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MORE CALIFORNIA CABERNETS
NIEBAUM-COPPOLA
2006 Niebaum-Coppola "Rubicon" SALE $159.99 (last bottles)-
 The Niebaum here is from Mr. Gustave Niebaum, the founder of Inglenook
back in 1879. Coppola is Francis Ford, famous movie producer.
Founded in 1978, Coppola purchased the Niebaum residence and some vineyards.
Adjacent to this property he purchased some 120 acres of vineyards. In 1995 he
bought the Inglenook property, across the street from Beaulieu Vineyards. This was
owned by Heublein and came with another 70+ acres of vineyards. Also part of
the package was a bunch of wine.
The original wine made here goes by the name "Rubicon." A South
African winery also makes "Rubicon," by the way. Rubicon has been a
Cabernet-based blend. The first vintage was 1978, though Coppola didn't release this
until the mid-1980s. It was a bit rustic and astringent. People bought it
anyway, curious to taste what Coppola could produce in the vinous world.
Over the 1980s the wines continued to be of this somewhat rustic, harsh,
more-tannin-than-fruit style. I remember tasting a whole line-up of these when they
were about 10-15 years old and finding them to be somewhat dried out and short on fruit.
I suppose Mr. Coppola felt a need to improve and he hired Tony Soter (Spottswoode,
Viader, Etude, etc.) some time ago. Bingo! Instant improvement.
Soter helped craft the wine to have much better balance and significantly more fruit.
These also show a nice sweet oak note.
His fingerprints remain, though I am not certain Soter still is affiliated with
Niebaum-Coppola.
The 2006 is a full bodied Cabernet, showing some ripe tones and a
whiff of wood. It's drinkable now and should remain in good condition
for another 5 to 10 years.
The winery offers a bunch of wines with the Coppola name on them. We
have found these to be fairly commercial and of little interest. As we
get requests for something with the Coppola label, we carry a red wine
called Claret. It's a decent bottle, but hardly spectacular wine.
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- MARIO PERELLI-MINETTI WINERY
2012 NAPA Cabernet Sauvignon SALE
$19.99
2001 "MIRIAM" Napa Valley
CABERNET (Was $75) Sold Out
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 The winery has a small sign out in front noting "American Owned".
Old Uncle Mario's family had been in the California wine business for years.
Look in any book covering the wine scene in the early part of the 1900s. The history
is fascinating.
Mario, who passed away at the age of a hundred-and-something in late 2010, lived up the street from the shop and
he'd had a small cellar
in Napa making Cabernet. It's 100% varietal.
Oak is not a
big part of his wines. They feature the grape. The quality is good and the
pricing is imminently fair.
Mario was a friendly old fellow who was even more of a
dinosaur than are we!
His wines are not going to win tastings, but enough
restaurants around here have his Cabernet on their wine list that the wine is rather
popular. People like the Cabernet because it tastes good with food and doesn't cost
a fortune.
The 2012 vintage is a medium-full bodied Cabernet and is drinkable now and should remain in good shape for 4-6 more years, maybe
more. It's a bit of an old-school California red wine, not the
currently-fashionable fruit bomb with noticeable (and bothersome) levels of
residual sugar.
Still, it's an impressive Cabernet for twenty-bucks.
 Mario
made a reserve wine and named it in honor of his late wife, Miriam. I
think she was an avid swimmer and so there's a small icon representing her
on the label.
The wine is quite different than Mario's regular Cabernet. It was
matured for about two and a half years in French oak, all the cooperage
being brand new. The resulting wine is deep and dark. It's from
the 2001 vintage, so it's had considerable bottle aging.
The 2001 Miriam is now "history" and we thoroughly
enjoyed that wine...lovely work!
And we'll miss Uncle Mario...he was a character and a treasure.
- His grandson Andrew now runs the business and we hope he's
got big feet, because Mario had big shoes.
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- JOSEPH PHELPS VINEYARDS
- 2012 Insignia SALE $219.99
 We were one of Mr. Phelps' first customers back when they released their 1973
vintage wines. Phelps owned a construction company and was a home-winemaker back in
Colorado. He purchased an old cattle ranch on Taplin Road near Heitz and promised
the owner he wouldn't wreck the place.
Riesling was a specialty, as the winemaker back then was of German origins. Early Cabernets were promising but not stellar.
They
launched something called Insignia back with the 1975 vintage.
The wine was going to represent the best barrels in the cellar and some
early vintages were predominantly Merlot and others were mostly Cabernet
Sauvignon.
These days it's a Cabernet-dominated blend. And it's now
established as a benchmark for Napa Valley Cabernets and Bordeaux-styled
blends. Insignia is a wine showing lots of dark fruit and plenty of
wood. Some vintages may even have a tiny bit of residual sugar.
The "regular" bottling of Phelps' Cabernets are perfectly
pleasant and typically of good quality. We thought the current
vintage measured up to about a fifty-buck bottle, but would have had to sell
for nearly $70. No thanks.
Phelps has bought fruit from the Backus Vineyard since the 1977 vintage. When
the Backus family wanted to sell the entire vineyard site, Phelps stepped up to the plate.
This is a special vineyard in Oakville along the Silverado Trail. The
original vineyard covers less than seven acres, but Phelps says there are about 21 acres
which can (and are) being cultivated. Neighbors to this vineyard include
Screaming Eagle and Dalla Valle, amongst others.
We had a mid-1980s bottle of this
at the Vino Fino holiday dinner in December of 2000 and this was a sensational bottle of
wine! Very exotically-perfumed. The flavors were amazingly deep and lengthy.
It's been great to see this producer emerge in the past decade as a truly serious
quality winery.
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PETER MICHAEL WINERY
 Sir
Peter Michael is a royal subject of the Queen of England and he's got a nice
little winery and vineyard here in California. A venture capitalist,
this fellow has his fingers in the operation of radio stations around the
planet, along with a couple of luxury hotels (they refer to these as
"restaurants with a room"), a golf course and, oh, by the way, a
little winery in Sonoma.
The first winemaker here was Helen Turley. She's one who has strong
ideas about winemaking and viticulture. Typically she is affiliated
with a winery for several years and then moves on, leaving a disciple in her
stead. The Turley-ite here was Mark Aubert, who departed to start his
own winery, but has since returned on a consulting basis.
The winemaker today (they've had a bunch of people) is a French fellow,
Nicolas Morlet, whose family owns
vineyards and makes sparkling wine in the region of Champagne.
The Cabernet here is sold as a proprietary vineyard blend called "Les
Pavots." This vineyard site was dubbed "Les Pavots," by
Sir Pete's wife, Lady Maggie. This refers to the wild California
poppies growing around the vineyard. It comprises some 23 acres
and is predominantly Cabernet Sauvignon along with Cabernet Franc and
Merlot. We've long been fans of this wine (since before it acquired
its somewhat cult-like following).
The wines through the 1990s have been really good, but with 2001 and now
2002 the use of oak gives the wine a sweeter fragrance and flavor. It
scored a high numerical rating from various point-scoring critics and this
has increased the demand significantly. As a result, the winery has
raised its price in hopes of either separating "the men from the boys" or you
from your money.
The winery then decided that it needs to be even more profitable
that it already is (might they consider abiding by the laws in Sonoma and
reduce the amount of fines they're paying to the government there as a
result of doing some non-permitted development?).
As a result, the 2003 vintage brought a temporary end to retail wine shops
carrying Peter Michael wines.
Sir Peter issued a statement saying the winery would no longer
be selling wine to some of its original customers, in favor of selling
directly to consumers.
"For the present time," according to
the letter. If consumers don't flock to the winery to buy $150 bottles
of Les Pavots, Peter Michael may choose to stoop to selling wine to the likes of a
shop such as Weimax.
UPDATE: With the
release of the 2008 vintage coinciding with a 'down cycle' in the economy,
Sir Peter's wine once again became available to us. We may still have
a few bottles of the 2009 in the shop...it's a nice, big, robust,
not-for-the-faint-of-heart Cabernet.
With shorter crops in succeeding vintages, Peter Michael cut back
drastically on the sale of its wines to their distributors. We
understand they may have 60 bottles of a particular vintage with which to
accommodate more than a hundred accounts. Good luck.
- They will need eye-droppers to make such allocations
'go around.'
- Official Peter Michael Winery
Allocation Tools
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- Currently in stock:
2011 PETER MICHAEL "Les Pavots" Sale $189.99
2012 PETER MICHAEL "Les Pavots" Sale $199.99
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PIED À TERRE
 This
is a new label for us.
Pied à Terre is a term with a few definitions...it literally means having
a "foot on the ground" and certainly this vintner is
well-grounded.
You'll also find this term used to describe a small apartment or flat in a
big city...or it could be someone's home-away-from-home when they're at
work. There are some flight attendants who come and go from here in
Burlingame and they maintain an apartment over at Northpark so they have a
comfortable place to stay when they've land at SFO.
A New York sommelier of note, Richard Luftig, was bothered by the lack of
good quality and affordably-priced California Cabernet Sauvignon, so he
embarked on a winemaking adventure with Napa Valley vintner Steve
Matthiason. These days his winemaker is Dry Creek's Clay
Mauritson.
As a wine guru at Gramercy Tavern in New York and, these days, at
Cookshop, Luftig wanted to be able to serve a sensibly-priced wine which
offered good quality. Yes, you can find plenty of relatively
modestly-priced California Cabernets, but there are not many worth
drinking.
So, Pied à Terre was born a few years ago.
We tasted the new release, a 2013 vintage. This is quite charming
and a bit more reminiscent of old-school California Cabernets than today's
hit-you-over-the-head, punch-you-in-the-nose sorts of wine. It's one
of those wines which transports us old-timers back to the days when
California Cabernet was an elegant wine and perhaps even a bit
understated.
The Cabernet is primarily from Sonoma's Alexander Valley, though there's a
bit of Dry Creek Valley fruit here, too. You'll get a hint of wood
on the nose, but it's not a heavily-oaked wine. The tannin level is
modest, so the wine is quite drinkable now and will even blossom a bit
more with several years of aging.
And you don't need to speak with a mortgage lender or finance agent to buy
a bottle.
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Currently in stock: 2013 PIED À TERRE Sonoma
County CABERNET SAUVIGNON $26.99
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