“You've got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince in a $10 bottle of wine, but it’s possible,” advises Bruce Cass. He should know, having puckered up for plenty of samples—sometimes as many as 200 a day—in his career as a wine educator and judge. Cass, shown here savoring a fine 14-year-old cabernet, was a psych major and wide receiver at Stanford who taught high school chemistry and math in Palo Alto before committing to his true love, wine. Over the past 30 years, he has led wine appreciation classes throughout the Bay Area (including at Stanford), judged state and international competitions, hauled hoses at wine crushes in Australia and South Africa, and started the nonprofit Pacific Rim Wine Education Center. Last year, he edited the Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America.
As for those $10 princes—any recommendations? Cass shares two: Amber Hill’s 1997 Cabernet and the 2000 Vintage Lindemann’s Padthaway Chardonnay.
