Welcome to wine press, put your phone away
Recently we’ve been talking about the life cycle of a bottle once it enters our store. We get a lot of questions about how we choose our wines, and the truth is it doesn’t happen easily. In the past few months we have been tasting our faces off trying to cement our inventory for the next several months. Our staff has re-tasted through entire sections to make sure that the wines we have are the ones we want to showcase. Each wine that makes it to the wall is an ambassador that represents our time and consideration.
This week we tasted nearly fifty wines in preparation for the Beaujolais season. Of that group, nine made it out. And though we don’t normally taste that many wines in one sitting, that ratio paints an accurate picture of our selection process. We taste a lot of wine, but not all of it makes the cut. Each of our staff members has a unique palate, we don’t all naturally gravitate towards the same wines. But we all know what to look for when we taste Sicilian Nero d’Avola or Chardonnay from Sonoma.
For our shelves, we want wines that are accurate representations of their regions. That’s what we look for when we open a bottle on Day 1, we taste early and revisit them later in the day. On Day 2 we double check our work. We make sure that first impression wasn’t a fluke. We also want to see how each wine opens up. Did it become disjointed, which characteristics are more pronounced? Does the fruit come forward a little more? How much structure was lost in a day? These are the things to consider.
But what happens when we taste a wine that isn’t a natural fit for the shelf? What about Gamay from Oregon or a delicate Ripasso that we all fall in love with? In the store, we’ve created space for seasonal favorites that we love, but don’t have a natural home on the wall. But now, we have First Glass. First Glass is where we start the conversation about wines that fit outside the box.
We believe that typicity matters. If a customer walks in looking for classic St. Émillion, we don’t want them to be surprised. We want them to have the Merlot-driven experience they’re looking for. But we also want room for the off-beat wines that we’re drawn to.
In the next few months we’ll be exploring these ideas a little more. We’ll talk/complain about wine drinkers who refuse anything but California Cabernet Sauvignon, those who say they just don’t like “sweet” wines (but choose the ripest, juiciest bottle we have anyway), and every son-of-a-Karen who opens up Vivino instead of talking to us about our wines. But I digress. What we really want to do is open our doors and share our process and a bit of our knowledge with you. Because really, all we want to do is talk about wine.
