That’s right, for your eyes only and for your wine entertainment, your intrepid columnist treads where none have dared tread before to bring you this episode of wine-myth-busting madness.
Napa’s best regions make world-class wine and it’s a basic law of the human jungle that if you want excellence, you need to be willing to pay for it.
Napa wines are overpriced
I am starting with this myth because it easy to blow apart with four easy points. First, land costs and taxes are slightly more than Fresno farmland, for example, try several hundred thousand up to $1 million plus per acre.
Secondly, there are expensive grape-growing and winemaking practices. It is not just the barrels, although at $1,000 to $2,000 plus per barrel for new French versions, that is a significant part of the equation. There is the almost mandatory consulting winemaker, the newest and best of equipment, skyrocketing labor costs at every level — and, well, you get the picture.
Thirdly, there are restrictive building and use codes. In most regions of California, a winery is a license to print money in many ways. Unrestricted tasting-room hours, special events licenses, restaurants and lodges are among the sub-businesses allowed with a winery license. In the heart of Napa Valley, these licenses are incredibly expensive and usually somewhere between difficult and impossible to obtain.
Lastly, the trump card is that Napa’s best regions make world-class wine and it’s a basic law of the human jungle that if you want excellence, you need to be willing to pay for it.
Wine fraud is over
Many may think that wine fraud is over now that Rudy Kurniawan is visiting a Federal Country Club for an extended stay, but that’s not the case. Kurniawan, real name Zhen Wang Huang, created and sold many bottles of five- and six-figure juice, but the whole single-evil-entity theory falls apart after that. First of all, based on the estimates from records, he would have had to get the hard-to-acquire or make himself, raw materials and then be able to manufacture more than 100 bottles per day with a one-at-a-time, painstaking process. He would have also had to create his own acceptance as a wine savant, which is impossible to do without sponsors to be taken seriously. In the spirit of not getting myself sued, I’ll leave out the likely suspect, but watch the free movie “Sour Grapes” and you can probably identify the real perpetrators.
Another clue may be to search which auction house was quite recently outed and then withdrew a 1924 Domaine De la Romanee-Conti from its auction and has several other questionable bottles from the same mystery collector still up for grabs in the upcoming crap show — I mean wine auction. Note that this is transpiring several years into Kurniawan’s 11-year stay with the federal government, which still has a few years to go.
More dish coming soon in Part II.
