In Friday's Wall Street Journal, wine writers Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher wrote about ordering wine in restaurants that you can't buy in a shop (subscription required). In particular, they highlighted one of our favorite wines, Navarro Gewurztraminer:
Consider Navarro Vineyards Gewürztraminer. We love the spicy, unique taste of Gewürz, and Navarro routinely makes one of America's best. We celebrated our daughter Media's 18th birthday at New York's Le Cirque restaurant last month. The wine list was huge and filled with some reasonably priced wines and a lot of famous wines that cost thousands of dollars. Amid all of these, Dottie spied Navarro's 2004 Gewürz for $55, the best buy on the list. We ordered it to go with the seafood-heavy tasting menu Media selected, and it was excellent -- dry, spicy and filled with personality. We felt so lucky to have it because we knew that we'd rarely see it in a store.Deborah Cahn, who owns Navarro with her husband, Ted Bennett, says the winery makes about 1,900 cases of the Gewürz. Most is sold directly from the winery to consumers, and about 500 cases go to restaurants. The winery doesn't sell to retailers (except a tiny amount to a few old friends). Why? "I think all of our wines show better with food. They are meant to have with a meal. So for us, selling to restaurants that we like to eat in is almost a form of advertising, because it introduces the wine to people who otherwise wouldn't have a chance to come to the Anderson Valley to try our wines." By the way, the Gewürz sells for $18 at the winery, which means the markup at Le Cirque was about three times retail. But we're not complaining. It's sure cheaper than a plane ticket to California.
