What Wont Hyperdecanting Do For A Two Buck Chuck
First off, its not like freeze drying food. You should consume the wine immediately, or shortly thereafter.
It wont turn a cheap red wine into a good red wine. Lets face it, you couldnt slide your hyperdecanted two buck chuck past an actual sommelier. But, there is still plenty of room to impress your friends at your next wine tasting party.
May I suggest a fine Pacific Peak Cabernet Sauvignon?
The Chardonnay Called To Mind Cheap Dehydration
Popcorn is a nice treat. White wine that tastes like low-quality popcorn butter? Not so much.
An uncanny similarity to the taste of liquid popcorn butter had the retail desk collectively agreeing to chuck out the Two-Buck Chuck chardonnay.
Tasters described the wine’s flavor as “bland and slimy,” “gross,” and “oily.” We agreed that we wouldn’t be reaching for this option again anytime soon.
Charles Shaw Blend 2017 California Merlot
Again, the front label references only California, so the merlot grapes could have come from anywhere in the state. Similar to the Cabernet Sauvignon, this Charles Shaw Blend Merlot wine also has an ABV of 12.5%. The warm California climate typically produces higher alcohol Merlot in the 14-14.5% range. This Charles Shaw Merlot has bright black fruit aromas and faint black fruit and smoky/spicy flavors that dissipate quickly on the palate. The body is lighter than a typical merlot and less tannic and acidic. This is a straight-forward and uncomplicated table wine. Again, its very palatable, easy to drink and a great value.
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The Man Behind The Label
Before his name became synonymous with bargain booze, Charles Shaw was an early pioneer of the Napa Valley wine industry and made delicious, award-winning vino.
Chuck Shaw, founder of Charles Shaw: I was going to Stanford in 1971, taking a small-business class. My professor told each student to find a company in the area to work with. I heard about a guy who was making wine out of his garage, so I started working with him and fell in love. I knew I wanted a vineyard. But my wife, Lucy, said, “You don’t have any money,” so I took a job at a bank. The bank later asked me to go to Paris and my office ended up being right behind Steven Spurrier’s school. I got hooked. I flew to Napa and bought 20 acres above Lake Hennessey.
Bob Dempel, vineyard manager for a decade: He used Lucy’s mother’s money to start the winery. She had grown up wealthy it was her inheritance.
Shaw: I moved my family there to start Charles Shaw winery in 1974. We were part of a pioneering group out there. In 1978, we made our first production of gamay. We were so excited. It was carbonic, it had an amazing garnet color and was really quite striking. I liked to drink it with a Tiffany’s all-purpose glass. You could smell it just sitting at the table, and people said it had notes of banana.
“Charles Shaw wine used to be great — and nobody drank it. Now, it’s terrible and it’s selling like gangbusters.”
The Original Charles Shaw Wines
Decades ago, Charles Shaw was living in Europe when he fell in love with French Beaujolais . When he returned to the States in 1974, he decided to open a winery in California’s famed Napa Valley. He made his own, American version of Gamay wine. One of Shaw’s award-winning Gamay wines was sold at Trader Joe’s for $2 a bottle, but it was not the same as the now-famous Two-Buck Chuck Trader Joe’s currently sells under the Charles Shaw name. Due to a packaging issue in which 10,000 cases of wine were contaminated with a petroleum flavor and vineyard damage caused by root louse, and the winery experienced massive debt by 1990. Because of that, Charles Shaw Winery entered bankruptcy and shut its doors, and Charles Shaw left the winemaking business altogether.
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The Amazing $2 Bottle
In the early aughts, Charles Shaw wine gets its nickname, rising to cult stardom as the accessible and cheap wine option. But as Two Buck Chuck finds its place in the world, the original man behind the label gets left in the dust.
Shaw: I’ve seen some reports that are very wrong about why it’s cheap. Some of them are so wrong, they’re funny. No, the wine is not $2 because I wanted to get back at . I don’t know the particulars about how it’s made. But Franzia deserves the credit.
Wallace: People went apeshit. This was around 2002. Articles were saying this wine is amazing and actually drinkable. It was a fad — the “Macarena” of wine. I would always hear about it from college students. And it was this blue-collar pride thing. People thought, “This bottle is just as good as one that’s $20. Screw those snobs.”
Eddy: I’ve been in the wine business for 42 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. You’d watch little old ladies with blue hair line up at the shop and say, “I want one case of that and one case of that.”
National Director of Public Relations for Trader Joe’s: Somewhere along the way, these wines were dubbed “Two Buck Chuck.” We wish we could take the credit for that, but alas, some scribe came up with that moniker.
Eddy: As far as I remember, it was a local wine writer who coined the term. Couldn’t tell you his name — but it stuck.
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The Nuts + Bolts Theory
Theres probably several factors that put the Two in Two Buck Chuck. It seems to be a combination of savvy techniquesand some arguably questionable practices.
Franzia owns massive tracts of land on which he grows an equally massive supply of grapes. The thing is, unlike the original Charles Shaw winery, the land isnt actually in Napa.
While Charles Shaw wine is still bottled in Napa, the grapes are now grown in the San Joaquin Valley. The young wine is supposedly piped into tankers and trucked up north, with some of the fermentation possibly happening on the road during the journey. There are no barrels involved that would make the wine too pricey so wood chips are soaked in the wine instead to give it flavor.
Once the juice reaches the behemoth bottling facility in Napa, the innumerable gallons of vino are sealed up on an assembly line that Henry Ford would have admired. The thinner, lighter bottles that house the wine use less glass to make and less gas to transport and the boxes have even been converted to plain brown to knock a few more cents off the bottom line.
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History Of Charles Shaw Winery
Karen is a wine, cocktails, and food enthusiast. She holds a California Wine Appellation Specialist certificate from the San Francisco wine school and a Bar Smarts mixology certificate and bartends for charitable events.
Learn about our Editorial Policy.
The Charles Shaw winery, named after owner Charles Shaw, went out of business years ago, but the name and the wine live on. It is now owned by the Bronco Wine Company and is known for producing affordable wines including the infamous “Two Buck Chuck.”
Charles Not In Charge
Fred Franzia buys up the trademark and slashes the wine’s price. The $1.99 tag stirs up a slew of rumors about the wine’s quality, some of which aren’t terribly off the mark. The brand is sued for the levels of arsenic in the wine.
Eddy: Franzia used the exact same name and the exact same label on the bottle. Even the same original artwork: a picture of a little pagoda that used to sit by tennis court. He shocked the world by slapping a $1.99 label on it. Everybody in the industry thought it was impossible. He had the testicles that nobody else had, to sell wine at that price. He’d shoot over to Portugal or France and knock on the door of a cork or glass producer and say, “If I write you a check for $2 million, will you fill up this boat with cork? I don’t care about quality.”
Wallace: A few years ago, a report came out, claiming machine harvesting left branches, bugs, and birds in the grapes in the wine. It’s true that there is method of machine harvesting, which I believe uses, and you get some bugs and birds in it. It sounds gross but it’s not really a big issue. The FDA has requirements on how much of that is OK.
Wallace: It’s not actually good. It’s so sweet and nasty. It’s full of residual sugar, which is bad for consumers. It’s not hard to make cheap wine. You can make anything cheaply by cutting corners. It is the complete industrialization of wine, making it a commodity like grain. A lot of it is automated with little concern for quality.
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The Pinot Grigio Was Boring But Inoffensive
Trader Joe’s pinot grigio didn’t wow us as a group, but it didn’t send us running either.
“Inoffensive” was one descriptor that got thrown around a lot to describe this wine, although one reviewer said that despite the drink’s “grassy notes,” it stilled tasted “like a headache.”
One reviewer said it’s certainly a wine that they would “drink for free.” Three of us tasters agreed that this wine was worth it, with two reviewers dissenting.
Overall, it’s a slightly bland option with a mild flavor. It’s a great pick if you’re looking for a cheap white wine to mix with cranberry juice or whip into a sangria for a summertime picnic.
Two Buck Chuck: What To Try What To Skip
This is Season 2, Chapter 1 of Dan The Wine Man, a feature written for The Napa Valley Register and other media outlets. My angles are 1) Anyone can drink unique, delicious wines and Ill show you how, and 2) I include guidance on how to find the wines I recommend. Its 4-6 wines each time. Hope you like it and buy my picks! Heres the article on NapaValleyRegister.com.
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Evaluating The Taste And Cost Of Two
For the last ten years, the supermarket chain Trader Joe’s has been selling its Charles Shaw Wines better known as Two-Buck Chuck for two bucks. It’s been a great success.
In fact, a recent editions of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer newspaper says: We do think we know why these wines have struck a chord they’ve proven that wine doesn’t need to be expensive to be good, drinkable wine. These are not expensive, they are good, and they’re very drinkable.
Charles Shaw Wines are made by the Bronco Wine Company based in Ceres, California, near Modesto. The brand in its present form was born just over a decade ago, when Bronco and other producers found themselves harvesting too many grapes. One of the company’s founders, Fred Franzia, came up with the idea to undercut the competition: he’d make a two-dollar bottle. He was able to kind of go in and name his price, and come up with this ridiculously inexpensive wine. And over time he just had to figure out how to keep supplying it. Not the least of which is, frankly, planting his own vineyards, says San Francisco Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonne.
Now Bronco owns a lot of land in California more than 40,000 acres of vineyards mostly in the San Joaquin Valley. And Charles Shaw wine is just one of more than 90 different Bronco brands, most of which sell for less than ten dollars per bottle.
This story originally aired in May 2011.
What Does A Sommelier Think
The popular consensus among most fans of Two Buck Chuck is that some of it is actually pretty darn good, while some of it is pure swill. Aiming to compile a more scientific list which fans of the wine can turn to, the gang at Thrillist got an actual sommelier to taste test the most recently available varietals.
And the winner was? With scores of seven and above, the merlot, shiraz, chardonnay, and cabernet sauvignon all did well. The pinot grigio came in at the middle with a score of six. The losers of the bunch were the nouveau, the sauvignon blanc, and the white zinfandel, which was likened to a liquefied Jolly Rancher.
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Charles Shaw Blend 2017 California Cabernet Sauvignon
At first glance, seeing reference to California on the front of the label indicates that the grapes could have come from anywhere in the state, despite the back label indicating that the wine was cellared and bottled in Napa, California. Napa is a premium wine growing region so by utilizing grapes from other areas, costs can be better controlled. This is likely one of the ways the low price point per bottle is achieved. On the downside, it may mean that there is high variability in the taste from batch to batch and possibly in the quality of the wine from year to year. The next thing I noticed is that the ABV is 12.5%, which is lower than the powerful Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon wines that I usually drink, which typically have an ABV of around 14.5%.
After diving into the Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon wine, I note the wine has fruity aromas of berries, cherry and plum. I got the same flavor notes on the palate with some mild pepper notes. The taste is very acceptable for a Cabernet Sauvignon, but the finish was extremely short. This is not a robust wine and the body is extremely light for a Cabernet Sauvignon. Its also not very tannic, which is one of the aspects of a typical cabernet sauvignon that I enjoy the most. That said, the wine is balanced, definitely drinkable, and its certainly hard to beat the price. This is a great wine if you love cabernet sauvignon but you find the heat of the summer months too warm to enjoy a powerful red.
This Story Is One Of Sudden Glory Tragic Downfall And Suspicious Businessnot At All What Youd Expect From A Simple Bottle Of Two Buck Chuck
Billy Farrell/BFA/REX/Shutterstock
Trader Joes is known for fairly cheap prices, but arguably its most famously priced item is Charles Shaw wine, otherwise known as Two Buck Chuck. While not everyone may know the secrets of Trader Joes stores themselves, they definitely know this product.
As the name suggests, the wine, available in red and white varieties, only cost $1.99 when it hit shelves in 2002. Prices have increased slightly , yet sales have remained strong. Trader Joes sold more than 800 million bottles of the label in 12 years, CNBC reports.
Exactly how the store can maintain such low prices doesnt have a simple, painless answer. In fact, the whole ordeal was quite painful for Charles Shaw, the founder of the wine label. He told Thrillist that he moved his family to Napa, California, to start a winery in 1974. Less than ten years later, he charged $13.50 per bottle, put out 15,000 cases of wine annually, and won international awards for his products.
But by the early 90s, the business was suffering greatly. A supplier used the wrong type of wax for Shaws wooden barrels, tainting 1,400 barrels of wine, and Shaw signed off on a deal to double the production of Burgundies that flopped. Shaw lost millions, and his wife divorced him. He filed for bankruptcy and ended up selling the vineyard and trade name to Fred Franzia, owner of Franzia and Bronco wines, for $27,000.
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The Sauvignon Blanc Reminded Me Of A Different Mind
Truth be told, I felt that this wine smelled a bit like a different substance folks use to get a buzz. That is to say, this drink smelled like weed.
But I want to note that the wine’s pungency is likely at least partly my fault. In my rush to organize the wine tasting, I didn’t chill the white wines. That fact led a number of us reviewers to agree that this beverage could be a reasonable option when cold.
At the time of the tasting, however, we were less than impressed. On the issue of whether the wine was worth its low price, we were split, with two negative answers, two affirmative answers, and one taster writing, “I think so?”
The wine brought to mind adjectives such as “skunky,” “spicy,” “pungent,” “punchy,” and “mineral.”
The Mystery Of Charles Shaw Better Known As Two Buck Chuck
Its a cold, misty night. The moon casts a pale glow over the land. Youre feeling introspective, wistfuland very thirsty. The wine glass beckons.
This is the hour that calls for the juice of the vine. You take up your corkscrew and reach for a vintage thats laden with secrets: a shadowy bottle of Charles Shaw.
Wait a minute.
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The Wine Which Costs As Much As $399 In Some Markets Officially Lives Up To Its Nickname Once Again
Beginning in 2002, an entire generation seemed to come of age with $1.99 bottles of Trader Joes Charles Shaw winelovingly referred to as Two Buck Chuck. Interest in wine was continuing to surge in the United States, and for emerging drinkers on a budget, Charles Shaw was a dinner party staple, regularly sparking conversations of This is actually pretty good!
But eventually, those halcyon days came to an end thanks to an inevitable force: inflation. In 2013, Trader Joes jacked up the price of Charles Shaw to $2.49 a bottle in the brands home state of California . And though people continued to refer to it as Two Buck Chuck, we all knew it was a lie.
That is, until now. This month, Trader Joes has officially rolled back the price of Two Buck Chuck in California stores from $2.99 to $1.99a move the company says is permanent . Weve been able to work with the producer of Charles Shaw to make some improvements packaging-wise so that it uses less glass and the cork is a little bit different, Matt Sloan, vice president of marketing and product at Trader Joes, told the Los Angeles Business Journal. These cost savings have put us into a position where we can pass a lot of that savings right onto customers.
Whos in the mood for an old-school dinner party? Ill bring the plastic plates and mismatched silverware if you bring the three extra folding chairs no one officially claims in the basement of your apartment complex!
