Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
Noticed this too, but why is that??
Buy Low...
- Thread starter Jeff Grossman
- Start date
Pavel Tchichikov
Pavel Tchichikov
can't be as bad as alsace, right?
Well, I guess I am the outlier here as CT tells me I have 62 bottles of Sauternes, 42 of which are halves. Of the 62, 41 are Climens (ranging ng in vintage from 1971 to 2014) and most of the others are also Barsacs. Other than some full bottles of 2014 Climens, birth year wine I bought for my grand-nephew, I see that the last time I purchased Sauternes was some halves of 2009 Climens in 2010, however. But most of my recent consumption, I admit, has been donations, although I seem to have served it six times in the past four years. Having said that, I will also say that I do prefer stickies from Germany or the Loire.
Jayson Cohen
Jayson Cohen
Never had an issue with halves from my cellar. To the contrary I’ve been surprised by how excellent they’ve been. But maybe I’ve been lucky with my small sample size.
Claude Kolm
Claude Kolm
Also me, although the most recent halves that I bought were 1990 Climens, back in 1992 or so.
Tristan Welles
Tristan Welles
I've been buying and keeping 1/2 bottles of Sauternes for 35 years, no issues.
Eden Mylunsch
Eden Mylunsch
What a coincidence! I’m just back from the Baywood Park farmer’s market and sure enough, I bought a cantaloupe and a watermelon from a dry-farmer from Creston, which is east of Paso Robles, but not as far as Cholame, known mostly for being where James Dean unexpectedly met Donald Turnipseed on his way to a race in Salinas. East of Eden, indeed! They grow better-tasting dry farmed melons in Paso Robles than they do Cabernet Sauvignon (IMO), those eastside Paso grapes are irrigated halfway to hell and back these days and the water table is dropping like sales in the wine industry.
And who owns the rights to all the water around there? Why, it’s The Wonderful Company, who also own Justin Vineyards and most of the pomegranate juice in the free world (and Fiji Water). An advantage of growing grapes and not watermelon or cantaloupe is you can use mechanical harvesters for grapes (on the flatter East side of Paso), but if you try that with melons they get all crushed by the harvesters. There’s probably a market somewhere for watermelon or cantaloupe juice, (if they’ll buy pomegranate juice, they’ll buy anything that’s cold and wet!) but I don’t know if melon juice can be fermented, and the cost-of-production savings would be pretty small from employing mass market farming technology if there’s nobody around who’d buy it anyway. Besides, Justin hacked down a bunch of old-growth oak trees a couple of years ago after being denied permission from the authorities to do so, and despite profuse apologies, “oh, you meant THOSE oak trees?” and hefty fines, The Wonderful Company is still not held in very high esteem and are not exactly beloved by the local community.
But enough about juicy melons and sour grapes. (add a handle of Tito's and nobody would care, right?)
I know from having read the Jancis Robinson piece that Pasquini is the name of the d’Yquem guy, but I’m wondering if he’s related to the Pasquini family in Frogtown, a min-suburb of Los Angeles. They’re Italians, but there’d be a certain symmetry in them doing business in Frogtown if there was a branch of the family in Sauternes. The Pasquinis have sold espresso machine in Southern California they’ve been doing it for 50+ years and their shop is THE place to go when your La Marzocco starts spitting out espresso rivaling the quality of an all-night Starbucks in North Platte, Nebraska during the graveyard shift on a snowy night, which is to say that it’s not the sort of espresso that makes memories and wakes up anyone but desperate truckers. We took our Mini to Pasquini World Headquarters for a tuneup, and $750 and a week later the espresso was better even than a trendy coffee lab in Melbourne or at a petrol station on the Autoroute. The Pasquini family really knows their way around an espresso machine, and we reckon they’re worth the hassle of driving 200 miles and giving them all of our disposable income for the next three months, just so we can save money by making really good espresso at home.
But that’s not why I’m writing. d’Yquem, I like it, but at this moment I don’t own any. In my experience it is gold-standard collectible but collected mainly by people who “only buy the best” and who believe that Bordeaux is still the coin of the realm and the demarcator of class and breeding. They are also unlikely to ever open a bottle unless someone else brings another bottle of Bordeaux of an equal quality level ie: First Growth. “Right next to Ch. Haut-Brion doesn’t cut it, and Lynch-Bages is appropriate only when it’s “Bordeaux & Burgers Night” down at the country club. It wasn’t always like this. When I first got suckered into the wine biz I had an old geezer customer come in and he saw a bottle of d’Yquem on the rack and began to reminisce. He said that back in the 1920s, his father had made a pile of money with his hardware store in downtown LA and it was near a grocery store that sold wine. Newly prosperous, he asked the proprietor for something really good to accompany the family’s Sunday dinner. The wine expert recommended Ch. d’Yquem so the guy’s father ordered fifty cases of the 1921 at about $20 per case (he got a quanity discount) and they drank down that pile for years and years’ worth of Sunday dinners. You’d think they’d have gotten bored by drinking the same wine, week after week, but maybe d’Yquem transcends such dogma about wine consumption? If not d’Yquem, then who?
But nobody buys a pallet of anything like that anymore, because it’s too damned expensive, and besides, who needs to get gout again? Diabetes, maybe, but gout? I don’t think so. Besides, if I’m going to come down with something the requires a visit to a rheumatologist, I’d rather get it by pounding mags of Kracher TBA or Klein Constantia, accompanied by buckets of Colonel Sanders Extra Crispy or that new foie side dish they're featuring at Chik Fil A (but don't wait until Sunday to try it). Besides, Sauternes can be too nuanced, and when you want that manly sugar blast, there’s no reason to pussyfoot around. Dropping the dough needed to accumulate “The Best” Sauternes is a pastime best reserved for Billionaires, of which I’m not one.
-Eden (I wouldn’t be too harsh on ol’ Jancis about the bait ‘n’ switch aspects of this story. She emerged from a generation that was taught that there was Ch. d’Yquem and then all the rest of the Sauternes, and from that point on, there were “other dessert wines” but it’s not like they counted for much. I mean, back then you’d write a wine book that was packed with 22 chapters of infinite knowledge about Burgundy and Bordeaux, and then the rest of the world would take up like nine pages. She’s transcended that since her early days in the trade, but maybe there were some um, incentives from LMVH for better coverage for their flagship Sauternes producer in her piece on investing in -- and saving-- the region)(but probably not, because they did pour a 1960 d’Yquem for her 1950 Babes group)
Florida Jim
Florida Jim
One of the great joys of this place . . .
I see Eden is the author, I get the popcorn.
I see Eden is the author, I get the popcorn.
Peter Creasey
Peter Creasey
Jim, amen!
. . . . Pete
. . . . Pete
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Now, I was always taught that the Extra Crispy was a champagne bucket; connoisseurs took Original Recipe with TBA (or, at least, anything with more puttonyos than the chicken has drumsticks.)
Larry Stein
Larry Stein
First thing that comes to mind when I read Eden's posts: I'll have what he's having.