Cab Bro is Back
And he shops at Costco
I was at a dinner party recently and it’s a wine-centric crowd. We are all contemporaries, all solidly Gen X. Some people I know better than others, but there wasn’t anyone there from my high school, all later in life. Good palates, no one in the group is trying to advocate for some $5 wines “that no one knows about” and generally, no one brings a trophy or talks about them. Generally.
I stepped in on a conversation with a couple of the guys:
Cab Bro, “Have you ever had M.Étain? You know, Scarecrow? Well, I couldn’t believe the Somm didn’t know what I was talking about. This was a Michelin restaurant. Before we ordered dinner, I actually went back up to my hotel to get a bottle to have at dinner.”
Cab Bro, “Well after all that, I gave the Somm a taste of the M.Étain, I mean it’s Scarecrow! Anyway after all that I get the bill and this guy, this “Somm,” charged me for corkage. Can you believe that? He’s never heard of this wine, I give him a taste, and he still charges me corkage. Never going back.”
M.Étain runs $299 a bottle at K&L. Not hard to find, if you have the money it can be obtained this week from a retailer in the Bay Area or LA.
Additionally, I looked up the wine list at the restaurant he dined at, no M.Étain or Scarecrow. The wine list has 2+pages of Napa Cabernet, including verticals of Opus, Dominus, Matthiasson, Heitz, and Shafer. Big Cab from CA is well represented. I’m willing to bet the Somm most certainly has heard of M.Étain and Scarecrow considering the breadth and depth of the list.
After the M.Étain story wraps up, I ask Cab Bro, “What did you bring tonight?”
Cab Bro, “You shop at Costco right? Well, basically, I have Costco do all my wine buying for me. I mean their pricing is always the best because they get deals no one else gets. No sales people bugging you. All the wines are rated, if it’s 92 points or better and more than $30, Costco picks winners, as long as it isn’t foreign. Both the Cabs I brought tonight are from Napa, they’re like $50-60.”
To be completely fair, both wines Cab Bro brought that night were flawless examples of solid winemaking by 2 different Napa wineries who produce a second label in the more modern style, a little more extracted, good slug of oak, and a touch of residual sugar, not much, just enough for a little back palate oomph.
Here’s the thing…Cab Bro’s Costco logic is mostly sound. Ratings work, the pricing beats nearly every bottle shop, and they know what moves with their customers. Repeatable, easy, makes him happy. Yet this is the same guy who keeps M.Étain in his hotel room and lectures sommeliers about Scarecrow.
The wines he brought were good, though.
Cab Bro sounds like a self-important pr!ck. But it's worth pointing out that corkage is entirely up to the business and had your friend bothered to ask he would not have been surprised being required to pay the fee. Which was... how much? The last fancy-ass restaurant I visited (a few months ago) wanted $50 corkage per bottle! I ordered a couple of wines by the glass instead.
We have Burgundy Bros in our Wine Discord - a group I joined to have an LA social group around wine, but these guys consistently keep the conversation 90% about Burgundy and Napa, whatever the hot collectible labels are, and it's soooooooo booooooooring. They work in tech and only talk in cases, rarely single bottles, no one else can even afford that shit, even when they're "reasonably priced" so it's like why are they even sharing this with the group?
We did a unique/weird wine gathering this past weekend, annd all the Burgundy Bros were missing. And everyone had a wildly great time, with many members admitting something along the lines of: "Don't get me wrong, Burgundy and Bordeaux and Napa are all great, but when that's all we're drinking it's a little boring?"