THE bottle of Waterstone Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon looks like most high-priced California wines. The glass is heavy and the label is simple, classic, with an etching so small and discreet you can't even tell what it is. The price tag: $25.
But you won't find a Waterstone winery in Napa Valley or anywhere else. It's not a winery in any traditional sense. Unlike most of the appellation-specific California wines you find at this price point, what's inside this bottle is bulk wine.
Bulk wine is leftover wine. It's the wine that, for whatever reason, wasn't used by the winery that produced it. Some of it is finished wine made to the highest standards and aged for a year in French oak barrels. More often it is freshly crushed and fermented wine offered for sale after harvest.
A new breed of bulk wine brands is challenging the category's second-class status by using only top-quality bulk wine. The brands are positioned to stand shoulder to shoulder with more prestigious California wines, perhaps even being mistaken for something they aren't.
Most top California vintners make more wine than they can sell under their own labels. "It's insurance," says Doug Shafer of Shafer Vineyards. "We always crush more grapes than we bottle." It allows the winery to select the best wine lots for its top cuvee.
Some wineries roll their excess wine into second-tier labels. (Harlan Estate inaugurated the Maiden with the 1995 vintage for that reason.) Other wineries sell their excess wine directly to larger wineries to be blended into those wines.
The rest goes to the bulk market. When there's an abundant crop, Shafer says, the bulk market overflows. Shafer typically plans to produce 15% more wine than he needs. With the 2005 vintage, he had 30% more wine than he could use. "We had to sell it off as bulk," he says. "We knew we'd lose money, just trying to get our costs back."
Turning excess wine into marketable brands is the role of \o7negociants\f7. Like \o7negociants\f7 in Burgundy, France, they buy wine made by others to create blends sold under their own brand.
In California, where vineyard holdings are larger and vintners can easily produce their own brands, \o7negociants\f7 work the fringes of the market. And it can be a challenge.
"You can't sell wine without a story for much more than $10," says Glenn Knight, an owner at Wine House in West Los Angeles. A different story is fueling the sales of these new high-end \o7negociant\f7 wines, he says. It's the rumors about the provenance of the wine.
