K&L: $20 or Less Challenge

September 29, 2009 by John 1 Comment

K&L Wine Merchants

Quick:  you’ve got to pick up a couple of bottles for a dinner party, and want to spend about $20 per bottle (or less).  Short of stocking up on bottles at your corner bodega, where would you go?  While BevMo! might seem like a good stand by, let me throw you a curve ball:  K&L Wine Merchants (SOMA:  4th & Brannan) has some of the best bargains in the entire Bay Area.

K&L might best be known as the go-to place for higher-end,  hard-to-find wines, but it also happens to be a great place to find quality, value wines. I put them to the test on Sunday, and they passed with flying colors.

I was planning on serving a hearty entree for a “Mad Men” dinner/viewing party, so wanted a tasty red to round out the meal.  Lucky for me, K&L had a really exciting selection of syrahs, all for under $20, including two harder to find selections from David O’Reilley, of Owen Roe fame:

• 2007 Owen Roe Ex Umbris Syrah (Columbia Valley, WA) – $19.99
• 2006 Corvidae “Lenore” Syrah (Columbia Valley, WA) – $12.99

I decided to go with these two in order to do a Pacific Northwest tasting — the “Lenore” being particularly fitting for a “Mad Men” night given the literary allusion to Edgar Allen Poe’s classic, “The Raven.”

But K&L had even more to offer.  Either of the following also would have been great selections, and tremendous values:

• 2006 Copain L’hiver Syrah (Mendocino) – $12.99 [From all-star winemaker Wells Guthrie]
• 2007 Boom Boom Syrah (Washington State) – $14.99 [From rock-star winemaker Charles Smith, recently voted Food & Wine magazine’s winemaker of the year]

Moral of the story:  K&L might well be my new favorite wine store–not only for special occasions, but for everyday wines, too.

PS – K&L also has a great mobile site:  m.klwines.com.  Check it out.