2007 TRÉ Cellars California Syrah

I Just Don’t Know Why Anyone Would Drink This

I get supermarket wine, I really do.

Not everyone lives near a wine shop. Not everyone wants to bother with an additional trip to a wine shop to buy their wine. Many people just drink wine, and all they want to do is drink something familiar and inoffensive that won’t break the bank.

I was sent several bottles of an admittedly supermarket-grade wine (it was right there in their literature) to review here on Notes. One was a chardonnay that really pleasantly surprised me, and one was a cabernet sauvignon I couldn’t find much to say good things about.

There are two more bottles. This is one of them. It is far, far more the latter than the former.

The 2007 TRÉ Cellars California Syrah is the TRÉ in the pink label. Its grapes come from some of the most prestigious growing regions across California. The TRÉ Cellars motto is “Three generations of winemakers. Three brothers continuing the family legacy. Three unique characters, sharing a common vision, To create the perfect wine to be enjoyed as ‘One of Life’s Simple Pleasures.’”

None of this tells you anything about what’s in the bottle, of course.

In the glass, the syrah is a dark maroon red at its core, with lightening, pinker-but-still-red edges. The nose offers some interesting aromas, including strawberry, stewed cherry, and red apple skin. Not something I’m writing home about, but the nose certainly had me in the mood for a fruit-forward, young-drinking, quality wine.

Oops.

The wine is medium-to-full bodied, with harsh, unforgiving tannins and a hint of raspberry. But that’s not the main flavor note. It’s not what I walked away from still tasting, still thinking about in this wine. No no, the fruit is there—I just question whether anyone will know when they taste the note that dominated the bouquet on the palate. What aroma-slash-flavor is this, you ask?

Pen ink.

Yeah. Pen ink. A little metallic, a bit oddly minty, the 2007 TRÉ Cellars California Syrah tastes like pen ink. I guess I can’t judge people if they like this—but I certainly wouldn’t be able to understand them.

Verdict: sub-70/100

(full disclosure: I was sent this bottle as a press sample from Folsom & Associates)

2007 TRE Cellars California Syrah

2007 TRE Cellars California Syrah

2009 Salmon Creek California Chardonnay

Dredging Salmon Creek To Find A Chardonnay

This is the kind of wine that gets me in trouble.

Not because it’s difficult to review, or because it’s getting a particular score (good, bad, or mediocre), or because a friend makes it or I like the people at the winery, or anything like that.

This is going to make me look like a snob.

This is the kind of wine that if you ask people at a wine shop, they not only won’t have it (it’s primarily sold at restaurants), but they may give you the stinkeye if you say you like it. I’m not here to do that. I still believe to each their own, and that just because I don’t like the wine doesn’t mean someone else can’t. I still believe that. But this is really crappy wine.

The 2009 Salmon Creek California Chardonnay (they also make a more regionally-specific Napa Valley chard, but this is not that) starts off just fine, it glows ever-so-faintly in the glass, a pretty light yellow straw. On the nose is some red apple (not nearly as bright and clean-smelling as a green apple note would be) and some wood.

Did I mean “oak”? No, interrupting reader, I did not. I meant “wood.”

The wine is medium-bodied and shows off an astonishingly high amount of heat for a wine that clocks in at 12.5%. There’s no balance here. What fruit notes are here are very tart apple, and not much else. More wood notes (still doesn’t come off like “oak” to me, really).

All in all, blecch.

Verdict: C-

2009 Salmon Creek California Chardonnay

2009 Salmon Creek California Chardonnay

Better Than Jug Wine

2007 Tre Cellars California Cabernet Sauvignon

Tre Cellars is the supermarket-bound, $10-price-point wine label of Guglielmo Winery, in Morgan Hill, CA. Not a ton of wine is made in the Santa Clara Valley home of Guglielmo, certainly not as much as in the Napa and Sonoma valleys to the north, nor the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south.

Even Guglielmo’s premier label, Guglielmo Private Reserve features just three wines (Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, and Rosatello) that are marked as “estate bottled & grown,” leading one to the natural conclusion that Guglielmo buys a lot of grapes from grape growers, and is primarily a winemaking outfit. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

However, wine is as much about where it’s from as what’s in its bottle. In order for an American wine to use an AVA designation on the label, 85% of the grapes in the wine must have come from that AVA. Which is why when I see a label name its home as simply “California,” I get just a little nervous. What’s in the bottle? Cabernet Sauvignon grown in the cool heights of Howell Mountain above the Napa Valley is going to be very different from Cabernet Sauvignon grown in the sunbaked fields of Lodi. Et cetera.

Not surprisingly, this wine has very little character. It says very little about itself. The color of the wine is a bit tawny in the glass, especially around the edges, but it does get nice and ruby red near the very core. The nose is a bit hot, but features some black fruit notes, and a nice spice note, like cinnamon, that, while I don’t normally attribute such an aroma to Cab Sauv, was pleasant.

The wine is medium-bodied, but lacks any complexity whatsoever. Some very basic red fruit spars with some alcoholic heat (a bit surprising considering the wine clocks in at a modest 12.5% ABV), and there isn’t much else there.

That having been said, the wine is $9.95. It’s far superior to jug wine and lots of other California supermarket wines. It’s just not something I would choose to drink or can recommend.

Verdict: C-

(full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample from Folsom & Associates)

2007 Tre Cellars California Cabernet Sauvignon

2007 Tre Cellars California Cabernet Sauvignon