Part 2-Aldi Specially Selected Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2024

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Hey, welcome. It's Domain Dave again, cheapwinefinder.com, as always. And I've got an Aldi one. Um, this one's got a little bit weirdness to it, but we'll go over that right away. It's the Aldi specially selected Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2024. What's so weird about that? Well, in September of 2025, Aldi released a specially selected Wamma Vet Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2024. Different wine, uh, different label. Uh in the back label who they say bottled it or whatever, different one there. So this is the same wine, same year, or but same, but it's not. So um this is a new vintage. Like I said, um Precept uh Wines and Spirits, they're the largest uh northern, west, northwestern California, uh not California, Northwestern Um Wine and Spirits Company, and they they've been doing a lot of wines for uh Aldi, um Trader Joe's, um Casco. They're they're really busy right now where other people are are hurting. So why is this a year later, the exact same year for Willamette Valley, you know, noir? And the answer is well, I don't have the answer. I mean, there's a couple of things. Precept has their own vineyards, they've they've um been in Oregon wine for a fairly long time, and they've been making wine to have vineyards, but they also have entities that are negotiants, and negotiants go out and they buy uh completed wines by other people and they take the label off, put their own on. And that's a um you can get a really good wine at a really good price that way, and I don't know if they use their own grapes, as they do have grapes, or if they went out and bought, managed to get somebody. And and I kind of I think the fact that it's a year older, uh in terms of now, as to then, I'm I'm talking backwards now, that that was a 2024 then is a 2024 now. It was kind of a young wine then, 2024 and 2025 was a young wine, it was $12.99 then. This year it's $11.99. Um is it a leftover wine? Is it a wine that didn't sell? Right now, the wine industry is down like 14 to 20%. It's not good. Uh, it's worse. Uh oh, it's worse sometimes in the upper areas. Some people are doing fine, some people are just getting killed. And um, I'm gonna take a sip because it's depressing me. And this is a very nice Pinot. Um, I just came back from Sonoma and I was drinking the Russian River and Sonoma Coast and even Willamette Valley and maybe Santa Barbara, that they all had tasting flit room was there, and some of those were wow wines, but they're all above $50. Like, whoa, this is a really nice wine. And you don't get that woe on this wine, but you get a really nice wine. You drink it and you go, hmm, that's good. I will take another sip, I am sure of it. You know, because the first sip went well, and I'm glad that happened, and I want more. Take a second sip. The high-end wines in Willamette Valley will will have Dundee, the sub-AVA, and almost always um as I as you go up, you're even going to get a vineyard. They're gonna name a vineyard on it. And this is just Willamette Valley. This is the basic, this is the taste of Willamette Valley. Now, it doesn't, it can be one vineyard and they just didn't put it on there, or it could be ten vineyards and they just all mixed them together to something very nice. And it is, as you well know, a blend is often better than the sum of its parts. So having a taking a bunch of different, even if it's a Pinot Noir from the same AVA, blending them together can give you something really nice. So that's never a bad thing, unless the uh blender doesn't know what they're doing, which doesn't really happen, that's not a thing. Take another sip. So, what is this? I don't know. It's a good Pinot Noir, it's $11.99. Pinot um Willamette Valley Pinot Noir doesn't normally come in at that price, so if you can get it, get it. If you like, if you like the the one from a year ago, you're probably gonna like this one too. Uh Willamette Valley has like a very similar climate to Burgundy in France, which is the which is said to be the elite burgundy uh Pinot Noirs in the world. Actually, Burgundy is kind of like another word for Pinot Noir. And here you're getting a um here you're getting $11.99 Pinot Noir, a $12 wine that you know should be good, but this is better than good. You know, it's um this is a perfectly respectable Wyomet Valley Pinot Noir at a really, really good price. And you went to Aldi and got it. So uh what else can you ask for? So that's it for me, Domain Dave. I'm hoping some new wines come out because uh the holiday season's coming up and it's been kind of slow. So I want to talk about new ones rather than new vintages, but we'll see what we get, and I'll be talking everybody in a couple of days. And I might mention more about my trip to uh Sonoma, but adios keep it cheap, and I'll be talking to you later. Adios, bye bye.