Posts belonging to Category Under$20

This is NOT a post about JEREMY LIN. Isn’t he fun? Asian kid from Harvard? OK. Plays in the NBA? Wha? Has led his crummy Knicks team to 7 consecutive wins? No freakin way. But this is NOT a post about Jeremy Lin just so we can write about unlikely wines that turn out to be stars. Like Tom Waits. Who could have expected he would become a cultural icon. Do they love him in France? The piano has been drinking…
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And now you are getting very sleepy. Listen to my voice. Read my careful prose. I want you to type I-will-take-one-case. Hit send. When I snap my fingers you will awake fully refreshed and remember nothing other than how much you NEED Garagiste. SNAP!

Jon Rimmerman of Garagiste is the MOST POWERFUL WINE WRITER today. Forget those Wine Spectator drivelers and the 100 point buffoons. JR is THE MAN. The tBoW tasting team makes a point of reading the local wine rags; the pitch letters from the sales crews. Most are boring. Some used to be among our favorites but no longer. We still enjoy the Underground Wine Letter as classic and downright erudite wine entertainment. We like to read wine books as they come around. We have fallen behind. However two classic must-reads are about the Gallo Brothers and the Mondavis. This is like reading really good historical non-fiction; Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or A Bright Shining Lie. When we want more excitement we turn to fiction. (more…)

Dotoré IGTY and tBoW workinit

Burgundy and Barolo are possibly the greatest red wines and certainly the most vexing. When they are great they are the BEST OF WINES. And when they are not ready they can produce more frustration than a Fox news host getting philosophical. Here is the Burgundy dilemma. They are rarely bad wines…with exceptions and we have written about those here. But they can simply be…not ready. Which is almost worse than being bad or flawed [ed. from Flod? near Bosche?] (more…)

Dionysus called and tBoW heard. We opened the email from our local wine retailer Woodland Hills Wine Company titled “Greek Night.” The thought there was wine to be tasted from Greece was enough to get our attention. We take WHWC events seriously. They never pierce the vinous veil between plonk and genuine oenophile worthy quaffesence. tBoW circulated the invite to the tasting team and snagged IGTY while Dotoré declined. Both made predictable references to the unlikelihood that decent wine could be made in a country so far south, so dry, so rocky and so…unworthy. Apparently it has been a long time since they located Italy on a map noticing its proximity to the Hellenic penninsula. Things were a bit different at the tasting bar. (more…)

Mon Coeur vineyard

We started “tasting wine” in 1978. We frequented a wine shop in West LA up the street from the Wine House which had recently opened. The shop was located in a bungalow that was once somebody’s home on Cotner. It was the outlet store for The Wine Merchant owned by Dennis Overstreet and located in Beverly Hills. His BH store had all the celebrity clients. The outlet spot was for the lumpen proletariat of LA’s budding wine scene. In 1978 the collector’s find was any Napa Cabernet from 1974. The first wave of Napa Cabernet producers was emerging that included Diamond Creek, Caymus and Ridge. Heitz Cellar was an old guard hot ticket along with BV Georges De Latour. The real sharpies were hunting down old vintages of Inglenook. The good thing about the Cotner store was the Saturday tastings which were loosely formed, spontaneous events. Once a sufficient threshold of aspiring snobs was present somebody bought a bottle and opened it right there in the store. The store clerks were not like the info-matics you find today in upscale wine versions of Target like Total Wine or BevMo [ed. he prefers Total Yawn]. The store clerks at the Cotner store were geeks, folks like the ones buying wine except they had to work somewhere and living in LA was still pretty cheap in the late 1970s so a wine shop was good as any other minimum wage shithole. And you could drink interesting wines when the air got thick with opinions and burning curiosity. (more…)