Dearly Beloved Lodi Red Blend 2024
This is the now-famous Trader Joe’s Day of the Dead Skull wine.
It has been available at Trader Joe’s for about 15 years or more.
This is the wine with the silk-screened, flowered skull!
Over the years, the grapes have been sourced from Mendocino, the Central Coast, and now Lodi.
This wine has been very consistent, a quality sub-$10 wine, year after year.
Dearly Beloved Lodi Red blend is well worth giving a try!
Check us out at http://www.cheapwinefinder.com
or email us at [email protected]
SPEAKER_00
0:01
Hey welcome. It's Domain Dave again. Uh we're doing another Value Price wine review. This is a Trader Joe's $799 wine. This wine has been around since 2008, 2010. I'm not sure what it's the Halloween wine, their Day of the Dead wine. It's the dearly beloved Lodi Red Blend 2024. It's had several names. It's been the dearly beloved Ivy Red. It's the Dearly Beloved Forever Red. It's a few other things. This one is uh let me read the title here. It's very small letters. It is uh Back to the Very Earth. And this one's from Lodi. Uh these wines have had different producers, I believe. Um you know, these store brands, it's not always easy to tell. They've been from Mendoc have been sourced from Mendocino, they've been sourced from the Central Coast. Now they're in Lodi. And they are a pretty good day of the dead wine. I mean, red blends are the kind of the way to go, but people don't always go that way with value price wines because you can take, you know, this so much of this grape, so much of that grape, and if you put them together in a really nice way and a good blender, it's gonna be way better than the sum of its parts. You know, you get a $7 Cabernet Sauvignon, you gotta find a whole bunch of good $7 Cabernet, this is $7.99, Cabernet Sauvignon breaks but grapes, and I don't know the blend here. The blend has changed over the year, but it's usually those kind of grapes, uh, Cabernet Sauvignon. Um Tanat, usually, it's a French blending grape that's it's big in uh South America. Um, I think Uruguay. Uh Merlot, petit serrah, maybe it's from Lodi, so I imagine there's some Zinfadel in here. It's got blackberry flavors and blueberry, and they said some oak, so it's got some oak flavorings somewhere. And blackberry and blueberries probably you're talking about there's gonna be a good portion of um cabernet same and maybe merlot in there too. They'll have those two Bordeaux grapes seem to like each other. I'm gonna take a sip. It's soft and smooth with just enough spice and you know to give it a little bit of character. You don't want it to be completely soft and smooth, you want it to go you want it to go in a different direction here and there. And it does. For $7.99 wine, it's been around forever. And I don't know if it's always been $799, but in this day and age, $7.99 is pretty good. And uh lodi grapes, lodi is a great place for value-priced wines. Uh lodi is in the delta coming from the San Pablo Bay, but it's it's south and east of um of uh uh Napa, I'm like closer to Sacramento. It can get really hot there. Um it can be 100 degrees, even though the um in the in the daytime and it can go down to 50 at night. And in the delta of this uh of the San Pablo Bay, it does pull um fog in. Fog is a saving grace. Fog rolls in in the morning and doesn't burn off to almost noon, so the sun doesn't get to those grapes until noon, so it only has till noon, so whenever it goes dark, if it had all day, it would be a different story for the grapes. Gonna take another sip. This is the perfect um Halloween party wine. I mean, it's cheap, it tastes good, plentiful. Um but it's not just a Halloween party. I mean, it's just you want a red blend, you know, and it's got enough dark flavors, a lot of husky flavors. You know, um for a cool evening, yeah, perfect. I'm I'm it's the last of the 80s in Chicago here today. A little s you know hot and humid, not the best thing for a heavy red wine, but it tastes fine. I'm I'm I'm enjoying it, and plus, you know, I've got the air conditioning up, so not too sweet. Couple different flavors in there, blackberry, blueberry, maybe uh tart uh cranberry, some vanilla, uh bitter chocolate. You know, none of it stands out. Chocolate's not sweet, the vanilla's not too creamy. That's fine. So there you go. This is like I said, the is this the 15th version of it, maybe more? 16th version of this one. In this day and age, with the wines all being shut down and grapes uh binds being pulled up, uh being uh being around for a long time tells you something about the wine. And being able to sell it at a very low price tells you that they can sell it. Because if you don't buy it, price goes up, which doesn't quite work that way. So there you go, it's dearly beloved. I'll say the whole title uh Back to the Very Earth, uh Lodi Red Blend 2024. It's got the label with the decal that has the Day of the Dead um mask where the flowers make up a skull, and it's got the um fall coloring rather than that just that ripe, bright red day of the dead skull. This one's good. I don't know if they're gonna come up the other one, and I don't know who made this one. But for $7.99 for a nice red blend for a Halloween party or just this type of year, not bad. Not bad at all. Uh, I think I've got a Chardonnay coming up in a few days, and then I'm heading out to uh Sonoma. Uh maybe do some podcasts out there or at least record some. But I'll talk to you uh in a week or so. Adios, bye bye.
