Finding the Mixing Ingredients House Wine(s)
What are the right bottles to be sure are always in the cooler?
I love wine. I liked wine before I liked any other alcoholic beverage, primarily because my parents always had an interest and spoke romantically of visiting Napa and Sonoma in the 80s before they got completely overrun and bonkers expensive.
I’ve tasted hundreds, potentially thousands of wines. I have liked most of them. I have traveled to remote parts of the world to taste interesting bottles. Traveling for wine is great, because it usually also means that the vistas are incredible and the food is good.
And even after all that - I don’t think I “get” wine. I know what I like and gravitate towards, and I enjoy refining that, but I don’t get it. I’m not a connoisseur. I don’t keep a good mental map of what vintages from what vineyards I liked from which producers. I don’t have a great vocabulary for tasting notes. I’m extremely hit-or-miss on blind tastings. I find most of that exhausting. And I want drinking to be fun, not tiresome.
But still, I can’t claim to have a comprehensive, consistent home bar and not have, at least, a “house” red and white. So I’ve started a process to identify the right option that’s always going to be stocked in my cooler and will likely please whoever is looking to avoid a cocktail or Miller High Life1 for whatever reason. Here’s my set of criteria:
Widely Available (in Phoenix)
I love a good wine bar / bottle shop, and they’re amazing for exploration. But “staple” is what I’m looking for here, and that’s not really the niche those folks are designed to fill.
Under $30
Yes, everything is getting more expensive. But for something that’s constantly stocked, it’s got to cost less than most of the spirits in the bar.
From a Region I’ve Visited
I thought about mirroring what I did for Bourbon and limiting this to producer, but wine is too complicated for that and distribution too messy. So let’s just go with the general region - I need some personal connection here.
Good Without Food
So much good wine needs a fairly specific food pairing to be fully appreciated. And that’s fun! But it’s not a good fit for a house bottle that can fit any occasion.
Good With Food
Still, if the wine totally gets lost while you eat dinner, what’s the point?
(Relatively) Consistent Year-to-Year
Yes, a lot of what’s fun about wine is the terroir and the micro climates each year that change the juice significantly. But if something is so specific that the next vintage is going to have a different character entirely, that starts to defeat the point of the consistent experience I want from my house bottles. No wine will ever be the exact same next year, but I’m looking for something with a strong enough identity to deliver a similar experience regardless of the number on the bottle.
Next week (maybe), we start where my interest in wine started: Tuscany.
More house beers are certainly also on the table, though “rotating local IPA” is the answer today and probably the right answer tomorrow…