Ball Square Fine Wines

A Kamiak Conundrum

A fair to midland Tuesday at The Tasting Station for the Ball Square wine buying crew. The pace was easy to take with our vendors evenly spread and overall not a ton to taste.  This was a good thing as I was feeling significantly under the weather (sorry Asa those sparkling sakes just didn't hit me right AT ALL!).  Check out the score card below.

We did learn a few interesting factoids:

-Sebastiano de Corato of the Rivera winery in Puglia reminded us that the name of the Primitivo grape refers to its early ripening nature (thus first to be picked).

- A representative from the Graziano winery reported that the 2008 vintage in Mendocino County was a veritable disaster. Frost, Fire and Rain combined to make the crop virtually unusable. Much was left on the vines as "bird food". If you have a favorite Mendo wine stock up on the '07's!

We also encountered this rather sticky wicket:

Arik, our tall, dark and (humorously) sarcastic representative from Charles River Wine Company presented us with the new vintage (2007) of Kamiak red from Washington State. This had been eagerly anticipated as the 2006 was a huge hit at Ball Square Fine Wines. Kamiak is the second label of the Gordon Brothers winery and the '06 was a smooth and complex red that sold like hot cakes at $9.99 per bottle. The good news was that the '07 was the spitting image of its predecessor; cheery red fruits, light brushy earth and a hint of luxury that comes from aging in high quality oak barrels. The bad news was that the price would have to be $14.99, a full fiver over the '06. In reality it wasn't that the '07 had taken such a huge jump but that, for unknown reasons, the '06 had been priced unusually low by the winery....

The quandary for us is whether to put the new vintage of Kamiak (which also has a new, more minimal label and the name "Rock Lake" added) on the shelf and risk the perception that we jacked up the price, or choose not to stock it and deny our customers a perfectly good Washington state wine at a decent, if significantly higher, price.

Do you think we should go for it and stock the new Kamiak or hold out for another Washington wine to fill the $9.99 slot?

If a wine takes a price increase do you blame the store you bought it from or assume it was initiated further up the supply chain?

Total wines tasted: 47
Wines that made “the short list”: 4
One new addition you can look for: 04 Grazziano Carignane Mendocino