San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How pandemic sparked a luscious $15 blend
Welcome to Wine of the Week, a series in which Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley recommends a delicious bottle that you should be drinking right now. Recently, she highlighted a baginbox red wine from Ryme Cellars. Check for a new installment online every Wednesday.
Under normal circumstances, Graham Tatomer sells his wines for very fair prices. The Santa Barbara County winemaker is dedicated to Austrianinspired bottlings, and consistently produces some of California’s best Gruner Veltliners and Rieslings made in the racy, precise, dry styles that Austria is known for — mostly under $30.
But while shopping for wine recently, I noticed a Tatomer white at a truly spectacular price: $15. My interest was piqued. I bought it and threw it in the fridge. A blend of Gruner (80%) and Riesling (20%), the wine — which Tatomer calls Hinter de Mauer — smelled like honeysuckle nectar and lemon verbena, with a juicy, deliciously viscous texture. It was layered and complex, and continued to taste fresh as I sipped it over the next couple of days.
Wines this good at prices like this are hard to come by in California, so I called Tatomer to ask how he does it. “This is the COVID cuvee,” he said. Before the pandemic, Tatomer had sold almost all of his wine through restaurants, he explained — a necessity for a brand built on a theme (Austria) that’s not top of mind for many American drinkers. Geeky sommeliers loved to recommend his wines to diners, especially because they’re so foodfriendly, but getting Austrianinspired California wines on a retail shelf was always a challenge. “There aren’t a lot of people coming into a wine shop asking, ‘Got any Santa Barbara dry Riesling?’ ” he said.
So a year ago, when COVID19 shut down restaurants throughout the country, Tatomer panicked. “Restaurants shutting down really felt like my business was shutting down,” he said. He watched as other wineries slashed their bottle prices, but that seemed like a shortterm fix.
Instead of discounting his existing wines, Tatomer decided to make an entirely new one. He took five of the white wines he’d made during the 2019 harvest — Gruners and Rieslings from singlevineyard sites around the Central Coast — and, rather than bottling them individually like he usually does, made a kitchensink blend of them all. He priced the wine “essentially at cost,” he said. The conventional winepricing math suggests that he should be selling the Hinter de Mauer for somewhere between $25$30, but he’s doing it for $15.
The main goal, Tatomer said, is just to get some cash flow going during a time when it otherwise might have been completely static. And the ideal outcome is that the $15 price tag will introduce some people to the other Tatomer wines, the ones closer to the $30 range.
The phrase “Hinter de Mauer” is a local idiom in the small Austrian village of Loiben, where Tatomer lived while working for Weingut Knoll, one of the country’s most famous wineries. Loosely, it translates to “against the wall,” a reference to the walls surrounding Loiben’s terraced vineyards. The grapes that grow closest to the wall often taste the best, in part because they get some of the wall’s radiant heat.
“They’re the besttasting grapes but also the hardest to work,” Tatomer said of Loiben’s walladjacent vines. It felt like an apt metaphor for his business’ survival during the pandemic: being stuck within a confined space, under the most challenging conditions, and making something great out of it.
As exciting as the Hinter de Mauer is for wine drinkers, however, the prospect of making a kitchensink blend and selling it at cost again in 2021 — the prospect, in other words, of restaurants’ wine sales remaining as enervated as they have been — is not very exciting to Tatomer. He wants to go back to making his normal set of wines this year and selling them at real prices. Still, he said, he might try to make another type of $15 wine, if he can find less expensive fruit sources. He’s eyeing other Teutonic white grape varieties that can be sourced for less money than Gruner and Riesling: Sylvaner, maybe, and Pinot Gris.
“Is this going to be around next year?” Tatomer said. “I hope not!”
The wine is available at Castro Village Wine, West Coast Wine & Cheese, K&L, Farmstead Cheeses and Wines, Wine Mine, BiRite and Little Vine. It’s also available directly from the Tatomer Wines website, but must be purchased in 12bottle increments.