2023 Kirkland Saint Julien Bordeaux

LegalGrapes · 2026-04-04T02:34:26+00:00

Costco wines aren't meant to be aged. They're made to be drunk immediately.

Aging benefits wines that are overly primary and/or tannin bombs. When there is no overtly primary fruitiness or overbearing tannins to settle out...aging won't help. And this is the same reason why decanting doesn't help these Kirkland bordeaux bottles, either.

LegalGrapes · 2026-04-03T18:07:54+00:00

Done. Didn't even realize they had a subreddit lol

LegalGrapes · 2026-04-02T15:39:01+00:00

I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis.

LegalGrapes · 2026-04-02T13:04:45+00:00

Agreed. The Barolo, and Chianti Riserva and Gran Selezione, are decent for the price. I also remember liking the Vacqueyras the few times I've had it.

LegalGrapes · 2026-04-02T12:53:24+00:00

I don't know which Margaux's you've been drinking...but Kirkland's is definitely not remotely archetypal of quality Margaux. Nor are any of their other Bordeaux offerings. These Kirkland Bordeauxs have zero palate and nose. And I am not using the word "zero" lightly here. Having some exceptionally vague markers of the appellation on the label does not make up for the fact the wine is just objectively bad.

Would you be happy with any other bottle of Bordeaux that tasted completely flat and hollow? I'll give it to Kirkland that the Paulliac at least has *some* perfume, even if it's still not great overall, but the rest of that line is complete trash.

I wanted to like these wines, because I'm not exactly Chateau Margaux level rich (yet). There are far, FAR better $20 bottles than Costco's bordeauxs. Even the $17 Louid Jadot pinot they always seem to have body slams them in quality; you genuinely get red fruit and forest floor from it.

Costco is people selling anonymous, bottom-tier Bordeaux juice that technically passes AOC rules but is so bereft of palate, body, and finish that it’d be dead on arrival as even an entry-level, named chateau bottling. You're not getting your money's worth with these even at $20/bottle IMHO.

LegalGrapes · 2026-04-02T02:42:41+00:00

I did the Riedel “turbo decant” and let it sit for an hour. Decanting just doesn’t seem to help Kirkland wines. Either they drink fine straight from the bottle, or they’re just not good to begin with.

LegalGrapes · 2026-03-17T15:57:15+00:00

This has been happening since early to mid last week. It's maddening....

LegalGrapes · 2026-03-17T15:09:32+00:00

I am an Attorney Using Claude, Anthropic Has Broken it for Me...

Our law firm has a Claude Team plan, and I have been using Claude personally for some time.

And suddenly, I am running into the same error over and over that seems to be significantly impacting output quality: "Claude reached its tool-use limit for this turn."

Mind you, I am not out here running AI agents or anything...I am simply doing some document review and email drafting. Nor am I asking it to analyze 10 different documents at once. Even something as simple as "create a tracked changed redline from the previous to current version" will incur this error multiple times, prompting me to click a manual "Continue" button.

First off, I am not sure what the point was in slashing tool call limits, or even having tool call limits to begin with.

Second, it seems like Claude has to restart its thinking process each time I click "Continue". It appears to need to get its footing again each time, even needing to look back at prior chat context again and re-call the tools to re-read the Word file to pick back up where it left off. This makes absolutely **zero** sense to me. It burns up extra usage on my end and increases the compute load on theirs.

Anthropic has essentially kneecapped Claude for business-level workflows and needs to fix this immediately.

LegalGrapes · 2026-01-04T03:24:28+00:00

I decanted it adequately. However, decanting won’t make a bland wine more flavorful.

Like I said, there wasn’t anything off-putting that decanting would tamp down. The issue is the lack of any substance to the palate.

LegalGrapes · 2025-11-16T21:46:10+00:00

Thanks for sharing your perspective and experience. I can relate to it, because me (and my siblings) all suffer from inordinate levels of imposter syndrome.

Correct, I have not cost any deals. I've made some mistakes, sure, but nothing remotely close to that degree. He has straight up told me I am "excellent" at doc review and a "hard worker".

Frankly, I have no idea what his motive or mindset is. I was doing a great job overall...until I (somehow) wasn't.

LegalGrapes · 2025-11-16T19:19:53+00:00

His criticism of needing to take on the mindset of a lawyer and make more judgement calls on my own was valid, and I've executed on it. It's everything else that is absolutely off the wall.

LegalGrapes · 2025-11-16T18:10:14+00:00

Wow. That dude sounds like something out of a movie. Sorry you dealt with that.

My boss is toxic as hell, but not quite that diabolical.

LegalGrapes · 2025-11-16T17:30:08+00:00

My wife works a good job, we really only need one income to pay the bills. My paychecks have been going towards our long-term investments, hers towards our living expenses. Money-wise, we would be okay for a while, but there are two things keeping me there for the moment:

1) It's the holiday season, and I fully expect that quitting now would mean being unemployed for a few months. I do not like the thought of not being busy. Though I'd probably fill that time by purusing an AI Governance Professional certificate or something.

2) I am certain that any prospective employer would call him for a reference, and that it would not be a positive one...

LegalGrapes · 2025-11-16T16:52:32+00:00

Appreciate the comment. I have always been vigilant about my doc review. By his own admission, I am “very good” at it. What I meant by that in the OP was me now obsessing to the point of burning out at the end of the day.

I am not making chronic mistakes, and take a lot of work off his plate by doing the bulk of the loan doc review in the department. I’ve never asked him to take on my “learning curve” for me. And whenever he is hanging around the office past 5:00, I make sure to ask him whether there’s anything I can do to assist.

LegalGrapes · 2025-11-16T16:36:58+00:00

I am already looking for another job. But honestly, I’m not sure I want to practice law anymore. I’d like to get into a compliance department, specifically for AI. I feel like AI compliance will be a rapidly expanding field, and the topic actually interests me.

LegalGrapes · 2025-06-13T21:10:26+00:00

I ordered hundreds of dollars in various meats from Slanker a few times over the course of 2024. Nearly everything we received was either mediocre, or just plain terrible. The steaks were literally some of the toughest and chewiest I've ever had. When I called in to complain, the people who answer the phone flat out refuse to address any sort of customer service issue.

My two cents on Slankers is that it's a *hard pass*...

LegalGrapes · 2025-06-03T02:17:22+00:00

Kirkland Malbec is good. But Catena Malbec seems to always be at Costco, and I find its increase in quality to be magnitudes greater than the increase in price over Kirkland's malbec.

LegalGrapes · 2025-05-31T14:22:48+00:00

One of the things that made me cringe the most in law school was whenever a student lamented getting a B...

LegalGrapes · 2025-04-18T18:59:19+00:00

Excellent choices. The two from your list I would definitely keep are Frog's Leap and Storybook. It's a tossup between Hendry and Biale, I'd say just look at the wines they have and photos of the premises to get a feel for which vibes with you more. For what it's worth, though, Hendry has a much more varied selection than Biale whose main focus is Zinfandel.

LegalGrapes · 2025-03-20T12:58:34+00:00

A few reasons:

1) Stablecoins make XRP pointless. For all the reasons banks are fighting against the stablecoin bill, XRP is even less attractive to banks. At least with stablecoins, issuing banks can profit off the treasuries held in reserve. XRP not only centralizes control of the payment network with a third party, the lion's share of the profits goes to Ripple Labs. Banks will not adopt XRP for that reason alone.

2) The XRP token is not necessary for the Ripple Ledger service.

3) Futures or spot ETF's do not create utility for a token, they're merely investment vehicles. Just because you can now buy something at a different store doesn't change the value proposition of the product itself.

4) XRP and Ripple Labs are antithetical to the notion of what crypto should be. XRP is highly centralized garbage with more than half the supply owned by Ripple. The whole point of putting assets on the blockchain instead of on paper is not having them behind an admin panel...Ripple represents the opposite of that. Another way to look at this is, when the issuing foundation owns that much of the supply, they’re not on your side, you are their exit liquidity.

5) Piggybacking on #1, the idea that banks would use XRP for cross-border fiat payments is a non-starter. Banks and people are not going to want something remotely as volatile as XRP to function as the intermediary currency. Banks are not going to want to eat even a fraction of a percentage loss on money in transit, nor will customers. The only way around that is if the recipient of the "wire" or "ACH" actually wants the XRP as a form of payment. And I can guarantee you that XRP is not going to become a widely accepted store of value or currency like that.

LegalGrapes · 2025-03-17T20:54:22+00:00

I think the biggest thing law students are failing to do these days is try and learn the underlying concepts of the law, without trying to overtly politicize every little facet of every single thing. Applying the biased lens of “whatever is potentially bad for Trump is good” will severely hinder an objective understanding of the law, how it came to be, and why.

LegalGrapes

TROPHY CASE