In honor of Earth Day and the spirit of drinking responsibly, I recently attended a tasting at the Emeryville BevMo where organic, sustainable, and biodynamic wines made in California were featured. On the bus en route to this tasting, I was a bit unsure what to expect. Why? For starters, organic wines can often be, well, unpalatable. And biodynamic wines are seen by skeptics (of which there are many) as a superstitious European way of farming at best, and a science fiction level hoax at worst. Perhaps that is why the the two certified organic wines on our tasting list don’t even put that information on the bottle. All that being said, I was pleasantly surprised by the wines that we tasted, and quite impressed with BevMo’s commitment to sustainability. 2010 Frog’s Leap Rutherford Sauvignon Blanc – $17.99 The Frog’s Leap sauvignon blanc is a certified organic wine, an impressive [...]
BevMo’s Wilfred Wong: Top Ten Wines of 2011
We had the pleasure of chatting with Wilfred Wong, BevMo’s cellar master, this week about his favorite wines of the year and what it’s like to have the best job in the business (seriously — he visits France, Chile, Argentina, and more every year and tastes thousands of wines on each trip). He started at BevMo in August of 1995 as the import wine buyer and now, as cellar master, he scores about 8,000 wines/year for the retailer. Bevmo shoppers will be thrilled to know that the ‘WW’ on wine ratings around the store is, in fact, a real person. Wilfred gave us a quick primer on how he utilizes the 100 point scale to score wines in a systematic way. These top ten wines are all members of the illustrious “90+ point club,” which means that they all possess the characteristics of not only their respective grapes, but also [...]
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