Coyote Blog

I am a bourbon and cocktail guy, not a wine guy.  When folks are tasting wine and saying they can taste grass and strawberries and chocolate, I am saying "I think that's a red one."  Never-the-less some new friends who know a lot about wine hosted us a while back on a trip to Napa to do some wine-tasting.  I will say that I left somewhat confused.

The incident that set me to thinking started at a gorgeous winery called Bond, part of the Harlan family series of vineyards.  I had never heard of Bond or Harlan, which generated approximately the same reaction from wine-lovers as, say, telling my daughter I can't name any Taylor Swift songs.  Anyway, we had a tasting there, which I understand was something of a coup in in itself.  At the tasting we tried 5 different cabernets from 5 different parts of the valley.  It was actually cool, they had a jar of the soil each wine's grape was grown in next to the bottles and there were very dramatic differences.  I found this infinitely more enlightening than being told the word "terroir" over and over.

They did a couple of things that I have come to learn make for the best high-end vineyard tasting experience.  First, the whole thing was quiet and private for just our group.  And secondly, in addition to opening up all their current vintage wines (all cabernet sauvignon) for tasting, they pulled a few 2013 versions of the same wine from the library -- "library" being wine-speak for inventory of older stuff.  2013 was apparently a very good year for them and this was by far the oldest stuff we had been offered anywhere.

I had always been told that you can't drink cabs right away.  They have to age in the bottle for 10 or 15 or more years to really be their best.  I had never experienced that for myself but drinking the 2013 version next to the 2023 version was eye-opening to me.  TL;DR it makes a big difference that even I could readily taste.

By the way, if you have any scientific bent, good luck asking any of these tasting room types what -- chemically -- happens in the aging process once in the bottle.  I am more used to bourbons that really do not continue to age once they are out of the barrel and into glass bottles (aging for bourbons requires molecular exchange with the wood in addition to evaporation from porous barrels and even changes to the weather).  So I was curious how wines age in the bottle.  But I asked wine folks about what happens in the bottle -- do long chain molecules break down, do molecules combine, do some chemicals vaporize and leave solution -- and all I could ever get was new-agey stuff about ... something or other.  Something happens to the tannins -- I could probably look it up.

But this is where I hit my conceptual wall I am still struggling with.  To understand this you need to know that the current vintage bottles of cab at this winery go for $800 a bottle -- that is for the 2023 version.  The problem is that I don't really buy $800 bottles of wine.  I don't actually buy $800 bottles of bourbon (see footnote below).  But I knew that people fight to get even a few bottles on allocation from this winery at this price.  So I thought about buying something because a) it was really a lovely tasting and buying a bottle or two seemed good manners and b) it might be fun to have a special bottle tucked away for a special occasion, maybe for the birth of our first grandchild or the night before I get put up against the wall come the revolution.

Outside the tasting, though, I searched on my phone for the 2013 Bond Pluribus we had tried.  I learned that this was considered a very good wine and scored a 100 from wine critic Robert Parker, which is apparently a good thing.  This very highly regarded and more fully aged 2013 vintage was going for $600 in several places. $600 aged 10 years vs $800 new -- I was confused.

My wine friends did not even blink when I said this.  Their reaction was "well, that wine was probably originally sold for $200 and $600 is a pretty big markup."  But that makes zero sense to me -- the original sales price should be irrelevant.  The 2013 is known to be one of their very best years and likely a better year than 2023.  But more importantly it had already been aged for 10 years in the bottle.  By any possible wine drinker metric, the 2013 had way more value than the 2023.  We all agreed the 2013 tasted way better, at least today, than the 2023.  But it was $200 cheaper.  Another way to think about that is that if I have to store the 2023 for at least 10 years for it to really be drinkable, that means the future value at 8% discount rate of my $800 I pay today is $1,727 in 10 years.  Why buy a young bottle today if I can buy an aged bottle from a really good vintage for cheaper?

I had a professor at HBS who taught investing -- I am sorry, I have forgotten his name but he was quasi-famous.  He would put crazy arbitrage opportunities on the board, and we would all argue about why they existed and how money could be made from them.  He would end all such discussions with the same phrase, "either this is a real opportunity or there is something you don't understand."  I am willing to believe there is something I don't understand and am open to commenters educating me.  I can think of a few possible explanations:

1. The online offer is counterfeit, like a fake Hermes bag  (I don't think so, I ended up ordering a bottle from a very reputable store and it appears quite real).
2. People don't trust the provenance of wine sold by third parties -- what if it has not been stored well?  Maybe they left it in a hot car trunk for a month?
3. People are buying lottery tickets -- just as a Pokémon card collector might buy a huge box of unopened card packs hoping to score a super-rare card, perhaps people are willing to pay more for wines at great vineyards in hopes that one will be that wine or vintage people talk about for decades.
4. With bourbon, people pay a premium to put together collections of all the different runs of a particular brand.  Do people do this in wine, try to collect all the years of a certain label?
5. Perhaps wine people are the ultimate marshmallow test kings, actually expressing a preference for 10-years deferred gratification.
6. Maybe it gives wine people an excuse to keep buying wine because none of what they already own is ready to drink yet

Footnote on Bourbon:

I have various types of bourbon tucked away all around my house, but I don't think I have ever paid $800 for anything.  And it is certainly possible to do so.  The most famous, the 23-year Pappy Van Winkle usually goes for $4000-$5000 a bottle on the secondary market. I saw a special bottle of Eagle Rare going for $10,000 a 2-ounce pour in a Nashville bar.  Woof.

I have been lucky enough to try Pappy and other very rare bourbons on someone else's dime.  And my general conclusion is that they are not worth it.  My wife and I did a very special trip to Buffalo Trace several years ago and somehow scored a tour and tasting from the CEO of Sazerac.  So even my wife, who hates bourbon, knows that Pappy and Weller start out in the same barrel.   I signed a Pappy/Weller barrel that my wife hammered the cork into -- it should be available for my funeral.  Anyway, the main difference is Pappy stays in the barrel longer -- which is NOT always a good thing in bourbon IMO -- and it has a higher proof, about 20 points higher on ABV proof (10 points higher on ABV),

So my wife ran a blind test last weekend with a friend and I between Weller 12 and Pappy (18?)  Anyway, my friend could not tell the difference and I could tell only because I knew Pappy had a higher ABV and I could taste the burn from the greater alcohol content.  Had we diluted the Pappy down to Weller level, not sure I could tell the difference.

I find almost any bourbon quite drinkable.  If you like your Angel's Envy or Woodford or Knob Creek or Makers Mark -- great, and I am more than happy to share them with you.  If you want a recommendation, however, here are my go-to's:

• Everyday bourbon, $55 at Total Wine -- Colonel EH Taylor Small Batch.  Seriously if you told me that this was the only one I could drink the rest of my life, I would be fine
• Pricier bourbon, $150-ish on secondary market -- Weller 12.  Probably my favorite of all bourbons and much more affordable recently (several years ago it was going for $400)

Special variations of these, like the EH Taylor Single Barrel and the Weller CYPB are great and fun to compare to the base models.  If you like these, you will probably like the other Buffalo Trace offerings like Eagle Rare and Blanton's as well.  Blanton's definitely has the best bottle, looks great on the shelf, and everyone loves the little horse.  If you are in a bar and see a nearly empty bottle of Blanton's, finishing it off in any good bar should score you the horse.

From these selections you can guess I hang out a lot in the upper left right of this map but I still enjoy things all over the spectrum.

Note:  Watch for a podcast coming out soon.  I am working on an outline I have tentatively called "the birth and death of a small business" covering issues across the range of small business life.

Last week I went on a wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley with a bunch of friends who are passionate about wine.  It was an odd experience, because I am not passionate about wine and do not have the tasting ability to discern many differences between the wine.  I could tell it was a red wine, and maybe if it was dry or fruity, but hints of tobacco and blackcurrent?  Not so much.  It was also weird to be in a place where I really was not very passionate (wine is behind both beer and cocktails in my drinking hierarchy) but I was surrounded by people with a an excess of passion -- by people who seem to build their whole life around wine.  There was a lot of competitive one-upsmanship and virtue signalling going on around wine that I only barely understood.  I would equate the whole experience with my wife's experience at Comicon, standing in line behind two guys passionately arguing about comic book hero backstories.  I tried my hardest to be tolerant of those who had really different interests than I have, though I will say that this tolerance was NOT shared by most wine enthusiasts who treated me as demonstrably defective when I admitted that wine did not do that much for me.

Anyway, at each tour we typically got the whole backstory of the business.  And the consistent theme that ran through all of these discussions was the simply incredible level of regulation of the wine business that goes on in Napa.   I have no idea what the public justification of all these rules and laws are, but the consistent theme of them is that they all serve to make it very hard for small competitors or new entrants to do business in the county.  There is a board, likely populated by the largest and most powerful entrenched wine makers, that seems to control the whole regulatory structure, making this a classic case of an industry where you have to ask permission of your competitors to compete against them.  There are minimum sizes, in acres, one must have to start a new winery, and this size keeps increasing.   Recently, large winemakers have started trying to substantially raise this number again to a size greater than the acreage of any possible available parcel of land, effectively ending all new entrants for good.  I forget the exact numbers, but one has to have something like 40 acres of land as a minimum to build a structure on the land, and one must have over 300 acres to build a second structure.  You want to buy ten acres and build a small house and winery to try your hand at winemaking? -- forget it in Napa.

It took a couple of days and a bunch of questions to put this together.  Time and again the guide would say that the (wealthy) owners had to look and wait for a long time to find a piece of land with a house on it.  I couldn't figure out why the hell this was a criteria -- if you are paying millions for the land, why are you scared to build a house?   But it turned out that they couldn't build a house.  We were at this beautiful little place called Gargiulo and they said they bought their land sight-unseen on 3 hours notice for millions of dollars because it had a house AND a separate barn on it grandfathered.  Today, it was impossible to get acreage of the size they have and build two structures on it, but since they had the barn, they could add on to it (about 10x the original size of the barn) to build the winery and still have a separate house to live in.

This is why the Napa Valley, to my eye, has become a weird museum of rich people.  It seems to be dominated by billionaires who create just fantastically lovely showplaces that produce a few thousand cases of wine that is sold on allocation for 100+ dollars a bottle to other rich people.   It is spectacularly beautiful to visit -- seriously, each tasting room and vineyard is like a post card, in large part because the owners are rich enough to care nothing about return on capital  invested in their vineyards.  The vineyards in Napa seem to have some sort of social signalling value which I don't fully understand, but it is fun to visit for a few days.  But in this set-piece, the last thing the folks who control the county want is for grubby little middle-class startups to mess up their carefully crafted stage, so they are effectively excluded.

I know zero about wines, but from other industries this seems to be a recipe for senescence.  It would surprise me not at all to see articles get written 10 years from now about how Napa wines have fallen behind other, more innovative areas.  I have never been there, but my friends say newer areas like Paso Robles has an entirely different vibe, with working owners on small plots trying to a) actually make a viable business of it and b) innovate and try new approaches.

Postscript:  The winner of the cost-no-object winery award had to be Palmaz.  Created by one of the folks who invented the heart stent, it was a wonderfully eccentric place.   The owner theorized years ago that pumping wine (something that is done at many steps to transfer it between process steps) hurts the wine by breaking up longer chain tannin molecules (search me if this is true).  Anyway, he wanted everything gravity fed, but that meant you needed grapes to come in at the top, with fermenters below that, and filters below that, and wine barrels for aging below that.  Well, if you have been reading this post, you can guess that a building tall enough for this certainly can't be built in Napa.  So he carved it out of a mountain.  Seriously, this place is like NORAD, with probably a mile of underground passages stacked 18 stories deep from top to bottom.  In the center of the mountain is this room:

In a circle behind the railing are fermenters on a train track that can rotate as a group all around like a giant carousel to position them under the grape chute or over the filters.  The room is carved out with a giant dome, and on the dome are projected process control data about each grape or wine batch.  It was truly incredible.  (More about it online here)

Don't get me wrong, I love this.  It is a pleasant eccentricity, from which others can benefit.  And the wine was good, at least to my admittedly weak evaluation skills.  I just hate it that the arbiters of the Napa Valley feel the need to exclude others who want to use their own land in different ways.

Update:  A Coyote Blog reader writes that they ARE doing things differently making wine in Paso Robles.  Here is his web site and story.

Apparently, the folks in France are at it again, valiantly trying to retroactively create trademark rights that don't exist.  I saw this link below:

Which leads to this site, which says in part:

When it comes to wine, there is no ingredient more important than location. The land, air, water and weather where grapes are grown are what make each wine unique. That is why we, as wine enthusiasts, demand that a wine's true origin be clearly identified on its label in order for us to make informed decisions when purchasing and consuming wine. This ensures we know where our wine comes from and protects wine growing regions worldwide.

Use the form below to sign the petition to protect wine place and origin names:

I hereby sign the Wine Place & Origin Petition. In doing so, I join the signatories of the Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origin - Champagne, Chianti Classico, Jerez, Napa Valley, Oregon, Paso Robles, Porto, Sonoma County, Tokaj, Victoria, Walla Walla, Washington State and Western Australia - and a growing list of consumers in supporting clear and accurate labeling to better ensure consumers will not be misled by wine labels.

Some countries like Germany cannot use "champagne" or "Cognac" to describe similar products.  Do you know why?  These conditions were actually thrown in to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI.  Since the US never signed the treaty, it and its citizens and growers are not bound by this restriction.

In the same spirit I demand that:  1) Hamburgers only be made in Hamburg 2)  Franfurters can only be made in Frankfort 3) Wiener Snitzel can only be made in Vienna 4) Hollandaise Sauce can only be made in the Netherlands  5) Boston baked beans can only be made in Boston.  Obviously we consumers are all duped, thinking our hamburger was actually made in Germany.  Had I only known!

OK, I am not a foodie.  I enjoy good food, but have never really appreciated sophisticated food or food that takes hours of preparation.   The steak on the grill is at least as appealing as the veal dish that took all afternoon to put together.

I know other bloggers often publish recipes.  If I were to do so, it might look like this (from an, unfortunately, actual experience)

1 bowl of Cap'n Crunch

Substitute 1/2 cup cheap vodka for milk

Preparation notes:  Never, ever do this again

That being said, we had the opportunity to have a world famous chef and writer, Hugh Carpenter, over to our house last night.  Hugh is a friend of my wife's from his summer cooking school and was kind enough to help us host a dinner party for some friends when he was in town in exchange for his room and board.   The fun part was he agreed to whip up a dinner with whatever we had in the house, which was pretty amazing.  Sort of an Iron Chef Arizona, with everything as the secret ingredient.   I would still be agonizing over how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon in the first recipe item in the time he whipped up a couple of sauces and some appetizers.

Here is Hugh with my wife.  Our guests are chipping in to help make the wontons  (Hugh actually is a big believer in this, and often advocates getting the guests to chip in on the preparation like this - its fun, a great icebreaker, and reduces pre-party stress on the host.

The list of folks Hugh has cooked for is amazing.  I find his cookbooks to be easy and down to earth and have good food in them.  They are here, and he has a new book entirely dedicated to chicken wings which may actually get me in the kitchen.

What people like my wife who are really into cooking really rave about is his cooking school in the Napa Valley.  There is a lot of cooking and wine drinking, of course, but the venues are great, often in the private homes of many of his friends and associates.  Highly recommended if you are into that sort of thing.

Oh, and since I am foodblogging, I guess I should tell you about our meal.  We had these pork wonton thingies in some sort of brown sauce.  We had black cod in some kind of chutney stuff with some sort of mixed rice thingie and this other vegetable deal.  We drank some sort of white wine except when we were drinking some sort of red wine.

Rachel Ray, watch out.

PS-  OK, I was actually able to introduce Hugh to a new food product.  He asked what I usually made the kids for breakfast, and I said "spray pancakes."  He had never heard of this, and so I proudly showed him my spray can of pancake batter (from Whole Foods, no less).  I couldn't tell if he was shocked or amazed.