There’s something spiff-alicious about opening a delectable bottle of wine after drinking low-budget swill for a couple of weeks.
I select a bottle from my wine cellar (read: garage). I break out the fine wine glasses, caress the delicate glass. I touch the bottle, read the label.
Madroña Zinfandel. El Dorado. 2012.
It’s an $18 bottle of wine from mixed vineyards—so no big whoop, right? But I recently jammed through a six-pack of low-end Blackstone cabs, cheap zins made from old vines (the nerve!), and a Yellow Tail merlot that turned out to be palatable with sketti. While cost is not necessarily an indicator of quality in wine—or anything else—it turns out 10 bucks a bottle makes a huge difference.
At my house these days, even the wine-formerly-known-as-average is saved for visitors. Tonight, that’s my husband, Dave, who has made his monthly sojourn from his home in Reno to my place in California.
I pull out the cork and pause, donning glasses to read descriptive text on the bottle’s back: “Situated at 3,000 feet in the El Dorado appellation of the Sierra Foothills, Madroña’s hillside vineyards offer ideal growing conditions.”
Madroña has single vineyard wines in the $50 range, but we love this wine. We’ve had this zinfandel at the winery’s tasting room in Camino, Calif. For the money, it’s excellent. Recently, I spotted this bottle on The New York Times Wine Club website.
I pour, giving the liquid some air, and inhale. Spice and berry balance on the nose. The first sip is nectar of the goddess. Wars might be fought and won for this wine. I’ve never tasted a better zinfandel. At least not in the past two or three weeks. Hence the hyperbole.
“It’s a little young,” suggests Dave. I’m reminded that he lives far away in a grand house with a wider-ranging wine selection.
“It’s perfect,” I argue.
“No, it’s really good,” he says.
“It’s amazing,” I reply, “especially as a change from Three-Buck Chuck.”
Oh yeah. I’m poor. Poor and, I admit, super-duper privileged at the same time. This year, I bought a house, and delectable wine became a luxury.
I was tired of renting and having to move when a landlord decided to sell or move back in. A few years back, I rented a house owned by a man who pocketed my dough and didn’t pay the mortgage. Bank foreclosed. House sold on the courthouse stairs to the highest bidder. Which was not me.
Saving for a house has meant limiting my wine appreciation on behalf of thriftiness.
Sort of. Perhaps I enjoyed fewer wine extravagances. An occasional weekend in Anderson Valley, Mendocino County, drinking pinot noirs flavored by fog. And, yes, there was that spring camping trip to Paso Robles. And a handful of sojourns to the wine meccas of Lodi and Murphys.
Still, it took a while to collect enough dough for a down.
Wine connoisseurship gets pricey fast. In August, my daughter and I hit a couple of the tasting rooms on Santa Cruz’s trendy Westside. We’d been camping on a beach north of Monterey. Fires had been built, and marshmallows roasted. Before leaving for home Sunday, we drove up the coast to explore. We wandered into a tasting room while we had sunburns and our hair was smelling of charcoal and sea air—not intending to spend much. A chatty winemaker poured generous quantities of ruby ware, mostly pinot noirs in the $25-$30 range.
My daughter Steph, a doctoral student at Case Western Reserve’s School of Medicine, likes to say she knows little about wine. Yet she consistently identifies the most complex and refined wine in a tasting flight. In this case, the wine she most enjoyed was a new release, a 2012 pinot noir not on the winemaker’s tasting notes—or on his price list.
I had intended to buy a bottle; the $25-$30 range is doable if I’m only buying one bottle. My daughter liked the 2012. “We’ll take it,” I said. The winemaker handed me a credit card receipt for something like $45. The new release of pinot noir was $42, he said.
It’s entirely likely the winemaker wasn’t trying to exploit our inebriation but had merely raised the price of his pinot noir to reflect market demand. And neglected to tell us. I could have asked. I could have said no when I saw the credit card charge.
I did neither. Steph and I have a lovely bottle of $42 pinot noir. We’ll drink it when she graduates in 2018 or so. A well-crafted pinot noir ages nicely. We’ll see how this one holds up.
I have a few other bottles too fine to drink on the average kick-back-and-watch-Scandal sort of night. That said, I enjoy a glass of red wine most evenings. In search of affordable reds, most often I buy cases at wineries during various sales.
An overnight wine run to Murphys in early June netted six bottles of assorted varietals (at about $10 each) from Black Sheep Winery, a $99 case of Stevenot Winery merlot, and a $50 case of 2012 syrah—blowout sale!—from Sobon Estate in Amador County. Now it’s almost all gone. I blame adult children and plenty of parties.
Hence the grocery store six-pack. Think battery acid on the nose, with the mouth-feel of Kool-Aid. I won’t name the worst of the dreck. The Yellow Tail merlot was OK, which snooty me pronounced “not terrible.”
That’s why, tonight, the Madroña zinfandel provides a nice contrast to low-budget liquids. The wine’s complex fruit profile reminds Dave, he says, of the mourvedre varietal.
“Don’t you get that?”
Sure, I get that—and so much more.
The wine reminds me that deliciousness exists, and that I’ve never experienced anything like poverty—not even close. I own this house, in theory. I drive a Prius to shop for organic veggies at the farmers’ market. I have a great job. And family. And friends. And dogs. I have this wine and many other bottles to discover on other nights.
That’s not hard to swallow, not at all. Gratitude ensues.