The continued evolution of the global wine marketplace has made many things possible for many people. Small regional wineries that couldn't survive, let alone exist twenty years ago are now thriving because there are folks out there like me and you that are looking for just the type of wines they are producing. Likewise, the proliferation of estateless wineries (bonded, licensed wineries that own no land and may even rent their winemaking facilities) has exploded in California in particular. Finally, a relatively recent phenomenon for California and the US (though old news to the negociants in France) has surfaced in what I will call surplus winemakers. These folks don't buy grapes to make into wine, they buy wine to make into wine.

ch.logo.pngMany consumers are unaware of the large amounts of wine that get made but never get bottled and sold to consumers. This wine is instead sold, by the barrel, so to speak, to other businesses who do everything from make vinegar to make those hotel branded bottles you will sometimes get in your suite. Increasingly, however, there are a whole class of folks who are searching out that surplus wine and turning around to bottle it themselves.

Cameron Hughes is exactly that type of guy. He's got a long background in wine sales, and has lots of connections to wineries as a result. Over the years he heard many times from winemakers who had multiple barrels of finished wine that they couldn't sell for some reason -- either there was no demand in the marketplace for it, or for some reason the winery ended up with more wine than they wanted. At a certain point the message sank in -- there was lots of wine out there, and some of it was really good wine, and it was available dirt cheap.

So what's an enterprising guy to do? Cameron decided to start a label to sell these wines at what he calls an "extreme value level." Though he won't ever advertise them this way, in public hell affectionately refer to them as "ten buck chuck."

His wines, made from vineyards and wineries that by contract cannot be disclosed, and blended by winemakers who by contract cannot be identified, are designed to have an extremely high QPR -- or Quality-to-Price-Ratio. Typically, the wine that Cameron bottles would sell for two to three times the price he puts them on the market for.

Cameron has been so successful with these wines that he has now gotten to the point where he's not only being opportunistic and snapping up wine when he hears about it, but is proactively working with winemakers to arrange for their excess juice, and to have some of them help him with final blends.

Sound too good to be true? Well, there's a slight catch to all this. You can't exactly run down to any local wine shop and pick these wines up. Most of Cameron's inventory is sold to Costco and to other large retailers in Chicago and on the East Coast.

And are the wines any good? This is the second batch of Cameron's wines I've tasted, and I continue to be amazed at the value his wines present. These wines are mostly jammy and fruit forward, which is a conscious choice on Cameron's part, and which may be responsible for why they fly off the shelf at Costco, but they may not be to everyone's taste. Compared to nearly every other wine in their price range at your local supermarket, however, they are truly excellent buys.

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