Tasting the Future

Want a fun way to save money on wine?  Look to the future.
Some wineries will let you buy wine while it is still in the barrel and in so doing, you can save a bundle off of market price.
“In Wine Country” recently visited Retzlaff Estate Wines in the Livermore Valley. Retzlaff is a certified organic winery. They’ve making small lots of estate-produced wines from Sauvignon Blanc to Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet for more than 25 years. What sets Retzlaff apart from many other California wineries, is that at Retzlaff you can buy wine futures. That is, you can stop in anytime and do a barrel tasting, if you like what you’ve tasted, you can buy a case of that wine sometimes years before it is bottled.
Wine futures, or wine sold “en primeur,” have been commonplace in Bordeaux, France for centuries.  Most wine houses in Bordeaux offer futures tastings to journalists, merchants and importers in March and April and the results help to set the wine price for that particular vintage. For wine enthusiasts, buying
“en primeur” guarantees you will get a quantity of a popular wine and if it is a good year, in theory you’ll get it cheaper than the market price. For wine producers, it means they have money coming in to the winery to offset production costs, even while the wine is sitting in the barrel. For high rollers buying in Bordeaux, wine futures can be a high stakes endeavor. At Retzlaff in Livermore, it is decidedly more low-key.
The day we visited, I tasted a Cabernet-Merlot blend that was half way through its two-year barrel aging process. Robert Taylor, the owner and winemaker at Retzlaff explained how I could buy the wine now and pick it up in another year when it is bottled.  By committing early, I could save up to 30% off the market price.
Of course, I wondered how you could predict the taste of the finished product if you are sampling wine from the barrel a year or so before it is bottled? For an untrained palate such as mine, Robert says you look for flavor profiles. In the case of the Cabernet-Merlot blend, you’d look for a deep red or purple color, a prominent fruit flavor, and enough tannins to give the wine some structure. Barrel wines are likely more tannic or tighter than you might be used to, but the idea is that they will evolve and soften as they age.  The advantage of buying a wine future at Retzlaff is that with estate grown grapes, the wines are made from the same vines, grown in the same soil and the same basic conditions year after year. That means the flavor profile will be fairly consistent vintage to vintage. Retzlaff sells about half its wine through futures and thanks its futures fans with not only great wine, but also an annual July 4th barbecue at the winery. You can learn more about the program at www.retzlaffwinery.com
Indeed it helps to know a particular wine before you commit to buying a vintage in wine futures. If you have a wine that is your go-to wine for special occasions or just general consumption, check and see if you can buy it as a wine future. For my husband and me, Ridge Monte Bello is our favorite special occasion wine and lucky for us, you can buy it as a wine future. We celebrated the birth of each of our four children with a bottle of Ridge Monte Bello right in the hospital. In truth, we shared little more than a toast and a few precious sips out of paper cups each time, but as traditions go, it was delicious!  Ridge calls their futures program the Monte Bello Collector club, and in essence you commit to buying a certain number of bottles of Monte Bello a year (limit six per customer) and you get a savings off the market price. If you enrolled now, you would start with the 2008 vintage, which would not ship until March of 2011 (www.ridgewine.com).
Of course, Retzlaff and Ridge aren’t the only wineries offering wine futures, Nickel & Nickel winery and Long Meadow Ranch in Napa Valley come to mind, but the practice is not nearly as common as it is in Europe.  However, interest in California wine futures may be growing. The barrel futures portion of the Napa Valley Wine Auction is always an enormous draw and a huge moneymaker for the auction, and with good reason. After all, who wouldn’t want a taste of the future?

Mary Babbitt is the host of NBC11’s In Wine Country which airs on Sundays at 8:30 p.m. For more information about Mary, or about the products and people featured in her column, visit www.inwinecountry.com.