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Wine Review: 90 Plus Cellars Lot 17, 2007, Merlot, Napa Valley

90 Plus Cellars is a relative new comer to the negociant business.  Their niche is centered on buying up the excess finished wines which have scored 90 points or more, and reselling them at a discount under their own label.  Which brings us to…

90+ Cellars Merlot (Lot 17)

Blend: 81% Merlot 13% Cabernet Sauvignon, 6% Cabernet Franc

Aging: 12 months in 1/3 New French Oak

The wine retails for $13.99.  It was made from 100% Napa fruit.  That is a good start in my books.  I popped the cork, and let it breathe in the decanter for an hour.

On the nose I detected black currants and subtle oak.

The palate revealed black cherries and at first it was a pretty straight forward wine.  Nothing special, nothing off putting, just okay.  I let it breathe more.  It was worth the wait.  After about 3 hours the richness  opened up revealing plummy tannins.  It reminded me a little of the Bordeaux style, especially later on.  The Rich chewy and young tannins were nice but not overpowering.  At first I thought this was more of a pasta Merlot, but later on  it could have paired well with meats aswell.

The verdict:  A good value at $14.  The wine benefits from a little patience and decanting

This wine was received as a sample

Check out my interview with 90 Plus Cellars here

Visit 90 Plus Cellars website here

Interview with Kevin Mehra, 90+ Cellars, Latitude Beverage Company

This is an interview I conducted through email with Kevin Mehra of 90+ cellars.

WWJ: How long has 90+ cellars been in business? Where is the company based?

Kevin Mehra: The company Latitude Beverage has been in business since 2007 but we launched Ninety+ Cellars August of 2009 and it has quickly gained customer acceptance, we have already shipped just over 19,000 cases. The company is based in Boston MA.

WWJ: How does 90+ cellars ensure that the wine they originally sampled is the wine that they receive?  I have heard of other Negociants having to “send the wine right back to China, where it came from” so to speak.

Kevin: A few things:

1.       We deal with wineries that have a reputation already and can be trusted.

2.       We also send every wine into a lab for a chemical analysis on the wine to check for any impurities.

3.       When we taste a wine and decide to buy it we keep a sample of the wine as the standard, when the final Ninety+ bottle arrives we sample it against the standard to confirm it is the same wine. If the wine passes we pay the remaining balance due to the winery.

WWJ: How many releases has 90+ cellars released, how many current releases are there?  What would you say are some of the best values?

Kevin: We are excited to be bottling lot 20 Reserve Pinot Noir from Sonoma Coast this week and just approved an Oregon Pinot Gris which would be lot 21. The best values would be the wines that sold out the quickest which would be lot 15 Pinot Noir from Carneros, it was a phenomenal wine from a producer that would retail it for around $35, our partner retailers sold that same wine for $15, and we sold out of 2,400 cases in 2 weeks. Other wines that have become very popular that we have partnered with the wineries to make extended lots and buy the next vintages on the wines are lot 2 Sauv Blanc and lot 7 malbec, which are $10 a bottle retail and are consistently our top selling wines.

WWJ: Do you reveal where the wines originally came from or did you have to sign NDA’s?

Kevin: No we do not reveal where the wines are coming from and do sign NDA’s if required.

WWJ: There is a lot of talk about “the coming carnage in the California wine Industry” as Alder Yarrow at Vinography puts it.  Basically there is a wine glut, and now there are hundreds of California wineries facing foreclosure.  This provides opportunities for Negociants such as yourself, but how are you going to sort through the hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of cases of unsold vintages some dating back to 2004?  how do you see this cataclysmic re-organization playing out?

Kevin: I believe that things will settle down this year with consumer’s slowly moving back up to the luxury wines and wineries with luxury and trustworthy brands will be back on track. For us I am confident with our relationships with wineries in California and around the world there will always be an opportunity to buy excess wine from each vintage. We represent a very profitable part of their business, they get paid within 30 days and they don’t have to budget any commission or marketing dollars on selling the wine. Many wineries may have over-reacted to the down turn and have laid off half or all of their sales staff which I think is a mistake, in hard times you need to work harder to service your customers. The biggest problem for wineries is the technology in vineyards has improved so much that yields are much higher, I think it’s the increased yields that in the future will be the cause of the wine glut.

WWJ: The wines you purchase, are they back blended?  Do you only buy finished bottling blends, or do you also buy mixing components and rework them yourselves, as some negociants do?
Kevin: No we don’t do any back blending we currently only buy finished wines or clean skins.

90+ cellars website

Rise of an American Wine Negociant

The Oxford Companion to wine defines a Negociant as “a wine merchant who assembles the produce of smaller growers and wine makers and sells the result under its own name.”

According to the Wine Curmudgeon, this approach is a centuries old tradition that began in the French region of Burgundy.  Some well-known negociants you might have heard of: Louis Jadot, George Duboeuf?

During the recent economic recession, I picked up a part-time job selling wine nights and weekends for one such negociant.  The merchant is Cameron Hughes Wine Company.  The way the company works, is they track down orphaned mixing components from premium and ultra premium producers and retool them, and or they buy actual bottling blends.  Cameron’s family background is in the liquor and wine business, and so he knows a thing or two about over production in the wine industry.  He negotiates  deals with producers and a big part of the deal is that the producer is to remain anonymous.  The producers have expensive brand names to protect and so what Cameron does is offer something called the “Cameron Confidential”.  He gives you just enough information for you to speculate, but not enough to reveal the source.   Sometimes these deals can take months to come together, sometimes the deal never materializes and sometimes a deal just falls right in his lap.  Each deal that Cameron completes is given a “Lot’ number.  It’s the easiest way to track which deal is which.   I am reminded of the story of Lot 84.  According to “Cameron Confidential” This deal came to him through his banker!  His own banker had financed the original deal on the winery and now that the partnership was being split and the property being sold, he had a tip.  The new owner was not interested in running vineyard, or keeping the brand, he just wanted the Mount Veeder property for the view.  So within a couple of hours Cameron had his winemaker knocking on their door to buy all the remaining inventory.  The result is 2,400 cases of wine that retailed between $60-$80 through their tasting room and mailing list only, being sold by Cameron for $19! The 2 prior vintages received 92 and 93 point ratings. I had a chance to pick up a half dozen bottles of this wine, and now that they are all gone, I am wishing I had bought more.

With the recent recession, there has been a lot more wine for Cameron to choose from.  The recession came on so fast that most wineries had little time to adjust their production, and rather than lower their price to move product, they are willing to part with some of their juice.  In fact, some places have parted with half or entire vintages.  Nowadays Cameron is  not only buying the remaining mixing components,  he is  also picking up finished bottling blends, the exact same stuff that these producers are selling for $95+.

Have you ever heard of a 90 point Stag’s Leap District Cabernet Sauvignon for $20?  see Lot 100. How about a 90 point Chalk Hill Sonoma Cabernet for $16? see Lot 140 How about a 92 point Diamond Mountain Cab for $22?? See Lot 146 You get the point: Extreme value.

Cameron Hughes Wine was rated by Inc magazine as the 18th fastest growing company of 2008, ranked #2 out of the top 100 San Fransisco-Oakland-Freemont area businesses and ranked #3 in the top food and wine businesses overall!

Visit Cameron Hughes Wines website here