K&L Wines

I paid a visit to the ne K&L Wines shop on Vine near Sunset yesterday. K&L is my favorite wine shop in San Francisco, so I'm thrilled that they have a Los Angeles store now. They have the rare and expensive wines, but by and large are a warehouse sized shop with a focus on well selected mid and low priced wines. To make a long story short, this is a place where you can find $10 wine that tastes like what most would consider $20 wine. It's also a place where if you start mentioning wines you've liked from them in the past, the clerks are extremely helpful in helping you find something new you'll love.

The big news from this visit: we've found our wedding wine! Root:1 Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile. The qualities are like that of a California Cabernet Sauvignon or Zinfandel: big full mouthfeel, fruity, faint tannins, easy to drink. The clerk said Chilean winemakers realize their target audience is Americans (as opposed to European), so they tend to build a very Californian flavor profile at a fraction of the cost. We thought it would be a nice crowd pleaser. Our original choice was Seghesio Sonoma County Zinfandel, but at half the price Root:1 wins.

K&L will store whatever wine we buy until the wedding and deliver it the Friday before for $10! This is a huge bonus for me, since most wine shops are unwilling to store orders for that long. Being able to store this far in advance means I cantake advantage of special finds like Root:1 and add to my order as I find things I like. It also means one less thing to worry about in the 30 days leading up to the wedding. I have one prosecco (sparkling wine) in the fridge from K&L, and sometime soon I'll go in to find a white. Then I'll be all done!

Trivia: this wine gets its names because the root from its vineyard are the original stock that was brought from France however many years ago. Because Chile is so geographically isolated, grapevine pests and diseases never plagued the region, and no grafting of new vines to old roots was ever necessary. So in fact, some stock that is now extinct or rare in France and California is still thriving in Chile. Results? Cheap old vine wine. Okay, that and the fact that labor there is probably 25 cents an hour. But South America really does produce several wine grapes that are rare or extinct elsewhere.