Great wines under $8.00

I have a soft spot for Rioja - the tempranillo grapes, the distinctive prescence of oaky flavours and tannines, the berry-flavoured bouquet, ... simply delicious!

One can buy very afforable Rioja wines - but every now and then, one should treat oneself with the delicate pallete of a more mature cru!

Wine is the most over-hyped libation in the history of the Milky Way galaxy. Oooo, real genuine fermented grape juice! Let's pretend we're dazzled by some imaginary subtle wasabi shadings in the finish and stake our claim to the upper tiers of the middle class! Fuck wine. Fuck grapes. And especially fuck raisins.

Q. How related is the price of a bottle of wine to its quality?

A. Aside from bargain basement swill, the price of a bottle of wine is really a reflection of how successful the brand has been at positioning itself on the wine lists of trendy restaurants, utilizing the tactics of Tammany payola. So wine really is more than fermented grape juice ... it is liquid bullshit.

Like other things which can rely on a relative form of scarcity, the price of a bottle of wine is to some degree the object of speculation. Especially in the high end cru market. It's particularly popular by Chinese and other Asian nouveau riche, even to the point where you have banks offering specific credit-formulae up to several hundreds of thousands of euros for those who wish to invest in wine.

This has lead to what is considered to be a Bordeaux bubble - millésimes of Bordeaux that were auctioned to prices far above what is considered to be realistic for some years in a row. It is expected prices will come down again as the Asians are starting to find out that if you bid on a recent millésime, you're not actually seeing a bottle of it for the first 2 or 3 years. And since wine is an important status symbol to them, they're just not willing to wait that long.
Another side-effect is the ridiculously overdone popularity of a 1982 wine - I think it's a Bordeaux as well but would have to check. If you happen to have an empty bottle of it lying around, it can easily fetch several thousands of euros if it's still in good condition.

All of this is of course rather absurde - but all in all one should conclude that people who have truckloads of money as a rule of thumb tend to be really absurd.

That being said, I do value the craftsmenship behind wine a lot - just as I appreciate a fine brewn beer, a delicate olive oil or a good perfume.

user wrote:
Q. How related is the price of a bottle of wine to its quality?

A. Aside from bargain basement swill, the price of a bottle of wine is really a reflection of how successful the brand has been at positioning itself on the wine lists of trendy restaurants, utilizing the tactics of Tammany payola. ...

Possibly the restaurants I go to aren't trendy enough, but I generally steer clear of any wine I've seen on a restaurant menu.

My approach is to be as snobbish as possible while still being a cheapskate.

Banrock Station Shiraz, 2010--regular price $7.39, but only $5.00 if you have a Giant Grocery Store card.

Berger & Wyse.

Haven't tried this yet, and I'm reluctant to--no vintage.

But it's not just under $8.00, it's under $5.00.

pinhedz wrote:Haven't tried this yet, and I'm reluctant to--no vintage.

But it's not just under $8.00, it's under $5.00.

You may just have a bargain there.

pinhedz wrote:Haven't tried this yet, and I'm reluctant to--no vintage.

But it's not just under $8.00, it's under $5.00.

What's the alchohol percentage?

12.0%, distributed by CC1 Beer Distributors, Inc., Bayamon, Puerto Rico.

3 for $12.00, so if it's good, I'll stock up.

Berger & Wyse

Doc Watson wrote:

pinhedz wrote:Haven't tried this yet, and I'm reluctant to--no vintage.

But it's not just under $8.00, it's under $5.00.

You may just have a bargain there.

As luck would have it (and against most expectations) this was a big hit.

So (since the 3 for $12.00 deal is still in effect) I just invested another $12.00 in it.

The Days of Wine and Mouses: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast
02/27/2012 | 9:01 am

Freakonomics Radio is produced in partnership with American Public Media and WNYC.

Stephen J. DUBNER: So Levitt, um, a college friend of yours once told me that your favorite meal during college was a dill pickle, beef jerky and grape soda. Is that true?

Stephen D. LEVITT: I did indeed have that for breakfast, but to tell you the truth, it sounded better before I ate it than after.

DUBNER: Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, an esteemed economist at the University of Chicago, has an extremely refined palate.

DUBNER: All right, so you’ve got beef jerky, you’ve got dill pickle, what are your favorite foods? Like, what are your favorite places...like if you could drive across America and pick any place to stop and eat, what’s it going to be?

LEVITT: You know, I love the Billy Goat tavern. It’s the cheap place that was made famous in the 19-probably-70s on Saturday Night Live, with the ‘cheeseburger- cheeseburger, no Pepsi, Coke.’ Anyway, they have an incredible rib-eye steak sandwich. Pretty much the cheaper the food the better, there’s almost no fast food that I don’t adore.

DUBNER: So KFC?

LEVITT: Yeah, I like KFC. Burgers. Chipotle. I’d kill for Chipotle.

DUBNER: So how would you describe your palate?

LEVITT: Probably ‘underdeveloped.’ You know, but it’s good. The thing is, it’s a wonderful, wonderful gift to like cheap food. I mean, some people just happen to like expensive food and then they are unhappy most of the time, or else, they spend all their money on food. But if you just, by chance are born loving cheap food, then you can eat everything that you love.

DUBNER: Now, how much do you like wine?

LEVITT: Wine I do not like at all.

ANNOUNCER: From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, why wine experts should just put a cork in it. And, what happens when you’re eating in a restaurant and someone finds a [BLEEP] in their [BLEEP]? Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

DUBNER: Good wine, we’re told, is the province of smart, superior people. They taste things on a whole ‘nother level than people like you and me.

[WINE TASTERS] Smelling a little minerality...Freshly cut apple...George Clinton...This funky sort of...

DUBNER: But I have a question for you: is that superiority deserved? The wines that experts love -- the ones that bring out the natural beauty of the grape but aren’t too funky -- they cost a lot more. But are expensive wines really that much better than cheap wines? Or, is it possible that developing your palate just mucks things up? Complicates things? Maybe we’d all be better off if we had taste buds like Steve Levitt’s.

LEVITT: I’d kill for Chipotle.

DUBNER: After graduate school, Levitt was invited to join an elite club at Harvard called the Society of Fellows. A junior fellow like him was paid a modest salary to work on his own research, with few obligations -- other than a formal Monday night dinner with the senior fellows, who were some of the most remarkable scholars alive.

LEVITT: People like Amartya Sen and Nobel Prize-winning physicists and what not, and you sit around a table. I believe the table was Oliver Wendell Holmes’s table, initially, and he gifted it to the Society of Fellows.

DUBNER: Over dinner, they engaged in witty, learned conversation; they ate venison and other fine food; and they drank expensive wine -- bottle after bottle. To this budding young economist, with the beef jerky taste and the grape-soda budget, all that pricey wine wasn’t doing him any good. He had a thought.

LEVITT: Innocently, I was young, I didn’t understand how the world worked, I thought like an economist. I suggested that perhaps we should have two tracks at the Society of Fellows; there would be the drinking track and the abstinence track. And for those of us who chose the abstinence track, because the cost of the wine was perhaps $60 per meal, that over the course of 50 weeks of the year, that would work out to be about $3,000 and they could add $3,000 to the paycheck of those of us on the abstinence path.

DUBNER: And did you have any other people in your abstinence camp, or was this just Levitt?

LEVITT: Well, you know it didn’t really get that far because the reaction was quite negative.

DUBNER: Levitt is the kind of person who likes to use data, not a personal agenda, to make his arguments. So he set out to get some data. Wine data. The wine they were drinking at these dinners cost five or 10 times what a cheap bottle of wine cost. Was it really five or 10 times better? He hatched a plan. The Society of Fellows held wine tastings from time to time. He suggested that the next one be his to organize.

LEVITT: So I worked with the wine steward to select two excellent bottles of wine, expensive bottles of wine, you know, probably close to $100 bottles of wine. And then I went to the liquor store that was down the street and I said, ‘can I have the cheapest bottle of wine you have that was the same grape,’ I don’t remember which grape it was.

DUBNER: Levitt used four decanters. Into the first decanter, he poured one of the expensive bottles of wine. The other expensive wine went into decanter number two. In the third decanter, he poured the cheap wine, which cost around $8. In the fourth decanter, he repeated one of the expensive wines.

LEVITT: So as far as the people knew, there were four different wines and these were all wines that were coming out of the wine cellar of the Society of Fellows.

DUBNER: So you are tricking them from the outset. You’re leading them to believe the fourth, the cheap wine, is also from the wine cellar.

LEVITT: I don’t....you know. Uh, yes. (Laughs)

DUBNER: They swirled them a bit … sniffed them … and sipped. They wrote down their ratings. As he looked at the numbers, Levitt’s cold economist heart warmed.

LEVITT: The data could not have cooperated more completely with my hypothesis. So for starters the four wines received almost identical ratings on average. Although there were a wide spread among individuals, on average, tallied up, people did not prefer the expensive wines to the cheap wine. On top of that, and this was the thing that I was hoping for and dreaming of but didn’t believe would actually come true: It turned out among individuals if you compared how differently they rated any two of the wines that they had, it turned out that by a small margin, people actually rated the same wine from the same bottle but presented in a different decanter as being the most different among the two wines. So the two wines that were absolutely identical, when you looked at the gap between the ratings that an individual gave to those wines, the gap was bigger than they did between the other wines, which actually were different.

DUBNER: A few minutes after the tasting was over, Steve Levitt shared the results with the senior fellows.

LEVITT: The jovial mood in the room suddenly went dark. People realized they had been tricked. That there had been this cheap wine the same wine was in twice. And they really realized that the nature of the game had been somewhat different than what they thought. And when they heard the results -- that collectively they had no ability to identify wines, they were not happy. And, in particular, there was one senior fellow, so one of the professors at Harvard, who was quite outspoken about his knowledge of wine. And he loudly announced that he had a cold. Otherwise he clearly could have made the distinctions and he stormed from the room and left the party prematurely.

DUBNER: What was his discipline?

LEVITT: I think for the sake of anonymity, I should not reveal that particular piece of information. He was a humanist.

DUBNER: Not an economist, in other words.

LEVITT: No. No.

DUBNER: The opposite of an economist.

LEVITT: Yeah, exactly.

DUBNER: So what does Levitt’s evil little experiment teach us about wine? Maybe not all that much; it wasn’t a very scientific tasting, really. And perhaps the Society of Fellows was having an off night -- the humanist had a cold, right? Or maybe this was just a group of people who didn’t know nearly as much about wine as they thought they knew. You’d never be able to pull this kind of stunt on wine experts. Would you?

Brian DIMARCO: On my team we have a master sommelier, two master of wine candidates, four people who have been in the trade for many years. These are sophisticated wine professionals.

DUBNER: That’s Brian DiMarco, talking about the people he gathered for a blind tasting of his own. Before we get to that, let’s hear a little bit more about Brian.

DIMARCO: I specialize in helping customers, consumers, private collectors, and retailers and restaurants decide what wines to put on their list, what wines to collect, what wines to sell. And I have a small import business and wholesale company. And we distribute wine that we find all over Europe and South America in New York City.

DUBNER: Cool. So you’re almost a wine agent then, yeah, in a way? More than just an importer?

DIMARCO: In many ways, yes.

DUBNER: Brian DiMarco is one of the people who decide what we drink. He goes to France, Italy, California, tastes wine fresh out of the tank. So he determines what’s good -- or bad -- without any critics whispering sweet ratings into his ear. Then he puts his money where his taste buds are -- he writes a check. Now, according to DiMarco, he makes as much money selling a $15 bottle of wine to a restaurant or shop as he does selling a $50 bottle. If that’s true, DiMarco is an honest broker. His job is simply to find wine that you or I would want to drink -- because, think about it, there are thousands upon thousands of bottles to choose from. Just picture the rows of bottles lining the shelves at every wine shop. You kinda, sorta, maybe think you want to buy a merlot. Do you pick the one with the pretty flowers on the label? Do you go with the one that Robert Parker, the high priest of wine ratings, awarded a lot of his Parker points to? Or, like a lot of people, do you let price be your guide? If you believe even a little bit in the free market, you’d have to think that expensive wines cost more because they taste better, right? Brian DiMarco wanted to know how much people were tasting the dollars when they drank an expensive wine. So, like Steve Levitt, he conducted a little experiment, with some of the people who work for him. As DiMarco said, these were no amateurs.

DIMARCO: We did a tasting, brown bag. And we had the exact same wine in both bags. And we told them that one bottle was a $50 bottle and to write their reviews, and we told them the other was a $10 bottle, to write the reviews. Of course they were both $20 bottles according to what they would sell at any retail store. And then we reversed it and we said now the $10 bottle is really the $50. And everyone liked the $50 bottle better in both circumstances, because they perceived that the price there was either something they were missing, when really these wines are so similar. Yeah but they’re different. A lot of people, two or three people said, ‘is this the same wine?’ And we said that’s for you to determine, and the more they thought about it, the more they intellectualized it, the more they decided there were differences to the wine.

DUBNER: So this wasn’t a wildly scientific experiment either, but to Brian DiMarco, the message couldn’t have been clearer: When people know a wine is more expensive -- or even think it is -- it tastes better. Now, obviously this idea doesn’t apply just to wine. A house that costs $500,000 ought to be five times better on some level than a $100,000 house -- the size, the construction, the schools and neighborhood. So is a wine that costs $50 five times better than a $10 bottle? Or is it even better at all?

[MUSIC]

DUBNER: So tell me your name kind of what you do, and how you describe yourself.

Robin GOLDSTEIN: My name is Robin Goldstein. I write about wine and food. Basically my book “The Wine Trials” has been my principal outlet for writing about wine, but I’ve also been publishing academic papers on topics of taste from a cognitive perspective, and an economic perspective, usually coauthored with colleagues from different academic fields. So I’ve been exploring the neuroscience side of it a bit. I’ve been exploring the behavioral side of it. And in particular I’m interested in price signals and how people’s knowledge of price affects their experience of wine on the most basic sensory level.

DUBNER: Now, first let me just ask you, I’ve heard good things about this lovely little restaurant in Milan called Osteria L’Intrepido, You ever been there?

GOLDSTEIN: I’ve been to the restaurant, but it’s actually located in my friend Giuliano’s former apartment in Milan. The restaurant, I wouldn’t say it’s great. Mostly. they serve left over pizza, and their wine cellar consists mostly of some leftover bottles of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from three weeks ago.

DUBNER: Meaning it’s not really a restaurant, is it?

GOLDSTEIN: It’s an apartment. So it’s just an address really.

DUBNER: Osteria L’Intrepido doesn’t exist; it’s a fake restaurant that Robin Goldstein made up. Why? Well, it’s a strange story. Goldstein’s research and writing on wine made him skeptical about critics and awards. He believed that so-called experts were, at best, subjective, and that they carried way too much influence. He wondered about the awards that magazines like Wine Spectator gave to restaurants for their wine lists. Did an award like that really mean the wines at that restaurant were excellent? So he invented Osteria L’Intrepido, or “Fearless Restaurant.” He created a fake menu, a fake website, and a fake voicemail message, saying the restaurant was closed for vacation…

[IN ITALIAN: OUTGOING MESSAGE]

DUBNER: As for the Osteria L’Intrepido wine list -- Goldstein made that up too. He included several expensive wines that Wine Spectator itself had given bad reviews in the past. One of them was a 1982 Brunello di Montalcino, which the magazine had given 67 points, or a D+ rating, calling it "barnyardy” and “decayed." He listed another vintage that Wine Spectator had reviewed as “Unacceptable … sweet and cloying … [and] smells like bug spray.” Then off his application went, with the fake wine list and a real money order.

GOLDSTEIN: My hypothesis was that the $250 fee was really the functional part of the application. In other words, the entire awards program was really just an advertising scheme, and that it was being fraudulently misrepresented as an exercise of expert judgment by Wine Spectator.

DUBNER: I see, was a little piece of you expecting that when you applied for this that they would send someone around to drink some of your wine or eat some of your food?

GOLDSTEIN: Well of course that’s the experiment, right? So, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure going into this that I would win an award. There were two questions being tested here. One was, do you have to have a good wine list to win a Wine Spectator award of excellence? And the second was, do you have to exist to win a Wine Spectator award of excellence? So I thought that it was quite possible that my experiment would fail.

DUBNER: His experiment didn’t fail. Wine Spectator called to tell him that Osteria L’Intrepido had won … and, by the way, they asked, would Signore Goldstein like to maybe take out an ad in the magazine to publicize that fact?

DUBNER: And what was the name of the award that you won for your fictional restaurant?

GOLDSTEIN: The Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.

DUBNER: So congratulations, that’s awesome that you’re a winner. I too could be a winner presumably?

GOLSTEIN: Yeah, if your wines are bad enough.

DUBNER: Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: Steve Levitt is served something fishy at another Society of Fellows dinner.

LEVITT: Payback! I never even thought about that! But given the evil geniuses that walk around that place, it’s quite possible.

DUBNER: And … I stumble upon another dining disaster, this time in a restaurant.

ALTUCHER: Yeah, right behind me. And she was sort of crying and half screaming.

[MUSIC]

[UNDERWRITING]



[ONE-MINUTE BREAK]



ANNOUNCER: From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

DUBNER: In August 2008, the American Association of Wine Economists -- that is a real thing -- held its annual conference in Portland, Oregon. That’s where Robin Goldstein revealed the Award of Excellence he got from Wine Spectator magazine for the fake wine list from his fake restaurant. The press drank it up. From the New York Post: “Wine Mag Humbled by Hoax.” According to the L.A. Times, Wine Spectator was now “Drinking a Hearty Glass of Blush.” Wine Spectator vigorously defended its award system. The executive editor said the magazine never claimed to visit every restaurant, and that it did its due diligence on Osteria L’Intrepido -- looking over its website and calling the restaurant -- but that it kept reaching an answering machine.

Robin Goldstein, for his part, was convinced: The wine system was fundamentally flawed. If a fake restaurant with a wine list that included bad, expensive wines could win an Award of Excellence from one of the most prestigious wine magazines in the world, who are we supposed to trust?

GOLDSTEIN: My takeaway is that expert sources in the media are trusted too much, and that they’re prone to abusing their positions of power as a way of making money. So the phenomenon where what’s really an ad is posing as real expert judgment is very problematic for consumers, because consumers really put trust in these magazines. We put trust in experts. There are so many fields out there where we don’t know as much as the experts do. And so we use experts as an information intermediary, as a proxy for good judgment, in an area where we don’t know as much as the experts are supposed to. When we trust experts too much, and they sell their awards to entities that are really their customers that’s quite problematic.

DUBNER: Robin Goldstein also had an academic paper to present at that conference of wine economists. The paper was called “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” If the Osteria L’Intrepido stunt was just a stunt, and if the Steve Levitt and Brian DiMarco blind tastings we heard about earlier were just unscientific tricks -- well, Goldstein’s paper was the opposite of that. It gathered up data from 17 blind tastings that Goldstein himself organized. The data included more than 6,000 observations from more than 500 people, from amateur wine drinkers to sommeliers and wine makers. He tested red wines, whites, roses. The prices ranged from $1.65 a bottle to $150 a bottle. It was as rigorous as you could get.

And what did Goldstein learn? That, overall, people liked expensive wines...less than cheap wines. When you don’t know what a bottle of wine costs, apparently you don’t know how good it’s supposed to taste. Even the most expert tasters could barely tell the difference between expensive wines and cheap ones.

It’s unsettling, isn’t it? Buying a bottle of wine shouldn’t be as complicated as buying a house. But thanks to the layers of experts between us and the grapes, we’ve got performance anxiety. Wine isn’t supposed to be a drag. It’s a celebration, a beloved recipe, civilization in a bottle. You’re drinking the hand-crafted fruit of some farmer’s vines that may go back hundreds of years, grown under the same sun that’s been shining for billions of years. Wouldn’t it be nice to drop the pretense -- to set aside the ratings and price -- and just drink? Brian DiMarco, the wine importer, that’s what he’s really after.

DIMARCO: Who are we to tell the Connecticut housewife that that oaky chardonnay that she’s been slamming down for the last ten years from California that she’s not deriving pleasure from that? She surely is. But there are so many other things. It’s like limiting your musical notes to only playing F and C notes the rest of your life. It’s only eating cheeseburgers and hamburgers, you know, the rest of your life, if you want to try other foods and other cultures and other things. If opening this bottle of rioja somehow takes you to Spain and makes you feel like you want tapas, then it’s done its job. And whether it’s a $15 bottle or a $30 bottle is irrelevant at that point. Then you’re getting into nuances of good and great. But I think the bottle of wine is the ability to either change your day from an alcoholic standpoint, getting to a certain point where you’re like. ‘OK this is’ -- or for people like myself who are in the trade -- it’s something you have with food. Growing up in an Italian household we weren’t drinking great wine, but to me wine wasn’t alcohol. Wine was Carlo Rossi in a jug that was poured into juice glasses for my grandfather and that was what you had with dinner. Drinking to me was Budweiser and Jack Daniels. You know, sneaking out on Friday night to go drink.

DUBNER: Let just ask you, we’re sitting here in a radio studio in downtown New York with kind of mucus-colored sound padding, and artificial light. There’s basically nothing good about this space, there’s no air, there’s nothing. But--

DIMARCO: It’s soulless.

DUBNER: But transport me for a minute. So tell me, Brian, the room that you would like to be sitting in right now, and the food that you’d like to be eating right now, and most of all what the wine is with that food, what that wine tastes like to you.

DIMARCO: I think a crisp sancerre would be perfect right now with some sort of croque monsieur, and maybe a salad with a little vinaigrette would be kind of perfect. Not too decadent, but definitely has its place. And maybe have a backup bottle on ice.

DUBNER: Has your table got room for another guy there?

DIMARCO: You’re sitting with me right now. This pressed, wood table, I think it can hold an ice bucket, I’m pretty confident.

[MUSIC]

DUBNER: Not too long after Steve Levitt conducted that sneaky wine experiment at the Society of Fellows, he attended another dinner there.

LEVITT: There was smoked fish one night. I ate it. Seemed to taste fine. And about a half an hour later, the room was starting to spin. I was like sweating profusely. I felt awful. And I turned to the guy next to me – a guy named Brad Gregory, a great historian. And I looked at him and I was going to say, ‘how do you feel?’ But I didn’t even have to ask him because the sweat was dripping off of him! He looked absolutely sick. I looked at him and I said, ‘I think we ate something bad.’ And he said, ‘oh, my God!’ It turned out that one of the pieces of fish was bad and one wasn’t. So about seven people around the room were virtually on their death bed. Staggering home. Barely alive. And the other 24 people in the room felt perfectly fine.

DUBNER: I’m just curious – you pulled this stunt on the Society of Fellows wine experts. Do you think this might have been a little bit of wine experts’ revenge on Levitt? ‘Let’s give Levitt the bad fish.’

LEVITT: Payback. I never even thought about that! But given the evil geniuses that walk around that place, it’s quite possible.

$6.99--but it's from 2009, so I have to drink it fast.

87 Points | International Wine Cellar, May/June 2011
"Opaque ruby. Dark berries and mocha on the nose, augmented by a subtle smoky quality and a touch of cracked pepper. Round and fleshy, displaying slightly loose-knit dark fruit flavors and no rough edges. Finishes smooth, with modest persistence. I'd have liked a bit more focus. The Root:1 wines are made from grapes grown on their original, ungrafted rootstock, which is pretty normal in Chile but quite rare elsewhere, especially in Europe."

Another $6.99-ner.

It's made by the same Australo-Sicilians that brought you Yellowtail (but they say this is their good stuff).

Since reputable reviewers won't review it, I have no way of knowing how good it is.

Anything under $10.00 Australian is suspect now.

At $6.99, wine from any country is suspect.  

By I will try it right now, and report my findings.  

The reviewers said it would be good with pizza or hamburgers.

I'm having it with peanut-flavored chocolate from Russia instead.

It tastes better now that the chocolate is all gone.

often one finds after a couple of glasses cheap wine can taste ok.

Did ol' One really say that?

over

Is it time to raise the threshold to $10.00?

The Post today says that millennials (this is the Post's word for "youngsters") are drinking wine with their burgers and fries more than they used to.

Top scientists are investigating the sociological forces behind this trend.  

over 8, but still reasonable for such quality

I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but rising prices have forced me to raise the limit to $8.90.

I will try to hold the line there.

Echeverria 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon, Curico Valley $8.90. Best Buy.

Aromas of currants, chocolate, and cedar with a silky, fruity-yet-dry medium body and a tangy, cherry and honey grilled apple accented finish with powdery tannins.

WORLD WINE CHAMPIONSHIPS AWARD: Silver Medal
RATING: 87 points (Highly Recommended)
CATEGORY: Cabernet Sauvignon, Red
ALCOHOL BY VOLUME: 13.5%
TASTING LOCATION: In Our Chicago Tasting Room


TASTING DATE: Jul-09-2012