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0:02
Hey, tomei and Dave, CheapWineFindercom again with another podcast. We write up three wine reviews for affordable wines every week and then we plug in the microphone and here we are right now. Right now, what we have is the Trader Joe's Reserve Arroyo Seco, monterey County, chardonnay 2023. These Trader Joe's Reserve wines always have really long names and that's what that one is. It's a $9.99 wine, less than $10. I don't know who made it. The back label I have. All the links on the website is for kind of like a Jack of all trades wine webpage where you can buy wine equipment, you can buy wine, you can get employment news, you can get everything there. But I don't know if they make wine or not, and Trader Joe's has something about their fearless flyer about a winemakeremaker and we'll get into that a little bit.
Speaker 1:
1:09
Arroyo Seco is in Monterey County. It's one of the older AVA's. It's one of the smaller AVA's. This one became an AVA in 1983. Before that they didn't have all these, all these outlined areas where that were different. Somehow every, every ava. There's something about that. It makes it unique.
Speaker 1:
1:30
So, um, the royal secco is in the salinas valley, about 40 miles from the uh, from the pacific ocean and right off the pacific ocean. There in Monterey Bay there is the blue dot or the blue hole, which is the coldest place in the entire Pacific Ocean and those winds go sweeping down the valley. And there is a Royal Seco down there. It's named after the Royal Seco River and the Royal Seco means dry river, but it's only dry certain times of the year. When the water has run off it becomes our actual river again. And there you have it. It's actually a pretty high value place for Chardonnay wines. There's a lot of old school California wine families and wineries in there owning vineyards. So this is an excellent place. The cool weather and the soil, the ancient riverbed and all that allow for really, really long growing seasons, not too much rain. They don't get too much rain. You've got a really long, fully ripened fruit and that's a very good place.
Speaker 1:
2:54
Who made it? I don't know the name they put in the back. They don't know. What Trader Joe's did say about it is that the winemaker put half of the wine in French oak barrels and the other half in American oak barrels to age, which is pretty good for a $10 wine that actually gets American and French oak. That's pretty good. Oak barrels can cost $1,000. They probably weren't all new. I mean, that's $1,000 new, they probably weren't all new. But what that does there's two different species of oak. French oak has a tighter grain. It's uh, more subtle, more spicy. And the open grain of the american oak, when you toast it, you can get different. Toasting gives you different flavors. That's where you get your chocolates and your vanillas and your butters and that type of thing.
Speaker 1:
3:38
I'm gonna take a sip. This has a kind of a huskier flavor to this is not a bright and shiny wine. Technically speaking, $10 wines are just bright and juicy and shiny and happy. This one is a little more brooding, a little more um, a little more of a food wine. This is kind of a chardonnay old school school Chardonnay, not 100%. Another thing I think they did I don't know they did. I think they did partial malolactic fermentation. Malolactic fermentation takes the tart acid that is naturally in the grapes and replaces it or just converts it to a lactic lactose milk. That's everything rounded acid and and it kind of like there's some tart flavors here and some others, so usually if there's still tart flavors flowing through, they didn't do all of it malolactic fermentation. So this one's got a couple different kinds of oak and possibly and I'm just going off guessing that maybe a little bit of, uh, different types of malolactic fermentation or no malolactic on certain parts of it, which is pretty fancy for a 9.99 wine. I'll take another sip. It's good, it tastes good, this isa. This is a well balanced, tasty wine.
Speaker 1:
5:18
One of the things about these Trader Joe's Reserve wines is like this is from the Arroyo Seco, I think. Another one they have out currently is one from the Canaros region, chardonnay. So if you buy the two of them, you can kind of get a little bit of insight in what Canaros tastes like and what Arroyo Seco. One is just north of San Pablo Bay, canaros, east of Oakland. The other one is on the coast in the Salinas Valley off of Monterey Bay, and they're going to taste different but they're still going to be Chardonnay grape. So it's one of those things where you can actually learn a bit about and get a good wine at a good price $10 for a solid wine. That's delicious. I mean. This is a good tasting wine.
Speaker 1:
6:05
The grapes from the Royal Seco they don't normally end up in inexpensive bottles unless there's some leftover and all the Costco Trader Joe's gets a hold of them. So I'm gonna take one more sip before I close it up. Okay, this is a Trader Joe's reserve, a Royal Seco Chardonnay 2020. Was that two or 23? Let me check the bottle 23. Really new. It's delicious, tastes good. Try it if you go to Trader Joe's, so like us where you like your podcast, if you will. It helps a lot. This is Domain Dave. We've got more wines coming. I can't believe that February is like the last month of winter. We're almost through it. So, adios, stay warm and I'll be talking to everybody in a couple days. Bye-bye, keep it cheap.
