You would think that after five years of tasting hundreds of wines per week that I\u2019d never be in a position to drink crappy wine at home. And you\u2019d largely be right. Because I regularly stock our home cellar with wines from The Cask Room\u2019s regular list \u2014 we don\u2019t frequently shop other places for wine. Why would we? Wholesale prices plus the ability to weed out the crappy wines on someone else\u2019s dime equals nothing but well-made juice. But, there always seems to be a day (or weekend) where I forgot to bring home enough to replenish the cellar after a rousing dinner party or two. Such was the case last month. We had great plans of taking the kiddos out for pizza after a nice, long walk, but Storm Watch 2010 changed our plans. We found ourselves phoning in a takeout order instead. I opted for a high-end grocery chain here for wine \u2014 figuring that I would maximize the chances of a warm pie plus wine this way, versus the trek downtown to “borrow” from the bar\u2019s inventory. I like to tell our customers all the time that as long as you know the varietal and you know the region that you will be empowered to pick a good wine. Well, I\u2019m here to tell you that this tactic doesn\u2019t always work. I bought three bottles of wine to match our pizza and leftovers the next night: a zin from a big name producer with a Lodi old-vine offering, a merlot from Alexander Valley\/Sonoma, and a Napa cab. None of these have I tasted before. These kinds of wines don\u2019t come across my periphery too often at our establishment because of their ubiquitousness in restaurants. Nonetheless, I bought them and we drank them. Well, most of them. They all had a common problem: they were “thin.” That is, not enough fruit, not enough texture, not enough alcohol, and most appallingly, not enough acidity to pair with the pizza. Now, why is this? They\u2019re all smart grapes for the areas where they\u2019re grown. What exactly is going on? Overcropping. Blame it on the economy. Blame it on greed. Blame it on corporate decisions and not agricultural decisions. Grapes grown on any plot of land have an optimal “yield” that will produce the “best” or the “most interesting” wine. This knowledge comes with years of experimenting until you get it just right. But, one general rule is that the more fruit yielded per acre, the less interesting the wine is going to be. Think about it \u2014 if there\u2019s a set amount of nutrients and water given up by Mother Nature, the more fruit taking it will not get a measurable amount per berry to fully ripen and show the best version of itself that it can. This is classic American farming. It\u2019s not surprising that many of the state\u2019s growing regions were once planted with lettuce, tomatoes, nut trees, apples, etc. The more you grew, the more you were paid. Grape growing is almost the opposite (for people who care). The less you produce, or the more you thin and prune during the season, the more interesting your crop should be, the more renowned your vineyard should be, the more money you\u2019ll get for your grapes and the more those wines will eventually sell for. Well, there\u2019s one class of winemaker who might just not give a damn, and it\u2019s those making hundreds of thousands of cases of drinkable but uninteresting juice. Precisely the kind of wine you\u2019ll likely encounter in your neighborhood drug store, liquor store, grocery store or restaurant. It really pays to find a retailer who gives a darn. Here in San Diego, I can\u2019t recommend San Diego Wine Company highly enough. Places like theirs, and like mine, really weed out the wines you shouldn\u2019t drink. We can make money doing the right thing, buying the right wines, from the people who care. Of course, there are times when you need a last minute bottle. Well, between 3rd Corner up north, to SD Wine Company in the central, and our store downtown, or the many Costcos around town, you should be able to spend your precious dollars with someone who cares enough to help you enjoy your next bottle. That\u2019s my dream anyway. Stop buying wine from the places who don\u2019t care. Mike Kallay and his wife, Stephanie, own the Cask Room, a wine bar in East Village. www.caskroom.com<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You would think that after five years of tasting hundreds of wines per week that I\u2019d never be in a position to drink crappy wine at home. And you\u2019d largely be right. Because I regularly stock our home cellar with wines from The Cask Room\u2019s regular list \u2014 we don\u2019t frequently shop other places for […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11556","_seopress_titles_title":"Vineyard Place: Badly farmed, overcropped grapes make bad wines","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11556,11547,11593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-downtown-news","category-features","category-no-images"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}