitting British wine shop owner Steven Spurrier hopes to revive his own failing business by sponsoring a competition (blind tasting) which will pit the traditional French powerhouse against the California upstarts.

Little did Steven and Jim realize that they were both on course to change the history of wine forever. Bottle shock delivers something for everyone…romance, intrigue,patriotism, and of course WINE. Its amazing to see how hard it was for the California wine maker in 1976 struggling to make ends meat…and being thought of as “hicks”…and to see the powerhouse California wine makers have become in 25 years.

God Bless America!!

Buy Bottle Shock at Amazon

View a trailer on youtube.

The book takes us through the authors childhood in Naples. His family moving to Albany NY. His lifestyle change between the two countries. His obsession with acquiring knowledge about food and wine…whether it was when he was a waiter, sommelier, or becoming an owner of Italian Wine Merchants.

Sergio takes you on a tour through the beautiful wine making regions of Italy, with up close and personal visits with some of the premier Italian wine makers in the world. You feel as if you are visiting with him…the way the author describes every detail…as if you were part of their family. You’ll visit their wineries, meet their families and partake in meals the author shared with the wine makers. Together they discuss the importance of food and wine pairing, and how, when done well, enhance each other and represent one of the essential aspects of an enjoyable and elevated quality of life.

The book is funny and at times charming. When you open this book and begin to read, it is much like a bottle of fine wine that develops and evolves over time. Overall the book is a great read. It has a little for each of us. Those interested in how wine is made…those interested in Italian food…family…travel..think of it as part travel guide, part wine guide,and part reality show. In 1999, Esposito founded Italian Wine Merchants in New York City. And as one of the directors of IWMH, Esposito continues to lead the store in raising the profile of Italian wine in this country and influencing both colleagues and collectors with cutting-edge selections and services.

So buy the book at Amazon, open a bottle of Barolo or your favorite Italian wine and enjoy reading Passion on the Vine by Sergio Esposito.

Cheers!

Joseph & Curtis Custom Wine Cellars