Costco Kirkland Signature Pinot Noir Challenge! (The pros and cons of Costco’s wine selection, why few experts review Costco wines, Kirkland Signature Russian River Pinot Noir review)

Show Notes

Episode 110: Costco Kirkland Signature Pinot Noir Challenge! 00:00

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

Ok, a quick orientation for those of you who may be new to the podcast - in each episode we learn about, taste and give our honest review of three wines that are reasonably priced - meaning under $20 each -  and should be easy for you to find. And our podcast is made for people who want to learn more about wine, find new wines to enjoy, and just want someone to talk about wine in a fun way that regular people can understand. So, if that sounds like you, you are in the right place! And we are proud to say that we are recommended by the editors of Decanter Magazine who call us fun, irreverent, chatty, and entertaining

Carmela, we are back again with another one of our Costco Kirkland Signature wine challenges, where we pit Costco Kirkland Signature wines against other similarly priced wines, and this week we are seeing how the Kirkland Signature Russian River Pinot Noir stacks up against some similarly priced Pinot Noirs. The battle is on!

And, as an extra bonus for us, or maybe more for you, I am doing a little wine cellar cleaning, and we are going to compare the Kirkland wine to a couple of Pinot Noirs that I have been hanging onto for a little bit and just needed to get on the show. So, we have a Mondavi Pinot Noir, and one from Oregon as well  that we are going to taste and compare to the Costco wine, but again, these are pretty easy to find wines and very similar in terms of cost, so we are giving all of the wines a fair shot. 

This is now our 8th episode on Costco wines, and our 6th Costco wine challenge, and these tend to be among our most popular episodes, at least in the Google machine, and we’ll talk about why I think that is in a few minutes, but before I get there, I want to talk about why Costco is great, and not so great, about educating people on wine.

Everyone knows, or should know, that Costco sells a lot of wine - in fact, Costco is the largest wine retailer in the US as we mentioned in the intro. What’s amazing about that is not just that they sell a large volume of wine, but they do not sell a huge variety of wines. Each store generally only stocks between 100-150 different wines. So, despite the huge wine section and the huge number of sales, what Costco is about is volume. 

And that makes sense, because that is their model - they keep costs to their customers down, and margins for themselves up - by buying a few items in tons of different categories and selling them to us in bulk.

And you can visualize this if you think about how they sell wine. Unlike a grocery store or wine shop where you see individual bottles displayed one by one on shelves, Costco displays wines in palettes or boxes. So, even their finest wines are bulk bought, and the selection of wine at a Costco store in terms of numbers of different wines is probably not all that different from your local grocery store or corner wine shop. Maybe even less when we talk about breadth. 

So, Costco has a huge impact on what people drink because - they sell a lot of wine, but they curate that wine list quite tightly, and they offer a huge range of prices on their wines. It’s not just inexpensive wine - you can find quite expensive bottles there, too. 

This curation of wine that Costco does is what I think is both good and bad. The good is that Costco’s wine selection is generally quite good, and you can find a pretty broad range of varietals there from all over the world. So, in that way, they expose their audience, which is a ton of people, something like 125 million people, to a lot of different types of wine.

What is not as great about it is that Costco is a volume seller, and so the smaller artisan winemakers, or less well-known wine regions, are just not going to make it into a Costco store, and so if Costco is your main source of wine, both from a buying, exposure, and selling standpoint, you are definitely only getting the select view of wine that they want you to see. It’s generally very good wine, but it is not fully representative of the world of wine. 

Although, I can hardly pin that only on Costco - that is true of nearly every large wine retailer and store, and why I think it is so important that part of what we do in our podcast is try and expose you all, our wonderful listeners, to new and different wines, through our WTF episodes and our Italian Wine Adventure episodes, and others like them.

But not today! Today we are sticking with a well known varietal in Pinot Noir, and we are going to taste and review the Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir alongside two other easy to find Pinot Noirs and let you know who wins the challenge . . . 

But first . . . we have to do our shameless plug.

First, we want to thank you for listening to us and for supporting our show, and if you have not had the chance to do so yet, now would be the perfect time to subscribe to our podcast, and a huge thank you to all of you who have subscribed already! 

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You can also follow us and see pictures of the wines we are tasting and trying today on Instagram  at thewinepairpodcast, and you can contact us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com, and you can sign up for our email newsletter there and get news and food and wine pairing ideas and more!

And, as we do every week, we’ll tell you someone we think you should tell about The Wine Pair Podcast. This week, we want you to tell anyone who loves to buy wine at Costco, and can’t wait to tell you how much they paid for said wine at Costco. 


ARTICLES and LINKS

• https://wineeconomist.com/2007/08/22/costco-and-global-wine/ 
• https://www.onlinedasher.com/costco-statistics/#:~:text=Costco%2C%20renowned%20for%20its%20membership,more%20than%20%24100%20per%20visit. 

Topic: The Subculture of Costco Wine Reviewers 09:43

Before we get to the wine tasting and reviewing part of the program, Carmela, I did want to spend a little time talking about the subculture of wine reviewers that talk about Costco Kirkland Signature wines. I bring this up because 1) I think this is partially why our Costco episodes are popular on the Google machine, and 2) people drink a lot of wine from Costco, but I have almost never seen their house wines reviewed by major reviews like Wine Spectator or Wine Enthusiast or Decanter or Vinous. 

Every once in a while you may, but generally you don’t, and I think some of that has to do with the price point, and some of it has to do with the fact that Costco is not actually making the wine, but rather that other, usually unnamed winemakers, are making the wine for them. 

So, to fill that gap or void, there is an interesting subset of wine reviewers that do offer reviews of Costco wines that show up pretty quickly when you search. There are two main websites that I see all the time are CostcoWineBlog.com and Reverse Wine Snob. 

These folks are smart because they have a niche that people are interested in, but it is not a small niche - it’s a pretty stinking big niche given how popular Costco wines are. 

The person behind the Costco Wine Blog is a guy named Andrew Cullen, and as he tells it, the website started on a whim. He was sort of a serial blogger, and ended up writing an article, just an article, for a site called BlogRoom.com, on buying wine at Costco, and it took off. So, they built the site Costco Wine Blog, and have been at it for more than 10 years. 

They have tons of content on their site, and they say that their site is 100% written by fans of Costco wines, so my guess is that they have a small coterie of people writing articles that Andrew edits.

Like the major reviewers, they rate on a 100 point scale, and so my guess is the ranges are pretty similar in terms of expected quality. 80-89 are good bottles of wine, 90-94 are real good, and 95 or higher are like totally awesome.

They also have expanded beyond Costco’s Kirkland wines in terms of what they review, but they stick to wines they find at Costco, which makes sense. 

The other popular Costco wine reviewing site has a great name - The Reverse Wine Snob. Unlike the Costco blog, The Reverse Wine Snob covers Trader Joe’s, Sam’s Club, and Aldi as well. 

The site looks to be run by a single person - Jon Thorsen - who believes, like we do, that you can find great wines under $20 - in fact, he focuses on the $10-ish range. And, like us, he is not a Master Sommelier or a Phd - he’s a person who loves wine, probably has a pretty good palette, wants to find great wines at a reasonable price, and thinks you learn by drinking, and drinking a wide variety of wines, not just those that are the most popular or available. I think we would get along.

He has a pretty large following on social media, and looks like he gets a lot of his wine sent to him, which is fun. He has a section of his site called “Insider Deals” which looks to be wines that he inventories and sells, And, he also has been doing this for more than a decade like Andrew at the Costco blog.

Like us, he does not use a 100 point scale, but rather uses a 10 point scale. However, he does not limit it to just those 10 numbers because he uses a formula that combines the taste rating of a wine with its cost. Which is pretty clever. A 10 rated wine can never be above $7, and a $25 wine can never have a rating above 7.5. So, even a mediocre rating on a low cost wine is better than a strong rating on a more expensive wine. Because he is trying to help people find high quality, low cost wines. Like us. We are just not as complicated.  

But what makes us a little different from all of the other reviewers is that we compare the Costco wines we are tasting to other similar wines, so in addition to our review of the wine, you can see how it stacks up to others in the same price range. 

Of the two reviewers, I think we tend to be a little closer in ratings to the Costco Wine Blog, although both of them seem to be bigger fans of bold wines like oaky Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay than we are. Which is fine. 

Ok, now, Carmela I think we should move on to the Pinot Noir wines we chose for this episode!

ARTICLES and LINKS

• https://costcowineblog.com/
• https://www.reversewinesnob.com/search/label/costco/
• https://costcowineblog.com/10-years-and-1000-costco-wine-reviews/ 
• https://www.businessinsider.com/wine-costco-good-deal-experts-2018-12 
• https://winefolly.com/tips/wine-ratings-explained/ 

Pinot Noir Wines We Chose for This Episode 18:06

As usual, all of the wines we have chosen for this episode are under $20, and all of them should be relatively easy to find because I bought one of them from Costco, obviously, and the other two I bought at a drug store called Rite Aid and another at Total Wine. In general, you can find wines by the other two producers - Robert Mondavi and Samuel Robert, pretty easily. 

The first wine we are going to taste and review is the Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir, which sounds fancy, but this wine is less than $9 and was the least expensive of all of our wines. It is also the oldest as it is a 2018, so this one should be ready to drink!

On the Mondavi website they talk about what the Private Selection series is supposed to be, but honestly, it is marketing gobblety-gook, and I should know because I’ve been in marketing for 25 years. I think it is a way of making cheap wine sound expensive and higher quality. 

On another website I found a write up that says these wines are Central Coast wines that are elegant and approachable and ideal for every occasion. So, yes. Cheap wines meant to sound expensive.

I could not find out a ton about this wine, but Mondavi makes a ton of wine, and I did not know this, but Mondavi is behind Opus One Winery along with Château Mouton Rothschild. And if you don’t know about Opus One, let’s just say, that shit is expensive. 

The next wine we are going to drink is called Conscious by Samuel Robert Pinot Noir, and this one is a 2019. Wine Enthusiast actually gave this wine an 88 rating and called it a Best Buy, so this should give the Kirkland wine a run for its money. 

Again, not a ton I could find out about this wine because the winery website is still janky - which we mentioned like a while ago - but from some sources I found, Samuel Robert says they focus on staying environmentally and sustainably friendly, which to me sounds like they are organic-ish or sustainable-ish. Sort of sustainable, but not willing to go through the certification to make it official, so they kind of make it up.

I could not find a tech sheet for the wine, and I could not find out any information on what the Conscious line of Samuel Robert wines is for, so if anyone knows, let us know!

So, let’s just get to the star of the show, the Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir.

Interestingly enough, on this Costco wine, we do get to see who the winemaker is - it is Glenn Hugo who is the head winemaker at Girard Winery in Napa Valley. Girard is a big winery that makes a ton of different wines, some of which are pretty pricey in the $120 to $150 range. I did not see any Pinot Noir, however. According to the Costco Wine Blog, Glenn Hugo makes several other Kirkland Signature wines, including the Kirkland Signature Rutherford Cabernet Sauvignon which sells in the $20 range at Costco which is relatively expensive.  

So, it seems like we are starting to see more and more winemakers exposing themselves as making Costco wines, and I can’t tell if that is something that Costco is asking them to do, or if they are asking Costco to do it. I could see it from both sides. Costco likes it because they can show that these wines are being made by legit winemakers, and the winemakers may like it because it gets their name out there in Costco, which, again, has a bajillion customers. 

I will say that Costco Wine Blog and Reverse Wine Snob had relatively divergent opinions of this wine. Both liked it, but Reverse Wine Snob liked it quite a bit better. Costco Wine Blog did say that they liked the 2021 vintage a lot better, rating it an 89. 

So, let’s just get to it. Regardless of how these damn wines are made, we just got to taste them to see what the hell is up!

And, we haven’t said this for a while, but if you have these wines or another Pinot Noir, pop it open and drink along with us!


ARTICLES and LINKS

• https://midwaywines.com/shop/product/robert-mondavi-private-selection-pinot-noir/5670376a7562755050080400?option-id=a1bbdfd4e9b4511e4e4427b34431b1846625c45307815afe31b676d6dc938f52
• https://udiga.com/robert-mondavi-private-selection/ 
• https://www.wineenthusiast.com/buying-guide/samuel-robert-2019-conscious-pinot-noir-willamette-valley/
• https://costcowineblog.com/2022-kirkland-signature-russian-river-pinot-noir/
• https://www.reversewinesnob.com/kirkland-signature-russian-river-valley-pinot-noir
• https://calwinecountry.com/glenn-hugo-girard-winery/
• https://winefolly.com/grapes/pinot-noir/ 

Pinot Noir Wine Pairing Tasting and Reviews 24:30

Wine: Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir
Region: California, Central Coast
Year: 2018
Price: $8.99
Retailer: Rite Aid
Alcohol: 13.5%
Grapes: Pinot Noir 

What we tasted and smelled in this Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir:

• On the nose: Floral, potpourri, cherry, oak, wood, rose, perfumey, strawberry, red licorice, freshly struck match
• In the mouth: Very tart, a bite, matchstick, sour, not a lot of fruit, lacks smoothness, sharp, not quite ripe strawberry, lingers on the tongue too long, a little rough, very acidic

Food to pair with this Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir: A greasy cheeseburger, greasy foods, avoid tomato and tomato sauce or lemony foods, charred meats
 
As a reminder on our rating scale, we rate on a scale of 1-10, where 7 and above means that we would buy it, and 4 and below means that we are likely to pour it down the sink, and a 5 or 6 means we are likely to drink it and finish it, but we are probably not going to buy it. 

Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir Wine Rating: 

• Joe: 5/10
• Carmela: 5/10

Wine: Conscious by Samuel Robert Pinot Noir
Region: Oregon, Willamette Valley 
Year: 2019
Price: $12.59
Retailer: Total Wine
Alcohol: 13.5%
Grapes: Pinot Noir
Professional Rating: WE 88 and a Best Buy

What we tasted and smelled in this Conscious by Samuel Robert Pinot Noir:

• On the nose: Alcoholy, not a ton of fruit, wood, matchstick, a touch harsh, tart raspberry, damp forest, mushroom
• In the mouth: Tart raspberry, matchstick aftertaste, sharp, aggressive, juicy, might be young, can be served a little chilled

Food to pair with this Conscious by Samuel Robert Pinot Noir: Pork tenderloin, grilled chicken, pizza, meatballs, again avoid tomato sauce based pasta, steak, banh mi sandwich, chicken teriyaki, summer picnic

Conscious by Samuel Robert Pinot Noir Wine Rating: 

• Joe:6 /10
• Carmela: 6/10

Crowd pleaser!


Wine: Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir
Region: California, Sonoma County
Year: 2022
Price: $11.99
Retailer: Costco
Alcohol: 13.5%
Grapes: Pinot Noir
Professional Rating: CWB 86; RWS 7.5 (8 on the taste)

What we tasted and smelled in this Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir:

• On the nose: Cherry, sour cherry, a kiss of oak, nice Pinot Noir smell
• In the mouth: Smooth, good cherry flavor, matchstick at the end, Twizzler, strawberry milkshake, creamy, red fruit, blackberry, raspberry, cedar, a touch of leather, Dr. Pepper

Food to pair with this Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir: A nice steak, beef roast, braciole, tomato sauce based pastas, 

Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir Wine Rating: 

• Joe: 8/10
• Carmela: 7/10

Great party wine!

Which one of these are you finishing tonight?

• Carmela: Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir
• Joe: Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir

Kirkland Signature Pinot Noir wins the challenge!!!

Taste profiles expected from Pinot Noir 40:51

• General Pinot Noir 
  • Wine Folly: Raspberry, cherry, mushroom, vanilla, hibiscus; Oregon more bing cherry, cranberry, and dandelion stem; California more sweet black cherry, black raspberry, coca-cola, vanilla, and caramel
• Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir
  • Winery: medium bodied with soft tannins and a lingering finish, making it an elegant offering for dinner parties. Fresh flavors of rose petals, strawberry, vibrant cherry and fresh raspberry abound in this pinot noir wine, while hints of Asian spice, sweet tobacco and Madagascar vanilla bean underscore aromas of ripe red cherries and violets.
  • Buy Wines Online: It reveals enticing aromas of red berries, floral notes, and a hint of earthiness. On the palate, it offers flavors of cherry, raspberry, and subtle spice, supported by silky tannins and bright acidity.
• Conscious by Samuel Robert Pinot Noir
  • Winery: this wine is medium bodied with flavors of cherry, earth, mineral and sweet oak
  • Wine Enthusiast: Don't let the lowball price fool you; this is a fine expression of authentic Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. Sweet black-cherry fruit is laced with cola scents and pretty highlights of mocha—all in a faultless wine of modest proportions. The tannins leave just a hint of bitterness as the wine trails away
• Kirkland Signature Russian River Valley Pinot Noir
  • Bottle: Delicate red fruit aromas combine with sweet rhubarb and Bing cherry laced with cola, spice and earthtones lead into a bright finish
  • CWB: Red fruits on the nose and in the mouth; flavors of cherry, strawberry and cola; some vanilla towards the finish but the wine wraps up quickly in the end
  • RWS: Begins with pleasing aromas of cherry and some assorted minty and herbal notes plus cola, licorice, rhubarb and a touch of earth. Compared to last year some of secondary notes are pumped up a bit in this vintage. While it's not super complex, it is some pretty tasty Pinot. It does need a bit of time to open but once it does it features a smooth mouthfeel with lots of sweet cherry and cola flavors. A bit on the simple side but crowd-pleasing no doubt. More cola and a little bit of tobacco lead into the dry, long finish. 

Outro and how to find The Wine Pair Podcast 43:50

Ok, so, Carmela, it is just about time for us to go, but before we do, we want to thank you very much for listening to us - and if you haven’t done so yet, now would be the perfect time to subscribe to our podcast and also a fantastic time to leave us a nice rating and review on our website or Apple podcasts or other podcast service - and it is an awesome and free way to support us and help us grow listeners.

We would also love to hear from you about a wine you would like us to taste and review. You can, leave a message for us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com and you can join our email newsletter there, too, or you can just email us at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and tell us about a wine you are curious about, or curious what we think of it. And, follow us on Instagram and Threads so you can see pictures of all of these wines we are tasting and reviewing.

Alright, with that, we are going to sign off, so thanks again, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine.

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