The Cab Franco Files
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Cam the Man: Cameron Hughes wine
A few years ago, a man named Cameron Hughes had a great idea. Buy up super premium wine that would ordinarily end up on the bulk market and ultimately blended into not so premium wine, then put it in a bottle as is with his Cameron Hughes label on the bottle. Or, even better, if the wine was bottled but unlabelled, just slap a Cameron Hughes label on it. If the sale of a winery led to orphaned wine, he'd be there to buy up the leftovers. If a product line ended, Cameron Hughes would be there, too. If a winery just need to raise capital or clear inventory, he'd also be there.
There's a name for this sort of middle-man wine trader, a negociant. This is actually quite common in Europe, but Cameron Hughes was the first negociant in America to really tap into the premium market and start bottling the unadulterated good stuff under his own label.
It took a while to get this idea off the ground, but now Cameron Hughes had bottled over 100 "lots" of wines in his Lot Series. Each "lot" originates from a particular region or (anonymous) winery. They're never backblended with lesser wine, so what you see is what you get. If you buy a Cameron Hughes Lot 75 Oak Knoll Cabernet, you know you're getting Cab from a sub-appellation in Napa, probably from a single producer.
Now, as awesome as paying $12 for wine that would cost $30 in its "native" bottle sounds, there are some drawbacks. Cameron Hughes keeps costs down by constantly moving inventory. He bottles then sells the wine at a pretty quick pace. However, some wines really do need some time in the bottle to integrate. Many upper-end producers (i.e. the ones who orphan their wine occasionally) age their wine extensively in new oak and would bottle age even after barrel aging. So in many cases you'll be buying a wine that is very young. But if you can let it rest or decant a young Cameron Hughes wine, you'll typically get something that outperforms the price.
In other cases, the wine really wasn't up to par to go into a $30 bottle. But even in those circumstances you're not going to get a bad deal paying $10 or $15 per bottle. The bottom line is, at the very least, you will get expensive tasting wine since it was made using costly methods even if there's some moderate imbalance in the finished wine.
Here a few Cameron Hughes wines I've tasted over the last year.