Last Night's Tipple

Costco is a very strange place. Nestled among the gigantic cans of tuna and the 32-packs of toilet paper is wine. Lots of wine. I think that I've read that Costco is the largest wine retailer in the United States, and it's easy to see why. They devote substantial floor space to it, and their prices are very attractive. And it's not just Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay and box wine dreck from Australia. They carry a number of well-reputed and distinctly uncheap wines. If you want to buy some Dom Perignon, for example, this is the place to do it. You're probably not going to find a better price. The most recent wine that makes me scratch my head and wonder how they got it is a 1996 Chateau Guiraud Sauternes.

When Sauternes was classified in 1855 in preparation for the Exposition Universelle de Paris (a parallel classification was done for the wines of the Médoc plus Haut-Brion from Graves), there were three groupings: 1 Premier Cru Supérieur (Yquem, then as now, is in a class by itself), 11 Premier Crus, and 15 Deuxièmes Crus. Château Guiraud, which was originally purchased by Pierre Guiraud in 1766, was one of the Premier Crus. Quality and standards change, of course, so it's a little bit ridiculous to pay too much attention to a classification that took place 153 years ago. Nevertheless, Guiraud is one of the well-reputed, reliable Sauternes producers. 1996 was ranked by various wine reporters as a very good but not excellent vintage in Sauternes. How is it that Costco got a few cases of 1996 Guiraud in 2008? Beats me. Maybe they picked it up from the secondary market for a song, or maybe Guiraud kept a stock of it unreleased hoping for higher prices and finally decided to dump it. In any event, since 1996, there has been one classic vintage in Sauternes (2001) and two excellent ones (1997 and 2003). Whoever sold Costco this Guiraud probably judged that there was no financial incentive to holding onto it for any longer. And so Costco acquired several cases of half bottles of 1996 Château Guiraud Premier Cru Sauternes, which it is currently selling for $28. That's really cheap for a First Growth Sauternes from a good year, and I bought a bottle to try.

Sauternes start out a deep gold color, and it tends to darken with age. This wine was almost copper-colored, so dark that I would have suspected that it had oxidized if it hadn't been Sauternes. It had a deeply honeyed nose, and on the palate it was honey mixed with lemons. This is a sweet wine, but it's not overpoweringly so -- not as sweet as Coca-Cola, for example. And the sweetness there is is balanced by the significant acidity, so it's not sickly or cloying. I liked this wine a lot. I might just go out and buy more. Really, really good, and not a bad value for Sauternes.

Last Night's Tipple

I really need to stop trolling the interweb looking for reviews of the wine that I buy, especially when the wine I buy is as lacking in snob appeal as that bearing the Kirkland Signature label. It's not that there aren't some excellent resources out there whose reviews are always worth reading. It's just your average Google search will turn up not just links to those excellent resources but also links to garbage written by insufferable snobs that almost assuredly will make me angry. In Googling for this Kirkland Signature wine (2004 GSM from Australia), I found something written by a guy on the Wine Spectator forums asking what people who bought Kirkland Signature wine were thinking. Because, you know, there's no way that it could possibly be anything other than liquified crap and buying any would expose you as a rube and a Philistine. Okay, I might be reading something into what he wrote, but not much.

Let's talk first about the quality that one can expect from a Costco wine. There really is no reason why it shouldn't be decent. There is plenty of good wine available for sale throughout the world, and Costco has the financial wherewithal to buy it and import it into the United States. For the producer, Costco's ability to pay and ability to buy in significant quantities makes it an attractive client. For Costco, their prominence in the wine retailing business must have given them some degree of expertise in selecting decent wines, and their ability to import and distribute wines themselves (in some states) gives them room to undercut comparable wines on price and still have a higher-than-average profit margin. There's every reason to think that the average Kirkland Signature wine is like every other Kirkland Signature product that Costco carries: unlikely to set the world on fire, but probably a quality product and decent value.

But what really made me mad was not the fact that this guy couldn't think through the value proposition that Costco could offer with private-label wine but rather that he came across as an insufferable snob. What matters about a bottle of wine is the quality of the juice in the bottle, not everybody else's perception of the label on it. Yeah, okay, the Kirkland Signature label is cheesy, but who cares if the wine is decent?

Well, is the 2004 GSM (Grenach Shiraz Mourvedre) decent? It is. It's jammy and concentrated, lacking in acid but with a lot of flavor. Grenach, Shiraz (Syrah), and Mourvedre are key components in red wines from the Southern Rhone and in many Australian wines. Well, this tastes nothing like any Southern Rhone that I have ever tasted, but it does taste like an enjoyable, easy-to-drink Australian wine. Which is appropriate because it is trying to be an enjoyable, easy-to-drink Australian wine. I'm not sorry I bought it. I am sorry, however, that I forgot to cap the remainder of the bottle last night, which means that I had to pour it out this morning. Alas!

Last Night's Tipple, Part II

Costco sells more wine in the United States than any other retailer. I will repeat that just in case you didn't catch it the first time: Costco sells more wine in the United States than any other retailer. That's pretty amazing, especially when you consider that Costco can't sell wine in all of their stores due to the liquor laws in some states and that wine isn't even close to being Costco's focus. I suppose that it was just a matter of time, then, until Costco came out with a Kirkland Signature private-label line of wines. And what they're offering under the Kirkland Signature label isn't just some generic juice from the Central Valley of California selling for $10 for a 2-liter box. There's a Kirkland Signature Super Tuscan, a Kirkland Signature Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a Kirkland Signature 10 year old Tawny Port. And a Kirkland Signature Champagne. And I'm not talking about some cheap bulk sparking wine labeled Champagne -- this is honest-to-goodness French Champagne. Was it any good? Heck, I didn't know, but curiosity forced me to give it a try. What's the worst that could happen? It could be crap, and I could have wasted my $20. Not a terrible risk, if you ask me.

The label says that the Champagne is made by Janisson for de Bruyne and that it is imported by DC Flynt. I won't try to portray myself as any sort of wine expert, but I do know that Janisson and de Bruyne both have good reputations in Champagne and that DC Flynt generally imports good stuff. As chance would have it, at some point in the past year, I had a bottle of pretty good Champagne with the de Bruyne label also made by Janisson and imported by DC Flynt. After trying this bottle, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Kirkland Signature Champagne is exactly the same juice as the de Bruyne bottle made by Janisson. I was pretty impressed with the Kirkland Signature bottle. It was fruity and tart without being sour and nasty, and I think that I may have detected some of that bready yeastiness that professional reviewers always talk about with Champagne. There are no absolute bargains to be had in Champagne; but relative to other Champagne at close to this price point, this wine was a good value.