December Newsletter: Our Exclusive Private Labels

Our new private label programs represent some of the most exciting, high-value bottles on our shelves. Sourced directly by our buyers and crafted in partnership with top producers based on relationships spanning decades, they deliver serious quality at incredible prices. This week, we’re spotlighting giftable Discovery Series wines, in-stock Anonymous selections, K&L Scotch exclusives, a new Rhône wine, a preview of our new Maison 76 project, and where to taste these wines in-store with Somm Services.

Anonymous Wine Co. Delivers Gifts with Intrigue and Incredible Value

With the huge amount of trust and recognition K&L has built over 50 years in the business, plus my own deep personal connections to great producers across California and beyond, I strongly believe that the sky is the limit for what we can achieve with this range of wines.

Holiday Gift Guide

This year’s K&L Holiday Gift Guide showcases the bottles our buyers are most excited to give (and to receive). Below you’ll find Champagne benchmarks, hand-selected Domestic gems, top-flight Tuscan classics, and versatile Loire Valley wines, plus upcoming in-store events and our Thanksgiving Pairing Guide. Consider this your roadmap to the most compelling gifts of the season.

A Domestic Wine Gift for Every Type of Wine Drinker

Even though Labor Day seems like just yesterday, we’re now deep into the holiday shopping season, and if you’re anything like me…you’ll still have plenty of gifts you need to figure out! Well, Team K&L is here to help! This year I decided to break down my list of holiday buying picks by the type of person you’re shopping for. Are they that person who’s the big-time wine aficionado that you never know what to get for them? Perhaps you’re looking to impress someone with a deep cellar with a nice bottle to add to their collection? Or a friend who is very “granola” and you have to find them a small-production, hand-crafted wine that fits the vibe? Well we’ve got something for everyone so read on and fill up that basket!

November Roundup: Cali Collectibles, Large-Format Finds, Our Current Top Ten

As the holidays approach and cellars start to open up, November’s Roundup gathers the very best of what our buyers have been building toward all year. From our monthly Top Ten—sharp, high-character values across regions—to a rare profile of industry icon Ralph Sands at 70, this issue highlights the bottles and people that continue to shape K&L.

Try Before You Buy: Thanksgiving Hits in Our Open Cellar Machines

Eight new wines are hitting the Open Cellar machines, and they couldn’t be better timed for the season. Think textural whites for crisp evenings, generous reds for hearty meals, and a few aged treasures ready to steal the show at your Thanksgiving table. Come taste them at any of our stores and find your next favorite bottle for fall.

Coming Soon from the Anonymous Wine Collective

Anonymous is without doubt one of the most exciting projects we've launched in decades at K&L. The wines have been extremely well received all around and continue to fly off our shelves as folks drink them and taste for themselves what exceptional values they represent. It's a fun game to play, trying to guess whom we partnered with on each release, and many of you have emailed me some pretty good guesses. However, the most important thing that really drives this project is the quality that's in the bottle. If it doesn't taste good, intrigue and speculation can only carry the wines so far. The wines have to deliver, and I'm really proud of what we've put in bottle. I hope you feel the same way.

Farella: Hidden in Plain Sight

The region of Combsville in Napa Valley even describes itself on the official vintners' and growers page as a hidden gem. Despite being just three minutes from downtown Napa, the region is somehow still off the beaten path for most visitors to the valley. Coombsville is one of the more recently established sub-AVAs in Napa Valley, becoming officially recognized in 2011. There is, however, a long history of grape growing in the region going back to the 1880s. To this day the iconic R.W. Moore Vineyard, planted in 1905, is still in production. It was however in the early 1980s that the modern era of Coombsville began and no winery was more instrumental in the founding of this AVA than Farella. Firstly, second generation owner, Tom Farella, wrote and submitted the petition that led to the creation of the AVA. But Farella’s importance goes deeper than simply filing paperwork.

MarBeso Wines: One of Our Domestic Buyer’s Top Small Producers

One of my absolute favorite small producers we're working with right now is MarBeso, based in the Sta. Rita Hills. I first got to know owner/winemaker Colin McNanny when he was making the wines at La Honda winery, just down the road from our Redwood City store. I admired the wines he managed to craft at La Honda, especially when you take into account that the team there produced wines from dozens of essentially “backyard vineyards” from Los Gatos to San Mateo. Colin and I became friends with a mutual enjoyment of surfing and finding great hole-in-the-wall taquerias around Redwood City.

Inspiring Winemaking at Stolpman Vineyards

The first time I encountered Stolpman was back in 2008 when I was working for Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon Vineyard. As the infamous “Rhône Ranger,” Randall sought out excellence in Rhône varietals throughout California, so it's no surprise that he ended up buying fruit from Stolpman who pioneered Syrah and other Rhône varieties in what was to later become the Ballard Canyon AVA. Stolpman’s Vineyard is planted across a series of undulating hills on the Western side of Ballard Canyon, just a few miles south of Los Olivos.

Breakfast Wines with Steve Matthiasson

A recent K&L staff trip to Napa Valley saw the NorCal sales team explore the cooler parts of the region with a day in Carneros and Coombsville, two of the southernmost sub-AVAs of Napa, with lots of moderating influence from the nearby San Pablo Bay. We started off the day with an incredible 8:30am visit with Steve Matthiasson at his Cressida Vineyard in the upper Carneros, right at the foot of the Mayacamas range as it descends towards the bay. The weather in Carneros behaved perfectly with thick morning fog slowly receding back to the bay as our crew walked up into the vineyard with the first patches of blue sky being revealed.

What I'm Excited About This Week: The Return of Anonymous

For these Anonymous Wine Collective bottles, we've given a pinky promise and staked our reputations on keeping certain particulars under wraps. In return for a little anonymity, we're able to offer incredible pricing on these wines. If these wines were bottled by the original producer, they would sell for 60-70% more. Fortunately for us, the producers had more wine than they needed, and we felt like, gosh that would be an outstanding product to be able to offer our customers. We are extremely fortunate and thankful that our positive reputation has given us access to these wines, and, as more and more of them are released, we hope that you notice the theme of extreme price-to-quality ratios.

K&L Wine Merchants

www.klwines.com