We’re sure you’ll like the price/value ratio of Traveling Vineyard wines. We were the first company confident enough in our selection process to offer the entire inventory “in a try before you buy” format via our in home wine tasting education program – The Traveling Vineyard. True, some wines are cheaper, some wines are occasionally better, but we always deliver optimum quality for your wine dollar. With TTV you don’t pay for the scads of overhead and advertising built into the cost of every general market wine. Before our wines are finished to be bottled they’ve been blind tasted against similar types in the same price ranges, and always prove to be among the best. We earn the “non-in-house” awards and reviews to prove it, too.
To further back our claims, in recent years a certain segment of the general market keyed towards the “smarter buyer” has emerged – the 3 Thieves line, the Cameron Hughes wines and the like – whose whole spiel re: their approach is essentially what we’ve done for years. We work with the vintners and winemakers in each region of production. We do not buy from wholesalers and importers.
The easiest task for us is to find, buy, then bottle an existing wine for ourselves. Recent Chilean example 09 Kuri, Sauvignon Blanc, pushed all Sauvignons from not only Chile, but the US (including Lake County and the Napa Valley), Argentina, Uruguay, France (the Loire Valley, Bordeaux and the Midi), Northern Italy, the Eastern Bloc and South Africa right off of the blind tastings tables for value for your wine dollar.
The 08 Scotto, Chardonnay Marsanne is an example of us tweaking an existing wine. In our exclusive-to-TTV blend, we eliminated the Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc from Scotto’s general market bottling, which allows the varietals on the label to sing more. Not only did we arrive at a unique-to-us wine, our wine is a more faithful expression of the blend’s components, is prettier, and, on a practical note, shows better in our unique in-home tastings.
If we can’t find an existing wine or tweak a bottle blend for the better, we assemble the wine ourselves. This is our most difficult problem, requiring not just copious tasting notes, but enlisting a commitment from the producing vintner and winemaker to build a wine for us with the best possible price/value ratio. We only work with wineries that pride themselves in over-delivering. Tanglerose, Backyard Red is a prime example. We coined the term “Backyard Red” years ago, when working on red field blends, knowing that each new field blend bottled would be comprised of different components. We wanted a proprietary wine (not label) name that would allow for perpetually changing blend elements that was easy-to-remember, connoting accessibility without elitism. The current Backyard Red started out to be a Sangiovese, aiming for that good Chianti with spaghetti and meatballs comfort food vibe, but we had so many small amounts of undervalued components to work with to potentially make the wine better – here the “spice rack” was huge- that there’s Primitivo, Barbera and Merlot in the blend. Since there were multiple vintages of some of these components, we used what we felt were the best ones in each case, yielding a non-vintage wine because it cannot be labeled with multiple vintages.
What other US wine sellers blind taste literally everything available before they choose their offerings, tweak already-existing wines for the better, or totally make the wines themselves if necessary? Then, offer you a chance to sample the wines free at a tasting, essentially bringing the tasting room to you?
Only the one and only original in home wine tasting company The Traveling Vineyard, that’s who!
Cheers – Rick
The Chief Grape Stomper at The Traveling Vineyard
