Coppola Crapola

Coppola Crapola

I’m no wine snob. Most of the bottles I pick up fall within a few bucks of $15, but even my relatively low standards were shaken last night when I uncorked a 2004 Coppola Black Label Claret that The Wife procured (I'm guessing at Costco).

Flat, slightly metallic, with notes of wet dish towel and old marshmallows, this wine (and I use this term generously) fell on the palate with a taste-deadening thud. I drank it with meat, cheese and bread, straining to detect a spark of something even marginally pleasing…but… nothing.

I have no idea what The Wife paid for this entirely uneventful and uninteresting beverage, but it was too much.

I have to say, that was pretty much my experience at the winery itself last March. Beautiful winery, but the product was barely drinkable. Not always offensive, but in no way enjoyable.

This wine definitely gets wide distribution (Cost Plus, etc.), and as I recall is in the mid range (double digits, but below $20), so it has no excuse to be less that very nice.

Any chance it was a bad, or badly stored, bottle? Too much hot/cold oscillation in the storage room could certainly deaden whatever virtues it might have had.

I've never had any of the Coppola wines, so for all I know, what you tasted was exemplary of the house style. I merely offer a shred hope that this highly capitalized celeb. winery hasn't devoted all those resources to deliberately, or even fecklessly producing the product you describe by the tens of thousands liters.

mrbarolo wrote:Any chance it was a bad, or badly stored, bottle? Too much hot/cold oscillation in the storage room could certainly deaden whatever virtues it might have had.

That is a possibility, of course, though we kept it in the cellar for maybe 30 days before drinking, so if it was mishandled, it probably wasn't on our end.

That said, over the past year I have had maybe four bottles from this vinter, and none could be described as "very good" -- this bottle, however, was particularly vacant of any of the modest virtues I associate with basic, decent table wine.

Old marshmallows?

mrbarolo wrote:Any chance it was a bad, or badly stored, bottle? Too much hot/cold oscillation in the storage room could certainly deaden whatever virtues it might have had.

Even if the bottle Hammond had was, I kinda doubt they'd be that careless at the winery itself. I just remember everything being either flat or harsh, which are generally not words you want springing to mind when tasting wine.

And the worst part about it is that this crappy wine is the reason we had to sit through Godfather III.



Best,
Michael

A bit of history. Some time ago Coppola bought several parcels, over time, in Napa, of what had been the Inglenook winery. Ingelnook was a goundbreaking high quality wine maker in the early 1900s that took a nose dive mid-century. Coppola stared making high quality Napa wines there under the Neibaum-Coppola name. Some time ago he took his name off, and those wines are now under the Rubicon label.

Coppola also began his inexpensive table wine line, which is not, of course, made from Napa grapes. He has or is soon moving that operation to a property in Sonoma.

The Napa propery is a beautiful chateaux, and one must admire him for reuniting this historical vinyard. He clearly has a real love of wine. It's been years since I tasted those wines during a visit, so I can't comment on quality. The quality of his table wine line is a whole other kettle of grapes, apparently.

Jonah

I think I've only tried one of the "diamond" label Coppola wines a couple of times, but I used to try to buy the cheaper line of red or white whenever I saw them on sale, and I liked them. Not enough to hunt them out when not on sale, but enough to snag a few bottles on sale.

David Hammond wrote:Coppola Crapola
Flat, slightly metallic, with notes of wet dish towel and old marshmallows, this wine (and I use this term generously) fell on the palate with a taste-deadening thud.

Sounds like you've been using the random tasting note generator.

Fillay

fillay wrote:

David Hammond wrote:Coppola Crapola
Flat, slightly metallic, with notes of wet dish towel and old marshmallows, this wine (and I use this term generously) fell on the palate with a taste-deadening thud.

Sounds like you've been using the random tasting note generator.

Fillay

Yes, I have, but not the one you linked to. I call mine "my brain."

David Hammond wrote:
Yes, I have, but not the one you linked to. I call mine "my brain."

God, the terror - to think I have been in contact with the spawn of Hammond's brain (where the heck is the emoticoin for screaming terror???). HELP ME.

Celebrity wines probably fall into the same class as resort restaurants - they are just as good as they need to be. Or to put it differently, when you take out the money that goes to the celeb for the name, there is less to spend on grapes and winemaking. The one exception in my experience has been some of Greg Norman's wines (some may remember he once was a famous golfer), but I have not tried them for a while.

Seems to me that Bill Daley did a tasting of celeb wines a while back, and the Soprano wife's wines (whatever her name is) rated okay, too. Or maybe it was the WSJ column.

I know Fess Parker is supposed to be crap. Anyone else have any celeb wines to report on, good or bad?

I recall having a nice one from Greg Norman's Australian vineyard (he's got California grapes too), and I want to say it was a shiraz-cabernet blend. I thought it was quite good, although I should qualify my statements by saying I used to be a big Greg Norman (golf) fan back then. It's like if Michael Jordan started making wine, I'm sure I'd be saying they're all world-class, top-notch.

dicksond wrote:Celebrity wines probably fall into the same class as resort restaurants - they are just as good as they need to be. Or to put it differently, when you take out the money that goes to the celeb for the name, there is less to spend on grapes and winemaking.

I think there's a bit more nuance to it than that. Some celebs actually own vineyards themselves (or with partners) to produce their own wines. No company went out to pay them the rights to slap their name on a bottle. These are just famous people with some money and a love for wine. I'd hope they'd be able to put out a decent product. Coppola and Gerard Depardieu are probably the best examples of this type.

(I had mistakenly thought Lorraine Bracco was in the same situation since the wine is from Bracco Estates in Italy--but I was wrong).

Other celebs just slap their name on an existing label. Mike Ditka and Mick Fleetwood come to mind.

Best,
Michael

dicksond wrote:Celebrity wines probably fall into the same class as resort restaurants - they are just as good as they need to be. Or to put it differently, when you take out the money that goes to the celeb for the name, there is less to spend on grapes and winemaking.

Although in the case of Francis Coppola and Fess Parker, they own the vineyards and so are not just licensing their names to some third party (as I assume happened in Carmella's case).

I have a buddy who works at a wine store in Oak Park (yes, Prohibition is now a thing of the past in my village -- amazing, is it not?), and he encouraged me to buy a bottle of Fess Parker a few weeks ago; it wasn't expensive, and it wasn't bad, and unlike the Coppola, it was drinkable. Still, I felt like an imbecile buying a bottle of wine with Davy Crockett -- effectively a Disney character -- on the label.

Hammond