It’s time for another thrilling addition of SDMB Wine Club! Our sommelier this week is Swallowed My Cellphone – unless I’ve screwed that up again, which is completely possible but unlikely since I actually looked at the list this time. Swallowed My Cellphone, please enlighten us: What does one actually drink with cellphone? Looking forward to your pick! IIRC, SMC may have an interesting idea for us . . . .
As usual, everyone welcome; buy before next Thursday; taste and post before the following Thursday when the next thead will be posted. (In theory. As Exhibit A for the fluidity of all deadlines, see this thread, started on a Saturday, or in other words “three days late”.) Enjoy, everyone.
ETA: And a big wet smooch to whoever is updating and maintaining the spreadsheet. It is both handy and dandy, and it is here. Seriously, please remind me who gets credit for this.
Ladies… aaaaand gentlemen! Today we are going to depart with the usual wine club formula!
Instead of selecting a single wine for everyone (although I do have one on stand by if this idea is a total wash), I am instead sending everyone on a (hopefully) fun recognaissance mission.
Are we wine snobs? In the interest of promoting a good ecological footprint and trying wines we might not dare to try because we balk at the site of a box, I propose we seek out and compare wines in “alternative packaging”!
YOUR OBJECTIVE: Find a vintage wine in a tetra pak or other eco package (one that you’ve always wanted to try but thought it would be too gauche to show up as a guest with a boxed wine).
TASTE AND REVIEW: Is it actually decent? Is it pure, impotable plonk that not even a beer chaser will make palatable? Would you bring it to your mom’s for dinner? Most importantly would you recommend it to your fellow Dopers???
LIMITATIONS: To make it possible to compare products fairly, and hopefully so that more than one person may try the same wine, let us limit our search to Europe and aim for red (unless people have too tough a time finding something that isn’t frightening looking).
The wine I will be trying is: French Rabbit - Cabernet Sauvignon This was heralded here in Toronto as the “first vintage wine in a box”.
It is from a vinyard in the south of France. The Boisset Winery has been making wine for two generations, which gives me optimism. But on their website under “aging”, it says “To be opened quickly with good friends!” which makes me less optimistic and fearful of potential plonk.
Choose your BOX my fellow sommeliers!
Any input on this idea would be welcome. If anyone wants to further restrict or modify the rules for this week’s adventure, I’d be game.
I got the idea when my fiancee and I went camping and found juice-box sized three-packs from “Le Petit Sommelier”. I’d recommend it for transportability, and for eating with camp food that has been scorched over a dirty camp grill. When you are exhausted form a long trek, it is heavenly, but then at that point, so is instant coffee that’s been in a thermos for four days. But I would not bring it to an actual dinner party with any friends that I wanted to still like me afterwards. It was a touch oxidized in taste, had little fruitiness, and was overall bland. It just made your toongue feel as if it had licked the bottom of yesterday’s glass.
To be honest, I don’t recall ever seeing any “wine in a box” selections at my local wine merchant’s establishment. I’m going to be traveling all week so maybe I’ll find it somewhere between here and the midwest.
As for the eco-friendly aspect, our empties go to the recyclers so they may be more eco-friendly than a plastic bag that gets tossed in the landfill.
Tetra paks are in fact recyclable and should not be sent to landfills. (There are also other green benefits that come from manufacturing and transporting goods in them. They actually create less waste from the get-go). But presently only 25 states have facilities for recycling them (so presently they are producing only low-yield materials – they’ve got the package, but not easily the means to recycle its components). Right now, bottles have a worse carbon footprint, but a realy high recycling rate. (If you return your wine bottles to the “Beer Store” in Ontario, what actually gets divereted from landfill is insanely high.)
Perhaps this won’t work though with so many Dopers in the U.S. Nearly half of all wines sold in Australia comes in a tetra pak, and Canada has launched several boxed version of some wines (which are also available in bottles).
My thinking on both fronts. I always recycle my wine bottles, so I don’t see that it’s a non-eco-friendly container.
There might be some quality wines-in-a-box in the US, but I haven’t seen them. Of course, maybe I’m just not looking. BevMo keeps its low quality jug wines in a separate aisle, and if they have non-traditional containers there as well, then I wouldn’t have seen them as I tend to stay away from that aisle.
In these parts, I might be able to mix Mad Dog and grape Kool-Aid, does that count? Actually, I lived off of Franzia Bergundy, but I suppose this might not count as vintage. There was something wrong with the Merlot.
Yes, but bottles are quite difficult to bring on an 8-day canoe trip.
Okay… So that was a bust.
Back to the sommelier basics. This week’s pic will then be Bodegas Montecillo, Rioja Crianza 2003 (varietal: tempranillo). It should be good to compare to the Marqués de Cáceres that we tried back in week 7. In the U.S. it’s seems to be about $8-$12.
It is a hefty red (IMHO) although it’s supposed to be a mid-weight. It’s got a mature taste with soft tannin and there is something about the bouquet that I find a bit leather-like or maybe burnt chocolate.
Warning: I did get a nasty bottle once. I could find no evidence that it was corked, but it was gawdawful. These days on the shelves I’m seeing the 2003, depending on what’s in stock, but sometimes you can find the 2001 which is really yummy.
Swallowed my Cellphone I loved your idea, I just don’t know what qualifies and where i can get it. The wine box/bag is a great invention and perfectly suited to storing good wine.
I didn’t take in to account that in the U.S. the only boxed wines may be in the ailse wher they keep the low-end plonk, or the make-your-own section. Here in Ontario, you can’t buy alcohol at the supermarket or convenience stores. You have to go to a Beer Store or the Liquor Store (which also sells beer). So we can have a huge variety of wines available at a broad price range. It’s then easier to be able to offer a lot of the better (and newer) vintages in alternative packaging.
It never occured to me that a lot of places in the U.S. won’t have wine shops that have the space for the boxes other than in the ailse where they keep the “cheap” boxes, unless they are a large wine shop with a broad variety.
ETA: I thought it would be fun to try some of them (since newer but reputable wineries are starting to offer boxed wines), but it may be more problematic than I thought.
Swallowed my Cellphone, I think we should still do the box wine idea. I’ve had a few interesting box wines recently that may not be able to age as much as I would wish, but still are not your “typical” crappy wine. For instance I’ve had the Black Box wines referenced in the linked article and found them to be pretty good.
I’ve also had Wine Block referenced in the linked article, which are also decent.
I don’t think any of these examples follow your eco-friendly direction though, as they all are bag-in-a-box and the plastic isn’t exactly great for landfills.
I was afraid to try any of these wines until my step-father-in-law served me a white from a box (unfortunately I’m not sure which one it was). Since he’s also served me some of the best wines I’ve had, I figured if he feels comfortable serving them to a guest, box wines must have come up in standards.
Well, I wouldn’t worry as much about the “eco-friendly” aspect as much as focussing on the “alternative packaging” aspect.
I remember a couple years ago there was a news story about how a few really reputable, high-end wineries tried experimenting with screw-caps instead of corks and the response was practically “scandalous”. As if suddenly Chateau Fancypants that sold for $300 a bottle had become swill.
So I tought it might be fun to try an assortment of “alternatively packaged” wine and see if any good finds come out of it. But it sounds like there are Wine Clubbers who wouldn’t be able to find anything other than the nasties.
There is a list of recommended Tetra Pak wines here: Globe and Mail. I’m personally still find tetra paks’ environmental impact to be questionable (until they can improve the cost-effectiveness of recycling), but if anyone is interested this is how much of the benefit works. Note, that’s the tetra pak makers’ site. Mite biased maybe? :dubious:
In any case, LCBO stores in Canada had a really tough time keeping the reputable tetra pak wines in stock when they had their much heralded debut. I certainly would like to try a few more.
I was watching After Hours with Daniel* (on the MoJo Hi-Def network) the other night and they were drinking some (supposedly) excellent French wine that came in some sort of large-ish can (or cannister). I didn’t get the details, and I presume there was some sort of bladder inside the can, but the idea was that you could drink however much wine you wanted, and the remainder would stay good “indefinitely”.
*Daniel = Daniel Boulud, a high power French chef in NYC.
Was it Dtour? After the pick today, I found this article. A bit pricy as an initial purchase, but since it is the equivalent of four bottles, that brings the wine well within our price range.
There is a company in this area bottling wines in ‘mini-tanks’ - Mas Vino. Right now they’re bottling a red blend of Mendocino and Napa grapes and a Napa Sauv Blanc. I’ve tried them both, there are a couple of bars and restaurants that are using them. The wines were pretty good, but nothing out of this world.
Anyway, I like both the alternative packaging idea and the Rioja pick, so I’ll probably do them both.
Me too. I don’t think we should give up on the alternative packaging idea just yet. If all I can find is Franzia, then I’m not doing it, but I’d like to at least look first and report back. I think the idea is a good one so let’s not toss it out before we’ve tried to run with it.
Reading about the tetra pak wines, they compare them to the bags-in-a-box. The bag-boxes look like they’d be really ooky. One of the articles mention that the benefit of the tetra paks is that they don’t “impart a plastic flavor into the wine.” Is that what bag-boxes are like? that sounds disgusting?
One of the wines they have here offers a choice between a bottled version and a tetra pak version. I think I’d try the one one both ways and see if there is a noticeable difference. I suspect it will be like the differnce between bottle beer and beer in an aluminum can.
Bag in the box materials don’t impart plastic flavors, they just don’t have a very long shelf life. About a year is the max. The bags are gas-permeable and the wine will begin to oxidize.
Tetra Paks are also gas-permeable, but provide a slightly longer shelf life. About 2 years. I think doing a taste test of the same wine in different packaging is a great idea if you can do it.