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Well kids, I’m getting tired of hanging out on the street corner, selling my hairy love pucker so I can afford the kind of Pinot Noir I’ve acquired a taste for. God damn, but trends fuck up the price of the things you love. Pinot’s the Brangelina of today’s wine media, more loved by connoisseurs and writers than Britney loves a coke binge. More loved than Bush loves the word Nuke-u-lar. As such, it seems damn near impossible to find any half-decent Pinots under $20/bottle.

Some Consistently Tasty Pinots Under or Around $20 (generally vintage independent):
• Cloudline (our favorite), Willamette Valley
• Deloach, Russian River
• Acacia, Carneros
• MacMurray, Sonoma Coast
• Te Kairanga, New Zealand
• Bogle

So recently I began a quest. A noble quest, requiring all my courage, all my patience; a quest that requires steady hands and a clear head, firm resolve, testicles of iron and tastebuds of steel: I went to Save Mart looking for wine.

First off, I hate this store.

Take every inbred sonofabitch in my hometown, throw them into a flourescent-lit gymnasium with a handful of convicts and a couple of crackheads, and you’ve got yourselves our Save Mart. We live in a town with some great locally-owned grocery store choices, along with your run-of-the-mill healthfood stores and a Trader Joes, and I’ve never encountered a really good reason, other than sheer laziness, to go to the Save Mart here. But now I have. Like the meth-heads looking for Sudafed and the quintuple-chinned lovers of Grocery Store Brand doughnuts, my addiction led me to Save Mart.

I must confess, I also hit up Cost Plus, which is like the Pseudo-Hippie Save Mart in my town.. making it one step better than the meth-head Save Mart, in my book at least.

And I found some real winners that I can almost kinda afford to drink:

First off, I have to qualify this by saying that I like Russian River/Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. A LOT. I’m not a fan of really one-dimensional fruity Pinots. Well, to say “not a fan” would be pretty misleading. I fucking love fruity Pinots, but I love dirty, more complex, layered Pinots even more. I like “head case Pinots” who can’t decide what they want from their life in my mouth. One-dimensional Pinots feel like a bit of a disappointment to me, when I go into it thinking “alright I get to drink a Pinot tonight” and come away saying “coulda been a watery Cab.” Still, it’s like thinking you’re going to get a hum job and only getting a hand job– you win anyway, just not with the same measure of style.

But I digress.

So the first bottle I tore into was a 2004 Acacia Carneros Pinot Noir. At $17.99, it carried with it all the characteristics I love in a Pinot, and had what I call a Classic Pinot Nose– the kind of nose that even a non-wino can pick apart from any other wine varietal. It was nice and friendly and balanced, had some good layers to it and I drank the whole bottle by myself the very night I opened it. So consider the source here. I’m gonna give it a 90 straight-up and then deduct 10 because I got wine up my nose from swirling and sniffing too frequently.

My favorite of the lot was a MacMurray 2005 Sonoma Coast Pinot. At $19.99 it was a steal– you could basically empty out a bottle of $50 Russian River Pinot, drink that, refill the empty bottle with this stuff and then feed that to your dinner party and no one would even blink. Nuanced, rich, food-friendly and really balanced with cloves, cola and some boot leather thrown in for good measure. 95 points for being worth more than they sell it for.

Shit. I just realized that I classified a $20 wine as “a steal”. I’m going to hell in a handbasket. I’m gonna have to start robbing banks. Shit. What happened to 2-Buck-Chuck being a steal? OK, reduce that MacMurray score by 20 for making me realize that I’m turning into a snobby ass.

OK, back on topic. I wasn’t all that fired up by the Cambria Pinot Julia’s Vineyard from Santa Maria. I wish I hadn’t drank it all right away though, because I’ve got no reference as I write this review. Usually I’m drunk as a skunk when writing these… but this time I’m doing it after the fact (so if this review sucks, now you know why). Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. I don’t remember anything distinctive about this, but I drank it and I enjoyed it, so it’s not so bad for the money ($19.99), though it was nothing when compared to the MacMurray. So let’s give it an 85 then deduct 5 because it ought to be $5 cheaper than the MacMurray.

Now, at Cost Plus you’ve got this great assortment of New Zealand Pinots, which I will save for another bargain Pinot review. But I will say this: you won’t be disappointed by Te Kairanga, and it won’t leave you fellating anyone for the money to buy more.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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