I basically paid $35 for this lovely glass bottle.
I admit the obvious: I bought this because it looked like a bottle of buried-treasure pirate wine. I knew I was being taken in by pretty packaging, but I figured that this was from Chateauneuf-de-Pape, one of France’s most heralded wine regions, so it couldn’t be THAT bad…right? I forgot that top wine regions are like luxury cars: they don’t sell with gimmicks. If you walk into a Lexus dealership, the salesman probably isn’t going to bother offering you purchase rebates or free gas for a year; his sales pitch is going to be “It’s a Lexus.” Chateauneuf-de-Pape, located in the Rhone Valley in the southeast of France, is a Lexus wine region: it doesn’t need anything other than its name on the bottle to draw people in. So when a Chateauneuf producer starts messing with the bottle itself to draw in sales, it’s probably not a good sign. Read the rest of this entry »
pop & pour 