A New TJ’s Vintage-Compass Bridge Sonoma Chardonnay 2024

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Well hello, Domain Dave again, cheapwinefinder.com with another uh value price wine review like we always do and have been for a long, long time. And today we've got a Trader Joe's wine, and I it's it's a new vintage, it's not a new wine. We've got to talk about that too. And it this one is the Compass Bridge Sonoma County Chardonnay 2024. I think it came out last year, and I liked it. I think it's like a $9 wine. And it's uh We need well, Trader Joe's, my Trader Joe's just chopped their wine section again to about half of what it used to be. Um Aldi still seems to have the same amount of wines, but they don't seem to have new ones, and um Casco's up and down. That's because the wine industry is way off. They're not selling nearly as much as they used to. And there was a time where Trader Joe's and Aldi and all those would have maybe four or five new wines that you never saw before every month. That was fine for me because I can always go, hey, let's let's just let's see what these new wines are about. And and that might still happen in certain months coming up. There's the holidays, they're still gonna be trying to push wine, but we're not getting that as much. And what we're getting, and even for a while, Trader Joe's, if you look at their Fairless Flyer, uh, the wine section's got wines for some wines from five years ago. So, but when we get new vinages, we probably should look it up. I mean, go check those out and just not assume, like for a long, long time, you in California wines, you can just assume that each vintage was going to be pretty much the same thing as long as they use the same grapes and the same winemaker and all that stuff. Um, everything was fine, but California's starting to see climate variations and weird things happening, um floods, fires, the whole thing. Just took a sip. And one of the things we should check out with new vinages of these inexpensive wines, is there's a lot of grapes from higher price wines left over. Are these wines, and I don't know where they came from, are higher-priced wines at least partially or so coming into these value-priced wines? Because people need to need to get rid of them, you know, and if you can get, you know, name brand winery X selling you grapes for this this amount, or you know, a value price winery selling you for the same amount, you're gonna take the the higher one. At least they should. Because the grape might be better. Not that the inexpensive ones are bad, inexpensive wines the best they've ever been. So, what we got here is the compass bridge Sonoma Chardonnay. It's from uh Delicato umly vineyards slash copla wines. Uh Delicato uh bought a copola a while back. Copla is in Sonoma, and Delicato's in Lodi, and Delicato has holdings in Central Coast. I think they even have Napa, if I'm not mistaken. And then you got Copla's holdings. And this wine's from Sonoma, and according to the California Wine Cola, California Wine Cola Registry tells you about uh how they registered their label. Because registering the label is important in California for wine. Not that it I mean it's not as important as it used to be because it doesn't tell you anything anymore. But there was a time when you owned a vineyard and you uh and you owned the winery and you made wines from your vineyard. Well, then it told you, but now it's so complicated it doesn't really tell you anything. Um, anything more than just the basics, anyway. Let's take another sip of this one. This wine's got um some oak in there, and that's um I'm getting a lot of vanilla. It's it's calming down when I first got it. It was like vanilla is a little overpowering, but now that it's uh now that it's calmed down a bit. And I had it, well, I didn't actually have one open. Usually I open up for an hour. But cold wines I don't. But um the vanilla's kind of blowing in there, but it's got more body. This is a fall wine if you ask me, and it's got enough flavor that if you take a sip of this and you start thinking about all the different things you have in your pantry and in your refrigerator, you might be able to come up with some crazy, uh, crazy good uh pairings because there's a lot of flavor in here that can be brought out. It's got decent acidity, you know, it's it's not um it's not burgundy Chardonnay type stuff, but it's just good rounded California Chardonnay at a cheap price. It's got it's got good body. It's it's it's um it's medium body, but in the plus side of medium. And the flavors are like I said, vanilla, maybe some honeys, some pineapple, some uh peach and pear, some uh dark, uh dark acidity. Yeah, there's some decent flavors in here, but it's kind of bounced, it's kind of smooth. Nothing jumps out of you except for the vanilla when I first got it. Now it is, now that I've had it open for a while and in the glass, it's kind of just swimming along with all the other flavors. Yeah, it's a it's a at nine bucks it's a bargain. This is a nice wine. You know, it's it's not a wishy-washy wine, it's not a wimpy one. I mean, it um it it has this flavor profile. It says, here it is, here I am, which for an inexpensive wine's a good thing. You know, it's you want a wine to kind of make a statement, and this one does. It's inexpensive. It's you're not gonna you're not gonna think you're spending uh, you know, buying a $25 Chardonnay. This is you know, but this is definitely pretty good for a $9 Chardonnay. So there you go. I'm heading out to Sonoma in a couple days. So I'm gonna be I'll do some podcasts out there, but I don't know if I'm gonna when I'm gonna be able to uh upload them and do the production until later. But so I'll be gone for a little bit, but not too long, maybe about a week or so. So adios, keep it cheap, and I'll be talking to everybody on the other side of uh my little California expedition. Adios, bye-bye.