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Younger brothers (or sisters) are mostly known for their
ability to provoke annoyance. But who knew they were a bargain, too?
No, I'm not suggesting buying and selling them. I’m talking wine.
Here's an example: the Pegasus Bay
Riesling ($28.99) is a terrific, ageable wine from one of New Zealand’s
best producers. The price is a bargain given the quality, but there’s a cheaper
alternative to be had in the Main
Divide Riesling ($18.99), at about two-thirds of the cost. Both are
available at Cambridge Wine &
Spirits (202 Alewife Brook
Parkway, Cambridge,
617.864.7171.) Yet they’re made by the same people.
What’s the difference? The grapes. The Pegasus Bay
is sourced from vineyards owned by the winery, while the Main Divide is made
from purchased fruit. Other wineries might divide their bottlings between older
vines and younger vines, or between a post-harvest selection of the “best” and
the “rest.” This doesn't mean that the cheaper bottle is a lesser wine,
necessarily ... just that it’s made in a less expensive
fashion.
But why the name change? It’s simple, really: while you might
admit that you have
younger siblings, that doesn’t always mean that you want everyone to know who
they are.
The search for little brothers isn’t the only way this
relationship works. Sometimes, interest flows in the other direction: you’ll
taste a wine you like and then realize that there’s a “big brother” out there. For
instance, the Wild Earth “Blind
Trail” Pinot Noir (which I've written about before) from New Zealand’s Central Otago
has been kicking around local shelves for a while. And it’s a fine,
bargain-priced wine from a grape that’s not often associated with the word “bargain.”
But the regular Wild Earth Pinot
Noir is even better: richer, rounder, bigger, and more complete, if you’ll
pardon the lapse into winespeak. Is it worth the extra $10? I think so, but
taste and decide for yourself.
“Second” wines, as the lower-priced bottlings are often called, can
also be made specifically for export markets ... something you’ll notice
browsing any selection of US wines in a foreign supermarket. We get them too.
Neil Ellis, in South Africa,
makes two fine region-designated sauvignon blancs from Groenekloof and Elgin, but for about half
their cost, there’s also a bottle called Sincerely.
That one’s targeted directly at our voracious appetite for inexpensive
sauvignon blanc, a hunger that used to be filled by New
Zealand but is now easy pickings for South Africa because their currency
is in the tank. Undercutting the competition sounds cutthroat — and it is — but
it’s so, so satisfying for the parsimonious consumer.
And then there are the full houses. Not quite Eight is Enough, maybe, but a
large enough family of wines to crowd the table at dinnertime.
Ken Forrester (another South African producer — I seem to be
stuck in the southern hemisphere today) has one of the tastier little brothers
out there, one that makes its status explicit in its name: the “Petit” Chenin Blanc. Here’s a
grape that, despite many attempts, hasn’t done much of interest anywhere except
in France’s Loire Valley,
but for whatever reason, South
Africa has found its number. The “Petit” is
as much fruity, sunny fun as one could ever want, especially for under a ten-spot.
Moving just up the scale into the mid-teens, Ken Forrester’s regular Chenin Blanc from the Stellenbosch
region is no less appealing in its youth, but it ages into something a lot more
akin to the justifiably famous chenins of the Loire Valley (Vouvray and
Montlouis, especially). Then there’s a style nearly unique to South Africa — a dense, modern,
oaked version — called “The FMC”
that sells at a rather dramatic premium (around $50). It’s a clear bid for
world-class status, and though it’s an extremely well-made wine, one’s reaction
to it will very much depend on whether or not one thinks chenin blanc and new
wood belong together. Finally, there’s the ultra-sweet “T” Noble Late Harvest, which sells for the same
price as “The FMC” but comes in a bottle half the size. It’s a rather
incredible wine, though you won’t want much at a single sitting, and diabetics
will want to sprint in the other direction.
