Welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat. I'm here with, as always, Kristen. Hello. Very good. Thank you. And Roger. Hey. And Greg. Buddy. We're going to talk about wine today, right? Finally, we're talking about wine. Yeah. It's so good. I'll pretend I'm interested. What are we talking about today? Talking about Zinfandel. It's known as California's own grape. So it's grown in very few places. It's had a bit of an arcane history. It's kind of had to come through. It's come up, and so to speak, to become popular. And I think a little-known fact, if it weren't for the white Zinfandel craze in the 70s and 80s, then we wouldn't have the high-quality, delicious, dry red Zins of today. Or a lot of wine culture. That's where a lot of people got started in wine right there. Yeah, especially in California, making Zin. And it was kind of known as, you know, there are plenty of Italians that emigrated to California in 1800s, 1900s. And it was sort of known as the Italian farmers, kind of poor farmers' wine. And it was really coming into its own, I think, in 2019. And we've got some just world-class expressions around the world now. Cool. I think so. So let's take a look at its origins just quickly. So the reason that Zinfandel was kind of difficult to gain popularity, notoriety, was because it had no French connection. So Thomas Jefferson is waxing poetic about Cabernet, you know, hundreds of years ago, and poor Zinfandel just doesn't have any of that. So even in, you know, these studies in Montpellier and other famous universities on grape varieties, Zinfandel is like nowhere to be found. So it's just kind of lost in the fray. Well, where the hell did it come from? So it comes from Croatia, where it's known as Kružanick-Kaštalenčky. Say that again. Kružanick-Kaštalenčky. Also known as the neck. Sounds like a pastry. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I'm not sure. Yeah, that's the stuff the Polish people on the south side eat the day before Mardi Gras starts. A pastry that's full of like sauerkraut and sausage. Poppy seeds and curd. It's also known as Primativo in Italy in Puglia. So that's the heel of the boot for you guys that don't really know what Puglia is. So it's known as Chrożanek Kaszczalenski in Croatia and Primativo in Puglia. So like I said, it comes on over many, many years ago and is just brought up in California, grown all over the state and was just sort of traded hands and known as kind of the poor man sort of wine because it made consistent wine. It's super easy to grow, very vigorous vine, super high yield, relatively disease resistant. So people tend to really like it. But like I said, it wasn't winning awards. They weren't putting it into blind tasting competitions against French wines and so it just kind of fell to the wayside. Now, if you're a winemaker, what do you want to make apart from wine? Money. So when everyone's like gobble, gobble, gobble, give me Chardonnay, give me Cabernet, you're going to hock off your Zinfandel vines, you're going to plant Cabernet, right? Because you want to sell that, you want to make some cash. So let's talk about the white Zinfandel craze and kind of how it saved, in my opinion, how it saves Zinfandel. They're grafting their vines, they're switching over their vineyards to more profitable varieties. And we had this little accident, this guy named Bob Trinchero in Sutter Home had a stuck fermentation of Zinfandel. This guy was, you know, his aim was to make quality dry red Zinfandel in 1972. And he had a stuck fermentation, which is almost always a problem and very hard to come back from. And so whenever the fermentation stopped a few days in, he ended up with a very bright pink style, rosé, because the skins weren't allowed to macerate to any sort of red. And a wine that was low in alcohol, but very sweet, so full bodied, round and just luscious and delicious and bright red berry fruit. And he was like, man, I like this. I'm going to put labels on it and call it white Zinfandel. And I'm going to see what happened. And it just boomed. So his sales went from 25,000 cases to 1.5 million cases in six years. Holy cow. So when you say lower alcohol, what remind us what the general alcohol level is for normal Zin versus white Zin? So I've got a couple of regular Zins here and they're actually pretty high in alcohol. This guy is 14.7. So between 14 and 15 percent, I would say would be high. Well, it's normal for Zin, but high for other wines. We're looking for a collectible Cabernet from Bordeaux that comes in about 13.5, 13.7. Now, we don't really sell our wines that are very high in alcohol. They don't have legs to run. They can't do that marathon. So we don't really age Zinfandels that long. They're not super, super tannic. They don't have a ton of acid, so they're soft, they're easy, they're fruity. So these aren't wines that historically, we sell or then bust them out 40 years later and celebrate this award-winning vintage. I'm not saying that those examples aren't made in the world and that people do not sell their Zinfandel, but honestly, we just kind of look at it as a grape to really drink in the now. So the high alcohol really is a big part of that. What's the most comparable varietal wine for Zinfandel? If somebody's never had a Zinfandel, what would be close in layman's terms? Is that like a Syrah or a Pinot Noir or something? Well, less structured than a Syrah. I would say probably closer to a Merlot or a Dolcetto, if you know what that is from Italy also. It's kind of that, you know, a little bit more moderately tannic, lower in acid, fuller bodied style of wine. Okay. I thought those were the pastries that the Italians ate on St. Joseph's Day, similar to the Polish pastries we were talking about earlier. Okay. Let's do a podcast on pastries. We got to quit doing these around lunchtime. Hunger pangs. Dolcetto, right? No. I thought that was like a caramel. So why Zinfandel I think is cool for viticulturists is because it can ripen and create pretty complex, delicious wines in sites where other grape varieties just won't do well and create these award-winning wines, and so they'll take the hotter sites. Of course, you want that cool, even ripening to build complexity, cool, even ripening for grapes like Cabernet and so on from California, but nonetheless, Zinfandel will take those hot sites and will still produce wines that are relatively delicious compared to other grapes. That being said, one issue is it ripens unevenly. One thing, when we taste a little bit later, you guys might notice some of these zins might smell a little bit pruney, a little bit raisin-like. The Zinfandel grape ripens so unevenly that on one bunch, you could have perfectly ripe grapes next to one that's underripe, next to one that's almost raisinated. We had Barbara Herman on the podcast before. One of the things that she likes to talk about, especially on zins, is like an over-under, like it's overripe and underripe at the same time. So it can get pruney, but also it can still be vegetal too, which could read as complexity or it could read as under-produced wine. Inexpensive, less attention in the vinification and in the making. Yeah, which is difficult. Think about how much time and effort and money that would cost you to go through every single bunch. And I mean, that's what we do for something like a Berenal Schlesa dessert wine that costs 100 bucks for a half bottle. Right, to pay attention to individual grapes. So she's absolutely right. That just kind of is inherent in the style and can happen in those years where the grapes are super unevenly ripened on each bunch. So, best examples come from the Dry Creek AVA in Sonoma and the Russian River. That's where some of the oldest vines exist. Definitely in the Napa Valley, we'll talk a little bit about Biale, this wonderful producer a little bit later, Mendocina, Sonoma, Napa, of course, Paso, and San Luis Obispo, Lodi. So, it's kind of peppered all over, but between the Central Coast and the North Coast. So, like I said, once again, known as California's own grape, not grown very many other places, not sold commercially, apart from California and apart from Puglia. Back to the old vine thing. Quick question, what is the true advantage, or what's the big difference we're going to see in the bottle for one of those old vines versus a something that's just Zinfandel? Well, let's start with the disadvantage for the producer. A super old vine makes very few bunches of fruit. So, they have to have so many more vines to even make a case of wine, right? So, they're very hard to take care of. They can be very disease prone. But the fruit itself, even though there are very few bunches on the vine, is far more concentrated. The berries are smaller. So, you can end up with deeply colored, very well structured wines that are very flavorful and like I said, concentrated pronounced flavors and tents, but you just don't get a lot of it. Now, is that a Zinfandel someone might age or still we're kind of just drink it fresh, get it out of there? If it comes from the cooler sites and can maintain that tannin, but also have a bit of acidity to it, then that would be for me a qualifier of a Zinfandel that could last in a cellar for, I'm talking maybe 10 years. I don't have the experience and if some of our listeners do, please write into us and let us know. I haven't tasted too many 30-year-old Zinfandels in my life. I just don't know that they can last or that they would be as pleasurable to drink after- I think I've only had like six and eight-year-old examples. Yeah, and they're great. That primary does though drop relatively quickly in Zinfandel, whereas in, I don't want to just pick on Cabernet all day, but it's just the example everybody knows that after six, 10 years, you can still have a lot of primary fruit left in that That's the name of the game with Zinfandel is the fruit. It's the fruit. It's all about the fruit. But one thing that's great about Zinfandel is it's good during the wintertime. It's lovely with these high-intensity meals that we eat all season, especially over the holidays, because of the high alcohol, the relatively smooth, lush, low tannic structure. It's super-parable, and then that bright berry fruit really goes with everything from stuffing to turkey to ham to steak, like you name it. Zinfandel does it all. Hell, yeah, Prime Red Pack. All right. Yeah. So when does Zinfandel go from being associated with white Zin and something that's economical and popular to something that has more potential, is more respected, the Zins that we think of now? When did that turn? Yeah. For me, it's got to be... People began to make very serious bottles in the 70s and 80s, but just like I said, trading hands and kind of staying more locally, they really weren't distributed very widely until I'd say the 90s, because the 90s is kind of when people started to look for something different. We're coming off of the Chardonnay craze of the 80s, the white Zinfandel, the lush, the bright, that kind of thing, and we're moving into more serious reds. And I think that that's when people began to explore and want to see more wines on the shelf. It kind of happened consequently when, you know, like, Barolo's are coming more into fashion in the 90s, and people are really starting to pay attention to dry, more serious wines. And for me, I think it was just something that Californian winemakers could really hug on to, you know, as like their sort of favorite grape, their own grape, and so really everyone kind of made bits and bobs of it. I mean, think about, if you think about all the wine grapes in the world, every grape you've ever heard of is being grown in California and being made into wine by somebody somewhere. Like there's just no grape that's not there. It's just a true smorgasbord. So like I said, when everybody's making Cab, everyone's making Chard, everybody's growing Pinot, Zinfandel has been and still remains California's premier grape that's pretty much just their own. Now we don't want to knock the Italians in Puglia. They're pumping out a lot of Primativo. It's kind of their premier red, apart from Negromaro, but they just don't have the quality focus, generally, that we do in California to really make these high-quality bottlings. What about in blends? It seems like it's really taking a forefront in a lot of blends, too. In higher-end blends, just as a ripening agent, especially in stuff like Paso, but then in the super ubiquitous, kind of soft and semi-sweet red blends in California, that also, maybe people don't even know that they're drinking something that's People love, though, when they say blend, I think when people come into the stores and they ask me for a blend, they're thinking of that kind of style. They're thinking Zin blend. Yeah, I think just like you said, it adds that round fruity core. These aren't wines that are meant to age or collect. They're just simple, easy, crowd-pleasing, juicy drinkers. Yeah, you're right. It does build that backbone, but it does play well with a lot of other grapes, even Bordeaux varieties. If you're looking for something that you already know that you like, a soft red blend that's really fruit-driven, but you want something that's maybe a step up or maybe something more exciting to take to out to dinner or to a party, Zinfandel is a Absolutely. I haven't met one that I don't like apart from... It gives you a chance to promote the term juicy drinkers. I was just going to say hashtag juicy drinkers. Which is an apt description for this podcast group. I was going to say, I'm relying on IPA or Zinfandel. I don't even know anymore. So let's go ahead and let's taste one that's very, very near and dear to my heart. Because even though it comes from California, you can say it with your hands. This is how Italians make Zinfandel. This is the Biale Black Chicken. This is their entry-level bottling, and the story behind, do you know the story behind this wine, why it's called Black Chicken? Back in the day, so these are, like I said earlier in the cast, that red Zinfandel was sort of grown up in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and really popular for Italian wine growers and Italian farmers. And so there was the Biale family, Biale family in Napa Valley, and Aldo Biale was the patriarch at the time, and they had a party line. So back in the 1940s, in this particular neighborhood in Napa Valley, they all shared a phone line that was then spliced off to their various homes. So he was bootleg in wine, and he was a chicken farmer, and he grew, he raised white chickens. And so when he, when somebody would call, they'd call and be like, Ciao, Aldo, I want walnuts and I need some corn and I need a milk and can you throw in a black chicken? Which was a jug of his bootleg Zinfandel. And that's kind of how the brand grew, and now it's sort of their flagship wine, and that's the story behind the black chicken. So let's go ahead and taste it, then I kind of want to hear what you guys have to say about this red Zin. Getting a lot of perfume on this one. Well, that's kind of one thing it's known for. I can share some of those aromatic qualities with Grenache, but instead of red fruit, it's definitely the deep, dark fruit, a little bit of raisin, a little bit of kind of blackberry, but yeah, you get some of that purple flower, I think, that is Yeah, I mean, of course, on top of this like heavy raspberry. Yeah, I was going to say the raspberry, blackberry characters. People describe it as the boysenberry, the California word, you know. So what do you think? All kinds of liquid fruit preserves on this one. A little bit of licorice, anybody? Sure. Do you like anise, like black licorice? Cool, yeah, that's what I think. But taste it. I would have just loosely called it peppery. Sure. But is it the dryness in the tannin just from the fruit or is there any oak character? I don't get a ton of overt oak on this wine. I like them, it's kind of soft. I don't know a lot of zinfandels that take to a lot of new oak treatment. So the ones that I've tasted, you don't get that a lot. I mean, you can get a little bit of that vanilla baking spice. Like if it was in cocoa or vanilla on top of the fruit. Yeah. I think you can obliterate all that fruit really easily with new oak on this. So no, not too much, but you can definitely know it's definitely aged in oak because it's so round and very well integrated. But do you feel how fine the tannins are? Yeah, I really like how light the tannin is, and how just soft and round the body is. This is one of the easier drinking dry red wines I've ever had, I think. And how fruity it is. When you stand that up to a sort of protein or anything with salt on it, it's going to make it even fruitier. So I think that's why people really gravitate towards it as a wine that's so easy to pair with savory dishes. Just not sugar. Definitely not sugar. Sugar would make this seem like weird and austere. I think so. But honestly, if I had to pick, you know how a lot of people pair chocolate and red wine, which is not really my thing. Dark chocolate and Zinfandel, I think would be just fine. So if you're looking for a Valentine's Day gift coming up, make sure that I wouldn't put milk chocolate against this thing. But definitely a dark, like 70 percent kind of chocolate, I think would be fine with this because it doesn't have the tannin to get in the way. Tannin makes bitter, just like Roger said. So, you know, high cacao content in chocolate is very bitter, and that's actually a lot of tannin as well in that. So you're going to just have like the sort of clash if it's a milk chocolate sweet sugary. You want that tannin and that bitterness to kind of help each other with this pairing. But stews, I mean, anything rich and decadent because of the high alcohol and it's really full-bodied could stand up to it. Cassoulet. Dare I say, cassoulet. So here we have the Italian version, so called Primativo. Once again, same grape. And this comes from Puglia. Now it comes from a producer, Tommasi. They're more famous up in Northeastern Italy for Amarone, Valpolicella and the like, but very, very common for Northern producers to then in the last 10, 15 years to really come down, buy a lot of properties and make wines out in Southern Italy. Land is super cheap down there. Heracles, nice. So I like that he's wearing the lion on the label too. Good representation of Hercules here. Am I wrong for thinking I smell blueberry in this? No, if you smell blueberry, I'm never going to tell you that you don't smell blueberry. Good, because I throw this glass of wine in your face. Yeah, yeah. I mean, come on. I smell sawdust. The color on this list seems darker. Almost like it has a really interesting mahogany character. I'm getting some chocolate in it now. Leather bound books. Rich mahogany. So this is a deeper, darker expression that could come from a couple of things. If it says Primativo on the label, it does not have to be 100% Primativo. This obviously could be. Let's see. Doesn't say it is, but here's the deal. Down in the heel of the boot of Italy, way, way hotter. Lots and lots of sun. So these grapes are going to be super ripe and super concentrated. So you're going to notice that the darker the fruit on the nose, the blueberry is going to lend more towards blackberries. The cooler expressions of Zinfandel are going to lend more towards that red berry spectrum. So the riper the grapes get, the darker the fruit profile becomes. This is awesome. So the skins with more sun, they're going to get more color, they're going to have more flavor, and they could even let it macerate a little bit longer and pull even more of that color. Now, remember that color is water-soluble. So if they control the temperature on the ferment, they could just extract color before they start alcoholic fermentation, and that lends itself to an even deeper wine. So there are a few different reasons or ways the winemaker could treat this Zinfandel to create this particular style, but the deeper, darker, richer is really just a sign of a hotter climate and more sun. It's true, and the flavors as well as the color, I mean, it's backed up by intensity of fruit and spice. Yeah, this wine is wonderful. I think even less acidic than the Napa expression. Totally. I think even less tannic. It's just super fruity but way, way dark, but richer, even more mouth-filling, even fuller. And it's deeply complex. It's not just monolithic, it's deeply complex. Yeah. This is a nice bottle of wine, but it's got just a lot going on. It seems to be a little more oak forward than the Napa stuff. Flavors I associate with oak in whiskey are coming through a little more, especially on the finish. There's a lot more of that baking spice going on here. Quite a bit, yes. If it has a minerality, it seems like it's toward the copper edge. Totally. That kind of sounds gross, but it also gives it a little bit of focus where it doesn't have a lot of tannic focus, so it gives it like... See, I think it lends itself more to that iron sanguine style versus a copper for me. You know what? I was thinking coppery bloody, but iron and bloody too. So, Kristin, how much is the last wine that we tried? Guess. How much do you think? Well, the last one that we did as far as the Napa one, I would say that I put this on par with that, so $35, $40. Awesome. $13.99, my friend. Now, that is phenomenal. Well, the cost of pay to play in Napa, man, is just... Right. You know, so even wines that would be $13.99 elsewhere just come out at $25. You know what I mean? But I think you're right. Part of it is this producer is fantastic. They've got hundreds of years of know-how in Italy. So I think they're doing great things down in the South. So yeah, I'm happy you like it. $13.99. All right, Sutter Home White Zinfandel. Yeah, non-vintage, so it's a mix of just whatever the hell they've got in the vats, I suppose. That's not, all right, so let's actually defend that. We've talked about this before, they can pull the must, they can put it in vats, they can cool it down so that it's basically fresh, and they can vinify this throughout the year. It's pretty sweet, yeah, they keep it basically at freezing. It's like what they do for Moscato or what they do for Prosecco. Like there's no way that anybody could make all that Prosecco fresh all year long unless they're storing must in like football fields full of vats at basically like one degree. So you're saying that's a must? Oh, are you? You're not a dad. You're not a dad. So since the advent of white zinfandel in the 70s, plantings of zin has increased by basically 3000 acres a year in some areas. That's not like the entire state, right? But in the areas where it's popular. So there were 34,000 acres in 1992, which was still ahead of Cab Sov at the time. In 2003, there were 50,000. So it just kept getting more and more and more and more. Wow. I wonder if white zinfandel sales are growing for us still. There's no way, right? It's the red zinfandel sales that are growing. I'd say, I don't want to be hyperbolic and say large volumes, but all of that increase in the late 90s to early 2000s was the discovery of something new of California's grape. Let's hold on to this and let's make this our own thing. Because grapes like Merlot, Cab, Cab Franc, and even Pinot, especially in 2003 when Merlot took a dump because of sideways, those plantings after 2003 drastically increased. Merlot falls like 40 percent. So, Zin's just holding strong on this ever-exponential growth based on starting with the white Zin and then just moving into popularity for the delicious red wines it produces. That's really what I think. This has a really pronounced peach character to it. That's very strange. And that's Sutter Home White Zinfandel, everybody. It's not as sweet as I thought it was going to be. It's pretty damn sweet. What this needs is a... I don't think Behringer is as sweet. Collins glass, seltzer water, and a nice orange wheel. It has, you say a peachiness... Yeah, that would be very nice. You say it has a peachiness, but it also has like a lime and green stone fruit flavor, like apples and pears. If you were tasting this with a blindfold or out of a black glass, so you can't tell that it's pink, what would you think that this is? Oh, no. I blinded white Zin a couple of times. I've nailed it. Oh, really? I'd guess it is like- Because there's nothing else it can be. I would guess it as like some sweeter Grubritzger mead or something like that. No. Well, I mean, you're seeing the color, but when I, I guess, yeah, blind without color, I'm not really quite sure. But yeah, every time I taste it, I'm like, this is not like any other rosé out there. And it tastes, some of that expression I had is like watermelony, just kind of like, you know, super fruity, no structure, no acid. It's just like, this is white Zin. I think that you're tasting pink, quote pink fruit flavors because you see that it's pink. I don't think it actually tastes pink. I think it tastes like a white wine. It tastes like watermelon now, now that you said that. Tastes like watermelon to me. Watermelon, sure, stone fruit, tropical fruit, but there's a cherry, strawberry thing going on, undeniably, bubblegummy. Watermelon and only watermelon. Yeah. And so they don't add sugar to this though. It's just they leave a lot of for animal sugar. I can't speak to the 2019 production method of Sutter Home White Zinfandel. In the impetus in the 70s, no, it was a stuck fermentation, so all the residual sugar would have been left over from the natural grapes because that guy was trying to make some legit red Zin. I bet they capitalized this. Well, yeah. I bet they do. But what he's... I didn't Google it, but I bet they do. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm not going to say what they... I have a feeling that it's more like wine making by numbers at this point for this brand. You know what? You're probably right. There's probably a certain amount of mega purple in here that even just gives it more of a red color than the whiteish pink that it probably actually comes out. To be white Zinfandel, I'm not even sure how much Zinfandel it has to be because the wine itself is called white Zinfandel. It's not labeled after the actual variety. So to be from California and called Zin, it must be minimum 75% Zinfandel, right? But if it's white Zin, what else is in here? So that could lend itself to your peach and your, that could be columbar in here, which is very common to be, to stretch out in bulk wine like this in the Central Valley. All kinds of, you know, so I don't know what that's like. So that's why I said I really don't want to get too much into the production because I'm not quite sure what the kitchen sinks or the recipe could be for this wine. I highly doubt it's 100% Zinfandel. I doubt it's 100% red wine for sure. Yeah, right. That lends itself to the color, I think. This has to have been what birthed the wine cooler movement. And what's kind of funny is that I could see this circling back around because wine coolers are ultimately replaced with FMBs, so flavored malt beverages, which are essentially beer that's been filtered and stripped down. Problem with that is that you're left with carbs and then there's the gluten aspect. So a lot of people turn to those kind of beverages thinking that they're avoiding both of those things, but ironically they aren't. Right. Sure. I think this is also fresh off the like Liebframilch sweet Riesling craze because when they wanted the dry wines, they drink Chardonnay in the 70s and 80s, and then when they wanted sweet and everybody really loves sweet, we just do from the 60s on, it's just like the sweet Blush, the Gallows, the, you know, the Carlo Rossi's. This is when all this stuff was kind of coming up into play. And yeah, the sweet wines of the world just kind of went out here. But yeah, I think you're absolutely on to something. And as much as we're taking knocks at this, it's worth restating that like wine in America wouldn't exist how it does today without this. This is so fundamentally important to people onboarding, discovering and then falling in love and then wanting something more interesting, more complex with a better story that has some unique quality. There's nothing wrong with sweet wine, and wine growers and wine makers are going to change the landscape or their vineyardscape to suit the tastes of the public to make cash. If you look at Bordeaux in the medieval times, they were formed on dry red wines. But then the Dutch come in with their mercantile trade and their transatlantic movement, and they're like, we want the sweet stuff. And the Bordeaux ladies are like, let's make sauternes. And you know what I mean? And now it's like the most celebrated sweet wine in the world. So it just it's the way it goes. It's been this way for hundreds of years. And you have to you're right. Respect for what it is, and especially not just wine, but for for Red Zinfandel, because I love to drink the stuff. And if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have all the vineyards saved for Red Zin. That's it. Mix it with your La Croix. That's what we're saying. I think tonic. I think a little tonic on this, like a pork cocktail. You know how the white pork cocktails are delicious? Those are good. Not a big quinine fan, but you could probably make a good cocktail out of this. Krlizet Krlizanek Konstalanski, or what Pat was going to call the neck. That brings us to the Q&A portion of today's podcast. If you want a chance at $20 Binny's Beverage Depot gift card, write us your questions at cometsbinnies.com, hit us up on social media at Binny's Bev on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more. Our question this week comes from at Jamie Chotarov. Just listen to the Cali Cab Podcast and learned a lot. It's one of my favorite varietals, but $100 plus bottles are so out of my price range. What are your favorite quote value cabs, say $10 to $20 for everyday drinking? Thanks for being a repeat listener. Download and subscribe. Yeah. Leave us a review. Yeah. Let me think about that. I mean, there's some standbys that have always delivered, right? You know, for Cabernets out of California, I really like them out of Sonoma. I like the cooler climate. I think that in the less expensive category, you get more refreshing structure, you get more complexity. They're not syrupy, they're not played out, they're not too fruity, they're not, they don't pander to you like some can. I'm not saying they all do, just it can be spotty, because like I said before, the cost of pay to play is super high. So I like the Cabernet that comes from Alexander Valley Vineyards. I think it's a super fair value. I think we have it at $19.99 on the shelf. I like the Charles Smith, just the CS Cabernet. I think that's 15 bucks, or at least it was during December. That's a Washington State. I know it's Washington State, but it's a great Cabernet. The other thing is people overlook Bordeaux varieties at a Washington State. Look for places like the Yakima Valley. Inside the Yakima Valley, very tiny Appalachian of Red Mountain. I mean, it's like for people in the know, that's where you get some great value. Check out Hedges, for example, or another Appalachian, Washington. Le Cole is fantastic. And their wines are rate around 20, 30 bucks. Their cab is like 35 or 40 bucks now. But they are fabulous. That's expensive. I want 15 bucks. Hedges is 30 bucks. What about Louis Martini Sonoma Cab? I was going to say Louis Martini. Not bad and consistent. Yes. I was also going to say Hess. Hess makes some value wines. The Hess Select is great. Yep. And talk about blending in Zin. They have their Lion Tamer. It's like 40 bucks. And that is a Malbec based blend. But with Zinfandel and then a little bit Petite Syrah, which are kind of more California grapes. And then of course, we've got the Cabernet Merlot that play a little bit of a supporting role there. But that's a little bit of a stretch. Now it's out of 20, it's 40, but also very, very nice. Why do you hate wines that are less than $20 is the more important question. I'm trying right now. This is a personal struggle. You don't understand. You don't understand what I'm going through. Like I'm like, I'm going to buy. You know this, I bought you one. I'm like, I'm coming back to 10, $15 wines and I'm going to see what's out there. And I'm trying hard. Slumming it with the likes of us. Yeah. And I just, I just don't, I just, it's so few and 14. It's hard to find good garbage is what you think. Another region that can offer, another region that can offer some value in California is Paso Robles. Yeah. They tend to be a little more ripe because it's a little more southern and a little more inland. But you know, you get some great values from the region. I don't know. I'm just, I'm an old world girl. I, you know, cut my teeth in the old world. I started with Italian wines that are lean and mean and acidic and they kind of go in from there. So that's just my experience, which makes it difficult for me. So I mean for value, like you like this Primativo, I would spend $13 all day in Puglia before I'd spend $13 for a California Appalachian wine. That's just me. There you have it. Buy foreign. You know what? That's actually a really good point. Like France for Cabernet, if you're looking for some cab, now the inexpensive right bank stuff is going to be more Merlot centric. Even the inexpensive left bank is still more Merlot. But that doesn't mean you're not getting those same qualities. If you are looking for a more classically styled, herbaceous, tannic and structured Cabernet based blend, or Cabernet included blend. Yeah. No, for 15 and under, I'm going Italy, France, Spain, Portugal. But for the Napa style, Washington state. Washington state. Washington state, man. That's where it's so overlooked, so underrated, and so great. Dude, that's CS, I'm telling you. So thanks, Jamie, for writing in your question. Thanks for listening to the Barrel to Bottle podcast. We have a $20 Binny's gift card coming to you. Good for the purchase of your choice at the Binny's of your choice. Everybody else can hit up their questions to us. Write us at comments at binnys.com, social media at binny'sbev on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Drink that neck. Zinfandel. Delicious. The neck. The neck. I mean, I don't know, what a good gift, I think. You know what I mean? No one has to worry too much about it. They're consistent. They don't cost a ton of money. And no one has to age it. Anybody who likes red wine is going to like Zinfandel. Zinfandel. A wine fan and also like your aunt who doesn't like wine. Yeah, and if you don't know, Zinfandel. That's it. I love it. Cool. Thanks for listening, you guys. Thanks for entertaining my Zinfandel cast. And that has been another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Thanks for joining this week. We love talking all things Zinfandel, also known as the knack. So until next time, when we taste some more knacks, I'm your host Pat, here with Kristin. Bye. Roger. Cheers. And Greg. Thanks. Keep tasting, friends. What are we talking about today? Zinfandel, baby. Is that the red or the white? I can never remember that. Both, both. Well, you know, little-known fact. Ace Ventura reference? What bit are you doing? Ace Ventura. New England clam chowder. Yeah. Is that the red or the white? I can never remember that. That's a password to get into the computer hack. Computer hack. Okay. Them all doing the bit at the same time. That was perfect. Stop it there. Then let's do this for real.