The Under $20 A Bottle Wine Thread:

I like my Chards buttery, toasty and smooth but I have had some good crisp, dry ones too. Too much oak seems to get in the way of the flavor of a lot of wines to me. I wish I knew what made a wine taste the way I like it when I find one and then be able to reliably translate that to other wines.
They seem so hit and miss to me. Label, year, region, winemaker, nothing seems to be a total indicator of what you are going to get.
What really pisses me off is when one year a particular wine is great and the next year it is a failure but the winery tries to pass it off for the same price anyway. I won't name names but this tells me something about the winery. I know one winery that will open the bottles and reblend this kind of stuff into a cheap table wine if it doesn't sell.

[TheRiddick]

Originally Posted by BC-Axeman

I like my Chards buttery, toasty and smooth but I have had some good crisp, dry ones too. Too much oak seems to get in the way of the flavor of a lot of wines to me. I wish I knew what made a wine taste the way I like it when I find one and then be able to reliably translate that to other wines.
They seem so hit and miss to me. Label, year, region, winemaker, nothing seems to be a total indicator of what you are going to get.
What really pisses me off is when one year a particular wine is great and the next year it is a failure but the winery tries to pass it off for the same price anyway. I won't name names but this tells me something about the winery. I know one winery that will open the bottles and reblend this kind of stuff into a cheap table wine if it doesn't sell.

Every vintage is different, as you pointed out. Best wineries out there come as close to prior vintages as it gets, others don't. Champagne and Cognac houses actually depend on this and have highly paid people who assemble the final blends so that they are almost identical from release to release to keep the "house style".

Main reason I keep telling people that cigars are pretty similar and what one smoked from a box made 3 years ago may be different than from a box made this year no matter how you cut it. Consistency year to year is the hallmark of great producers. The process is not that much dissimilar when one dissects it, only one works with grapes and another with tobacco leaves.

Try that Toasted Head, its all over the place in Bay Area. I think you'll like it.