My very first visit to a vineyard was in 2018 and it was…Silver Oak. It was kind of my gateway wine when I didn’t know wine could taste so fine. It doesn’t suit my palate anymore, but I’m still sitting on the 2003 Alexander I grabbed from the library. Good memories.
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Agree I like veuve and especially the 08. Silver Oak has appropriate occasionsand some sentimental value too.
How is this not negative? You literally used the phrase “no no’s”.
Silver Oak doesn’t belong on this list and the assertion that someone who likes Silver Oak either doesn’t know anything about wine or has poor taste is what makes me groan. It’s an absurd statement.
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Poorly received wisdom
Cakebread
Herb Lamb
Billecart Salmon
Trout Gulch
MacDonald(‘s)
Orange wine
Joseph Swan
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In the way back a lot of the supermarket level wines were referred to as “plonk.” Cheap, drinkable, but not something to be sought out.
Unfortunately we live in polarized times, and judgments have to be clearly insulting to get noticed.
You want to make a list of wines to identify people who know nothing about wine or have poor taste. If that’s not negative…
Disclosure: I sell VCP in New York City for Empire
Merchants. Part of my onboarding process was tasting through the core portfolio. After a long hiatus of not having had “Yellow Label”, it was eye-openingly very good (same with Moët Brut Imperial and both of their respective Rosés).
As others have pointed above, little good comes of threads like this one. Enjoy what you drink and drink what you enjoy. Don’t publicly crap on what others, here or elsewhere, could possibly like.
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I’d put my garbage wine list in countless restaurants and wine bars who buy perfectly good wine from their distributors and store it in hot rooms, but mostly leave opened BTG wine on the bar/display for days instead of a relatively inexpensive wine fridge, or at the very least be more diligent about using vacuum pump stoppers . It turns into garbage and there are a lot of patrons who wouldn’t know any better, and they’re shelling out anywhere from $8-20/glass.
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Popcorn Chardonnay
Butter Chardonnay
I have a friend who loves Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera, Chianti….when he goes to the store, his wife tells him they are out of butter. She means Butter Chardonnay. Whatever. They are happily married.
Nope, Andy… Rombauer Chard has long been the punching bag for all that’s wrong with Calif Chard.
The Rombauer Carneros Chard at $35 is a good/solid/serious Chard. Some noticeable oak, but good acidity & speaks of Carneros Chard. I drink it.
Tom
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There are many people on this Board who really like Caymus and Silver Oak. And I would say that very few newbies maintain an inventory on Cellartracker - which reports that its members have more than 31,000 bottles of 2012 Caymus 40th Anniversary, and similarly hundreds of thousands of other bottlings. While not as substantial, thousands of bottles of various vintages of Silver Oak are in many collectors’ cellars.
I would not order a Sutter Home white zin for sure, but Trinchero has quite a wine collective and I would bet that there are a couple of member only wines that are pretty darn good.
Shifting to a label of another larger distributor/winery, admittedly I felt some negative bias the first time I tasted at La Crema but some of their SVD wines are quite good and we were on their list for many years. My point - don’t judge if you don’t know what you are talking about.
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I have to wonder if people who lump together Silver Oak and Caymus have really tasted both. To me Caymus is a bizarre concoction that isn’t much like any wine I want to drink. It’s over-extracted, sweet and in the worst vintages, actually syrupy. Silver Oak can be criticized for the oak treatment but I’ve never had one I thought was sweet or over-extracted. In some vintages the issue was more likely to be lack of extraction, perhaps because they amped up their production.
I tasted the 2017 Silver Oak Alexander on Sunday and it didn’t seem overly oaky to me either. I wouldn’t rush out to buy it but I’d have no problem drinking it.
Rombauer Chardonnay surprised me on the upside. Based on all the bashing I expected it to be the Caymus of Chardonnay, but it was actually quite good. It is indeed oaky but other than that I thought it was pretty nicely balanced and not overtly sweet. Again it’s not something I’ll seek out but I wouldn’t turn down a glass.
I’ve gone back and forth on the basic Veuve. There was a long time when it was pretty mediocre, then it seemed to improve. Then I had a number of mediocre experiences again (probably 3-4 years ago). I haven’t tried it recently. There’s so much good smaller label Champagne in that price range, I’m just not very motivated to buy it.
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craig - i share the same approach…not just with the 2 you referenced but several others. variety is the spice of life.
hope you are well.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
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You don’t want to know.
If you’re talking about things like Sutter Home or Yellow Tail, people seeking those out are looking for something entirely different than this board is looking for. That’s fine, no need to judge them. The only thing I’ll really “judge”, and even then I try to be gentle, is fruit bomb CA Pinots. Then it’s more of a “wow our palettes DO NOT align” more than “ur a dumb”
Someone I know who used to work for Jackson (another triggering company) brought some of these La Crema’s and I found them the same way you found them - exceeding my expectations.
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