Costco FTW: Kirkland Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, and Cotes du Rhone

Episode Transcript

Hello! And welcome to the Wine Pair podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and wine-pairing partner in crime. And we are the Wine Pair.

In this episode, we are going to cover off on one of my favorite things: going to Costco, and this is what we are going to do in this Costco For the Win series. And not just going to Costco, but buying Costco wine. Periodically, we will review different wines that can be purchased at Costco, which will sometimes be Kirkland brand wines, and sometimes other brands that Costco sells. 

Did you know that Costco is the largest wine retailer in the US? They sell something like $2 billion in wine a year! When I go to Costco, I can hardly help myself from buying a ton of wine. 

And, Costco is just an amazing place. Where else can you buy new york steaks, underwear, coffee, and peanut butter in bulk sizes so big you can never finish them? I mean, it’s a good day when we can get out of Costco and spend under $400 bucks. Whatever they do, they do it right because I always buy more than I intended to. I mean, who doesn’t need a 12 pound bag of beef jerky. Am I right?!?

What do you love about Costco, Carmela? 

Is there anything you don’t love about it?

On a recent Costco run we did, I bought a bulk container of ground dunkin donuts coffee, which is a good bad coffee, by the way, in like a 3 pound plastic tub. I am going to be making that coffee at home for about 4 years. Actually, it won’t last quite that long because I like to make very strong coffee. 

And, by the way, I really prefer Dunkin coffee to Starbucks coffee. I think I am running the risk of alienating all of our listeners, but I am really not a fan of Starbucks coffee. Dunkin coffee is way better. In fact, I hate to say it, but I think Folgers coffee is better. I mean it. I dare any of you to do a blind taste test of Starbucks coffee and Folgers coffee and tell me if you actually think Starbucks is better. I bet you won’t. To me, Starbucks is wayyyy over-roasted and wayyyyy too acidic. And I fear they have absolutely ruined coffee for Americans

Can we talk about a few things I really don’t like about Starbucks coffee?

First, their roasting process is just bad. I mean really bad. If you have one in your house, open up a bag of Starbucks coffee from the store, ground or whole bean, and give it a good whiff. My bet is that you will find that it smells like tuna fish. and try and tell me it doesn’t smell like tuna fish. I mean, I like tuna fish and all, but I don’t want my coffee to smell like fish. And this is a real thing - look it up on the interwebs and you’ll find that there are articles about how over roasting coffee can make it smelly fishy. So, Starbucks smells like tuna fish because they over roast their coffee, and the oils in the coffee get over cooked and then get stuck in their roasting bins and make the coffee smell off. If you think I am joking, just Google Starbucks coffee smells like tuna fish - it’s right there. And everyone knows the internet does not lie.

Second, the serving size of their drinks are just ludicrous. Let me just nerd out for a minute for all of those of you in listening land. A cappuccino does not come in a venti anywhere in Italy. In fact, there is only one size for a cappuccino in Italy, and it is not big. If you order a cappuccino in any size other than small, you are not buying a cappuccino. You are buying a latte. And PLEASE don’t ever order a wet cappuccino. That is a latte. Listen, do yourself a favor and get on a plane to Italy and go to any corner cafe and buy a cappuccino and you will learn what great coffee tastes like. It’s not going to be huge, it is not going to be wet. It is going to be perfect. And it won’t smell like fish. You can even get a great cappuccino at Eataly in New York. A great one. And, you should also know that you would NEVER buy a cappuccino after 10 AM in Italy. NEVER.

And, one other thing I have a hard time forgiving them for: the macchiato. Somehow, they created this monstrous abomination of a drink that is a latte with carmel drizzled on top - is it carmel and caramel? That is not a macchiato. That is - I don’t even know what that is. A macchiato is a shot of espresso with a little dab of foamed steamed milk. That’s it. Macchiato means “marked” in Italian and it is just a shot of espresso marked with foam. Ok?!?

Third, they screwed up some other things, too, like cookies. The word for that hard, half moon shaped cookie that you dip in your coffee is a biscotti, not a bis-scotty. Please, I mean, here is your one Italian lesson for the day. Never say bis-scotty. The WORST is when the barista at Starbucks tries to correct me by saying bis-scotty when I pronounce it correctly. If there is one pet peeve of mine, it is pronunciation and grammar. I know, I am a dork

Fourth, they sold my Seattle Super Sonics. That big dummy (can I say that) Howard Schultz bought the Sonics, and then sold them to some grifters from Oklahoma City who moved my precious Sonics, and had the audacity to change the name to the Thunder but keep the records. Listen, the Thunder did not win the NBA championship in 1979. The Sonics did. The Thunder never had Fred Brown, Jack Sikma, Tom Chambers, Xavier McDaniel, Sean Kemp, Gary Payton, Detlef Shrempf, Big Smooth, Nate MacMillan, or the other Sonics legends. They stole them. And it is Howard Schultz’s fault, and I will never forgive him for that. 

So, that was a tangent. I don’t know how I even got started on that, really, but we need to get back to the topic at hand - Costco’s Kirkland brand wines. In a future episode I’ll go through more of where Costco sources its wines and all that crap, but because I spent so much time hating on Starbucks, we should just get down to it. 

There are three white wines from Costco’s Kirkland brand that we are going to try today. I love buying Kirkland wines because in many cases they are very well priced, and some are actually quite good. We do want to warn you, though, that not all Kirkland wines are good. Some are shit, some are great, and some are merely meh. And we are going to tell you today what some of those are. 

Wines

Kirkland Grave Pinot Grigio

Region: Italy, Friuli  (NE Italy, bordering Slovenia and Austria)

Producer:

Year: 2020

Price: $4.99

Retailer: Costco

Alcohol: 12.5%

Grapes (if not clear): Pinot Grigio

Rating: Joe 7    Carmela 7

Kirkland Sonoma County Chardonnay

Region: California, Sonoma

Producer:

Year: 2020

Price: $6.99

Retailer: Costco

Alcohol: 13.5%

Grapes (if not clear): Chardonnay

Rating: Joe 5 Carmela 5

Kirkland Cotes du Rhone Villages

Region: France, Cote du Rhone (near Avignon, south of France)

Producer:

Year: 2020

Price: $6.99

Retailer: Costco

Alcohol: 14.5%

Grapes: GSM: Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre

Rating: Joe 7 Carmela  6

Taste profiles expected

• Pinot Gris: white peach, lemon zest, cantaloupe, raw almond, crushed gravel
• Chardonnay: yellow apples, starfuit, pineapple, vanilla, butter (California - lemon, pie crust, nutmeg)
• GSM: Raspberry, blackberry, rosemary, baking spices, lavender (Cotes du Rhone: black olive, dried cranberry, dried herbs, cinnamon, leather)

What is the wine we are finishing tonight? 

Well, that was super fun! 

If you have ideas for wines you would like us to try and give you advice on for future podcasts, let us know. You can visit our website at thewinepairpodcast.com and leave a voice message or send us a note. You can comment or reach out on Instagram or Twitter - on Instagram you can find us at thewinepairpodcast, and on Twitter at winepairpodcast (no “the” on twitter ‘cause it don’t fit). You can reach out to us at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and we just hope to hear you comments. And we hope you’ll subscribe and follow us

Thanks for listening to the Wine Pair podcast, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine