NW Wines: Not Ready For Prime Time

[stevebody]

I recently wrote a review for a British site called Worldreviews.com. I refer you to that site and their "wines" button. The gist is that, having sold wines here in Seattle for several years - and having sampled about 1,500 wines a year from all over the globe - I am far less inclined to buy WA or OR wines for simple reasons of value. An arbitrary decision was made years ago, by most of the primary WA vintners, to price their wines competitively with California's Medium-Premium tier, even though the quality clearly hadn't caught up to CA's. As a result, we have a S___load of WA wines sporting $40-$50 price tags but will be routinely beaten in a blind tasting by California wines that cost less. Case in point: A tasting of domestic Syrah, last summer, by a group pf fifteen people, all wine savvy, here in Seattle. Among the bottles were McCrae, Glen Fiona, and Cayuse Syrahs from WA and Havens and Babcock from CA, with a French ringer thrown in for perverse reasons. The winner, unanimously, was Bob Broman's Pepperwood Grove cuvee, that sells at retail for $6! This has shown up in Cab tastings, Merlots, blends, you name it. As a result, retailers here who used to just buy every new wine out of WA now are turning down some of the new, boutiquey stuff altogether...and being accused of disloyalty by vintners who should know better than to try to price their first vintage at $38 a bottle.

Our wines are coming of age quicklyut they're just NOT comparable to their CA peers right now. There are notable exceptions, of course: L'Ecole No. 41, Leonetti (sometimes), Andrew Will Merlots and Cabs, and DeLille. But our value stuff is cheap crap and not showing any improvement with time.

One man's opinion, of course...but I'm a long way from alone in it.