Posts belonging to Category Napa

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…)

Desert Kings

Somebody else is always getting married in Las Vegas. As good a reason as any to visit this forsaken cultural desert in a desert. There used to be two primary distractions in Vegas: gambling, aka gaming, and S-E-X. From a distance we observed that both industries are still alive and thriving. We could have used more distance at the poker table where we learned our game is more rusty than the Minnow on Gilligans Island. In fact, I channeled the doofus deck hand for hours as sharper minds ran roughshod over my pathetic attempts at winning hands. No matter. Once Internet poker is legal again I will be able to play at a table with similarly unskilled altacockers. (more…)

the man the legend

The season has turned. tBoW has suffered the first schnüpfen in his nélson. [ed. he caught a cold]. The A/C bill will drop only to be replaced by the heater bill. And we are loading up on, and pulling corks of, red wines once again. This is a good time to discuss something every “collector” must consider. (more…)

swirl the glass then sniff with gusto

We prefer to write about wines we favor which are generally Old World whites, reds and ros√©s. The tBoW tasting team clearly prefers Pinot Noir along with Italian varietals. However, we also have the occasional NoCal Cabernet Sauvignon or big Aussie Red [ed. there's another kind of Aussie red?] put in front of us and without other choices we slurp. There is one exception: we would never turn down a Ridge Monte Bello. Here are the notes from an assortment of these exceptionable remarkably de trop red wines rarely covered here purely for selfish reasons. Hey…they weren’t so bad. Oh yes…also a nearly 30 year old Oporto and one very good and unusual white wine. (more…)