Excellent Quaity Zinfandel-Cline Ancient Vines Zinfandel 2022

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Hey, it's Domain Dave, cheaperwinefighter.com. As always, I think I'll start this one off right away with going the whole explanation to who we are. There's enough out there you can figure it out. This is a wine I found at Trader Joe's. It's not a Trader Joe's wine. It's available everywhere. It's from a um a leading producer, a wine, a family-owned winemaker. Um, this is Klein Ancient Vines up until 2022. Trader Joe's had it for$13.99, which is a good price. It lists for$22 on Klein's site. And um looking at the web, it was anywhere from$14 to$20 within the middle there somewhere. So this is not a cheap, cheap wine. Um actually, everything everything over$11 is actually high-end wine. I mean, it's cheap wine under$11. Not that that actually works with with store brands and all that kind of stuff. It doesn't really work anyway anymore, but that's how they used to be. This is a wine from uh Contra Costa uh AVA County, which is just um east of the San Francisco Bay. It's below the San Pablo Bay. There's a bunch of bays in there. Um Sonoma, Napa are north of that on the other side of the bays. Back in the early 1900s, this was the place to get wine in Northern California. And then Prohibition hit, and you know, everybody shut down for over those years, and and then I think there was like um, you know, like there's housing moving in and all sorts of stuff, and a lot of the winemakers or wineries and vineyards moved north and started uh growing in Napa and Sonoma, and back then they were not developed. There were people in there, but not many, and there was open open property to buy and grow and good ones, and so now, you know, uh so uh Casta Contra um or Contra Costa um kind of kind of is the parents of Sonoma and Napa. Um but there's still um a lot of uh vineyards here, and much of them are 100 years old or more. And Klein, I believe them to be Klein Estate vineyards, because the their their paperwork's I mean the tasting notes that are in, you know, so okay, it must be yours. But the back of the bottle says vintage and bottled by Klein. And that just means they bottled it. But that doesn't actually mean what it always means because sometimes a vineyard's under one um one company name and another winner's and another, and the winemaker facility or another, so it's so complicated the back of the bottles don't mean much anymore. I'm gonna take a sip. A couple things are worth noting here. Um they fermented it in concrete vats. And it was also open top fermentation. Uh both of those are a little bit interesting. Well, more than a little bit. Open top fermentation means that the air can get to it, and the one thing you don't want is the air getting to it. But there's a cap of of the dead, not the dead, of the of the crushed or the pressed grapes up on top, and they form a tight cap and keep the air out because air was not, you gotta control the air. But it's always a little bit of um a challenge to do that. And concrete vessel for fermentation, concrete is really good at holding temperature and humidity steady. There's not a lot of changes, and that's exactly what you want when you're doing fermentation. Because you know, if it's if it's a stainless steel tank or even a wood barrel, if you get a front comes in and the temperature goes up or down, and the uh and and the pressure of the air changes, I mean, it changes the wine too. You don't want that, and the concrete will protect that. And then the then the after they did all that, they put this wine on French oak, various ages of French oak, for 16 months. So that's you know, that's the kind of oak program that you get in high-head price wines, you know. Um, they didn't name um, they didn't name a cooperage or anything. That's when wine gets really expensive when they're talking about the cooperages. But just picking out oak to put your wine in for 16 months, French oak on that, is pretty nice detail. I mean, and they went through some trouble to to ferment it. That concrete and the open top, you don't do that if you're just trying to make a quick buck. You that's what you're doing. You're trying to get a certain you you want a certain type of wine to come out. I'm taking another sip. Clyde is family-owned, they're on the third generation. Uh, from the website, it looks like all the kids have their own winery or their own wine project. It looks pretty cool. But this is a really nice zinfadil. It's rich. It's not, it's got extracted fruit, but it's not sweet. This is a dry wine. Uh it's got spice. I um here's here's the thing about the spice in zinfadil grapes. Zinfadil grapes in a bunch can run the uh gamut between not barely ripe to too ripe, like going to almost rot. So you you get a single bunch, you can get the whole gamut. And rather than picking the bad ones off or whatever, they just let it go, and that's where you get the spicy flavor you don't get anywhere else. It's kind of one of the unique things about uh about Zinfanel, something you don't get in Primitivo, it's supposed to be the Spanish version of Zinfandel, it's not Spanish, Italian version of Zinfandel. But there you go. This is Klein Ancient Vines Zinfandel 2022. It's got some age to it, it's tasty, it's rich, it's uh it's a it's a steak wine, it's a sipping wine, it's a good wine. It's a uh Trader Joe's is$14, but you know, even at$20, it's not a bad bout wine. So adios, keep it cheap. Domain Dave. I'll be talking in you in a couple days. Adios, bye bye.