Preamble: My wife and I have been enthusiastic Grocery Outlet customers for several years now, and enjoyed dozens, if not hundreds of wines we’ve bought there. Recently I connected with their brand marketing specialist Kelly Knight Martak on Twitter (she manages the @groceryoutlet account), and she offered me the chance to review some wines to help promote their upcoming 20% off all wine sale (from 3/30-4/3). I happily accepted; this review is the first of several covering the $50 worth of wine I got as part of the deal.

First a word of introduction about wine shopping at Grocery Outlet: the analogy I use is thrift stores. Its unpredictability means that it’s not for everyone, but if you’re open to adventure, stop in regularly, and know what to look for, you will pick up things ranging from decent to amazing, not to mention finding items you never would anywhere else. And when you can buy a bottle of wine for the same price as a gallon of organic milk (or sometimes even regular milk!), my thought is that it’s a gamble worth making–and you can learn something every time you open a bottle. So on to tonight’s wines, three whites, all from the Oakland, CA store:

’06 Chateau Cantelaudette Graves de Vayres ($4.99–white Bordeaux, sémillon/sauvignon blanc)
’06 Ken Forrester Stellenbosch Chenin Blanc ($5.99)
’06 Lusso Grillo/Chardonnay (Sicilia Indicazione Geographic Tipica; $3.99)

Again, with these prices, it’d be hard to go wrong, but these bottles caught my eye because we’ve had plenty of New World sauvignon blanc (CA and NZ), but not as much Bordeaux; we had a chenin blanc from the Loire recently and loved it, so I was curious about an example from South Africa, where it was the most-planted white grape according to our ’01 edition of the Wine Bible, and finally the Sicilian wine included Grillo, a grape I’d never heard of before. We tasted them blind, both to improve our skills, and in an attempt at objectivity.

Wine #1 turned out to be the chenin blanc, the wine we liked best of the evening. Clean and crisp, its balance between fruit and mineral notes fit my experience thus far with South African wines, in that they seem to be in between the more restrained Europeans and more robust, fruit-forward New World wines. I mostly noticed the lemony notes on the nose and the palate, but my wife also picked up on some apricot and peach aromas, which helped her peg it correctly as a chenin blanc. The acidity wasn’t outstanding (Stellenbosch evidently has a climate similar to the hotter parts of Spain or Italy), but it wasn’t flabby either, which is to say that I could imagine it pairing nicely with a white fish, pasta with alfredo sauce, or sushi. Well worth the $6, and nice to learn a bit more about a grape we’ve almost never seen in CA wineries.

Wine #2 was the Sicilian grillo/chardonnay, definitely the oddball of the evening–a wine that would never appear on a sommelier test as one of the world’s “classic” wines (e.g. German riesling, Napa cab, Spanish tempranillo, etc.)–but interesting, and for $4, that’s a win. Its golden honey color immediately catches the eye, and the prominent musty earthiness on the nose clued us in that it was a) old world, and b) more than a few years old. Given how hot Sicily gets, we weren’t too surprised at the low acidity, but its borderline-flabbiness meant that it wouldn’t be that great with food, although the buttery and burnt toast aromas that came out as it warmed up were quite fascinating. And  knowing that it was an Indicazione Geographica Tipica wine (the third run down from the top in the Italian classification system, and from the largest region in Italy, no less), we had pretty low expectations, and still felt that we got $4 worth of knowledge out of it.

Wine #3 then was the Graves/white Bordeaux, and as with the grillo/chard, we were a little disappointed because it was either a little over the hill, or just not that interesting to begin with. If you like your white wines fruity, this is not the one for you, because the mineral/chalky aromas from that gravelly Graves soil were by far the most prominent in the nose. As I understand it, a strong earth component is typical for white Bordeaux, but this one didn’t have as much of the citrusy brightness from the sauvignon blanc, or richness from the sémillon as we hoped, so the overall impression was that it just wasn’t very lively or complex. However, with some shellfish. . . .

So in conclusion, despite two of the three wines from this evening being a bit underwhelming, I’d still say that for Bay Area folks at least, G.O. might be the most affordable way to further your wine education.

Advertisement