May
2008
So much wine, So little time
The other day, I was walking past the bar in our lower level, the one that the previous owners were so kind to put in before they moved. There’s a case of wine sitting on it, unopened, with the Elyse label prominently displayed. Elyse is a “Mom & Pop” winery located down a dusty road in Napa.
My first thought is, am I ever going to deal with it, or am I going to let it sit there until the next time we have company walking through the door. At which point I’ll make a hurried attempt to get it out of sight. My next thought was; So much wine, so little time.
There are literally thousands of wineries producing, well, thousands and thousands of wines. Some are well known (Lafite) that will never pass my lips. Some are too well known and, unfortunately, will. But the vast majority I will never hear of and much to my chagrin, I’ll be missing out on them. You see, I’ve had the pleasure of stumbling across small wineries like Elyse and have been blown away.
Elyse is the quintessential winemaking winery. It is small, very small, so it sources most of its grapes from vineyards in and around Napa. What its winemaker does with them is magic. The word luscious comes to mind every time I open a bottle.
Lucky me. I happen to have local distributors that bring Elyse into my market. There in lies the rub. If they didn’t, I’d never have gotten to experience it. But what about all the others? So much wine, so little time.
Fabulous wines! I had the chance to try most of them, they are all very good.
I have a soft spot for the Little Guy. I have found I prefer Sonoma to Napa and particularly enjoy wines from Wellington Vineyards and Ty Caton. If you get the chance, seek them out. Also, from Napa I enjoy Corison wines. Cathy does wonderful things with Cabernet. Drinking her Cabs you can literally taste the Rutherford Dust. It’s an amazing wine.
If you like smaller wineries, you need to check out wine.woot.com They only sell two wines per week, always a great deal, usually good to very good wines and you can interact with the winemakers themselves on their message board. It’s the funnest place to buy wine on the internet.
Chris, I’ll try to keep an eye out for them.
Thanks