The Wine Pair Podcast

Are Layer Cake Wines Any Good?

• The Wine Pair • Season 1 • Episode 161

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We had mixed expectations about Layer Cake Wines. On the one hand, Layer Cake was started by a winemaker who produces some of the most expensive and highest rated wines in the U.S. via their Hundred Acre label. On the other hand, “layer cake” is hardly a name one would give a sophisticated, serious wine. So which one is it? In this latest episode, we try to give Layer Cake wines an honest shot to impress us, reserving our judgment until we had the chance to taste them. We’ll let you judge for yourself, but in our opinion, these are not good wines, or at least not wines for anyone who is serious about wine. And maybe that’s the point. Very similar to our experience with Josh Wines, we think you can do much better at their price point. Wines reviewed in this episode: 2022 Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay, 2021 Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon.

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Show Notes

Episode 161: Are Layer Cake Wines Any Good?  00:00

Hello! And welcome to The Wine Pair Podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and my wine pairing partner in crime, Carmela. And we are The Wine Pair! 

If you are new to our podcast, here is a quick orientation! Each week, we explore a different wine varietal or blend or even brand — like Vermentino or Priorat or Layer Cake wines — and we dive into just what these wines are, what makes them special, and why finding new wines to learn about is so fun.  Our goal is to help you expand your wine knowledge in a fun way that is understandable and accessible to regular people, not just wine nerds!  We also taste and review 2-3 wines under $25 each, and share our scores and recommendations to help you find great wines without breaking the bank. So, thank you so much for joining us! And, we are proud to say that Decanter Magazine calls us fun, irreverent, chatty, and entertaining

Carmela, we are back to one of our regular episodes this week, and I just want to say that we had a great time last week visiting our son and his girlfriend, and we got treated like royalty at the new tasting room for Chehalem Wines in Willamette Valley in Oregon, and Chehalem is part of the Stoller family of Oregon wines. A big shout out to Hannah at Chehalem who invited us and treated us so nicely. And the tasting room is stunning. View of Mount Hood to take your breath away.  We went to another winery and didn’t have such a hot time, but we are not going to bad mouth them on our show - HOWEVER, if you want to know who they were, just reach out to use and we’ll tell you. 

All right, back to the topic of the day. Carmela, we haven’t done this for a while, but we are going to explore a specific, well known, easy to find, and reasonably priced wine brand to see if we can advise our listeners on whether they should seek out these wines or not. About a year ago, we did an episode on Josh wines, and the Google machine seems to like it a lot. A lot of people have clicked on our episode about Josh wines, and we found that our impression of Josh wines, which some people consider their favorite go-to “splurge” wine to be merely meh, and we felt that there are other wines that are similarly priced that are much better. 

So, today, we are going to see if we feel the same way about Layer Cake wines or not. Layer Cake wines are relatively ubiquitous in the US on grocery store and big wine retailer shelves. We are not sure if you find them outside of the US or not, so we would love to hear from you if you are aware of them. 

Depending on what scale you use, which we will talk about in a minute, Layer Cake wines fall in the Premium, Mid-Tier Premium, or Popular Premium category, which is kind of where most of the wines we review on this podcast fall into. Since we have moved our price cap up to $25 from where it was before a $20, we are starting to include what the industry might call the Super Premium category, but not yet in the Ultra Premium or Luxury tier.

So, as a public service announcement, let’s break down the tiers and come up with some well-known brands that may fall into each tier. 

  • Value Brands are generally in the under $10 range, are of questionable quality, tend to be mass produced, and are wines we try to avoid when possible. Let’s just say, I would prefer just to drink beer. Some brands you may know include Barefoot, Yellow Tail, Sutter Home, and Cupcake. 
  • Mid-Tier Premium brands are generally between $10-$20, and are usually also mass produced wines from big brands, and at the higher end are getting into supposedly better quality, sometimes single vineyard, and supposedly more carefully crafted. You can sort of delineate in this tier once you get about $16 or so. Brands in this tier include Layer Cake which is our wine of the day as well as Josh Cellars, Meomi, Kendall Jackson, and La Crema. For some, these are on the more expensive end and may be considered splurge wines. I tend to believe they are overpriced and on the sweeter end, but we are going to give Layer Cake a fair shot.
  • Super Premium and Ultra Premium wines are in the $20-$50 range, and there is a break between Super Premium which tends to cap out at $30 and the wines above that. Many of the brands in the lower tier show up in these higher tiers as well, but with supposedly better crafted wines and/or better sourced “reserve” wines. Brands include Duckhorn, Justin, Beringer’s Knights Valley wines, and Joel Gott, as well as wines like Kendall-Jackson’s Reserve. These are your literal top shelf wines that show up on the top shelf of the store. 
  • Beyond that, you are getting into the Luxury Tier which includes wines like Caymus, Silver Oak, Opus One, and other more expensive wines that, if you can find them at your local grocery store, are usually locked up in a glass case! They will not make it on our show. 


So, Layer Cake wines fall squarely in the Premium Tier at about $15, which is a price point where we think people are expecting a bit more quality and a better wine drinking experience. I know for us, once we get past $20, we feel we should be drinking a wine that is going to be a pretty darn good experience. So, where will Layer Cake fall? That is the mystery we are going to unfold. And we have two Layer Cake wines that we are going to taste and review today to solve that mystery, and we are going to learn a bit more about where Layer Cake wines come from and why they are called Layer Cake in the first place since they ain’t cake . . . 

But first . . . we have to do our shameless plug.

Thank you for listening to us and for supporting our show, and if you haven’t  had the chance to do so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast  - it is a free way to support us, and then you never have to miss a show!  - and a huge thank you to all of you who have subscribed already! 

And, another great way to support is to leave a nice rating and review on our website or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or other podcast app so we can continue to grow our listeners.

You can also follow us and see pictures of the wines we are tasting and trying today and weird AI pictures I like to make on Instagram at thewinepairpodcast, we are now on Bluesky as well if you are curious and we post differently on there than we do on Instagram, and you can contact us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com, and you can sign up for our email newsletter there and get news and food and wine pairing ideas and more! And, on our website you can now find links in a section called “Shop Wine” where you can buy the wines that we rate as buys in each episode. 

And we want to make content you care about and you like, so send us a note and tell us what you like and don’t like, if there are wines you want us to try or wine making areas of the world you are curious about - and we’ll take care of it! joe@thewinepairpodcast.com. And we have a few shout outs this week:

  • A shout out to Alejandro on Instagram who has been DM’ing us about wines he likes, like a nice Priorat and Pinot Noir. We really appreciate hearing from you, Alejandro - known as Pepitoespada on Instagram
  • A shout out to Wine101Hamden on Instagram for reaching out and letting us know just found our podcast and like it. Thank you!
  • A shout out to Dr. Burt who reached out about our minerality episode. We had not heard from him in a while on BlueSky so great to hear, and of course our BlueSky buddies Tips2LiveBy, WA Wine Girl, and Amy Leland
  • Keep the notes and DMs coming, we love to hear from you! And we always respond!


And, as we do every week, we’ll tell you someone we think you should recommend The Wine Pair Podcast to - because the best way for us to grow listeners is when you tell your family and friends about us - your endorsement by word of mouth is just so valuable. This week, we want you to recommend us to anyone who drinks Layer Cake wine or shows up with Layer Cake wines and tends to say things like “I don’t know, but I like this wine” because they may be curious to hear what we think!


RESEARCH ARTICLES AND LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE



Topic: What’s the Tea About Layer Cake Wines? 13:02

Ok, Carmela. It’s time to spill the tea about Layer Cake wines, and if you are skep, to find out a bit more about them. So, what the fuck are Layer Cake wines all about, and aren’t you curious about why are they called Layer Cake?

Layer Cake wines was founded in 2004 so they are still fairly new, and they were founded by a dude named Jayson Woodbridge and he was inspired by his grandfather who compared wines to layer cakes because they have layers of complexity. More specifically, his grandfather believed that the vineyard soils were like a layer cake and that properly made wine from those would have delicious layers of flavor and aromas. The name is also supposed to generate images of comfort, richness, and deliciousness. So, that is where the name came from. Do you believe it?

So, another question for you. When you hear the name Layer Cake wine, what do you think of?  Do you think about wine? For me, I think first of something very sweet and I do not associate it positively with wine. I get this sense of being not very sophisticated, and probably made for people who don’t take wine very seriously. That’s just me.

The winery makes some pretty typical varietals, and, interestingly, some less common ones for an American winery. Typical varietals include a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, a couple of California Chardonnays, a Pinot Noir from California’s Central Coast, and a Malbec from Argentina. None of these are surprising choices, and I would expect all of them to be pretty fruit forward and pretty oaky. The reason why I think that is because the information I have about these wines is that they are generally aged in French oak, so I expect these to be very California style punch-you-in-the-face wines. But we will see.

They also have a few wines that are less common, and what is also interesting is that they make several wines that are global - including the Malbec as well as a Primitivo from Puglia - which remember is Zinfandel - a Shiraz from Australia - which remember is the same as Syrah - and a Garanachea from Spain - which remember is the same as a Grenache. So, while they make these wines, they are not varietals that are grown in California. So, that is extra interesting to me.

They only do 100% varietals, too - meaning they do not do any blends, which is also kind of unique. They don’t seem to be focused on organic or sustainable wines, but they do say that they work directly with the farmers who they source the grapes from, and they also say that the grapes are handpicked, separated, and fermented with care. Which is nice.

Now, Carmela, depending on who you ask, the marketing team at Layer Cake would have you believe that they over deliver on quality for their price, and they are considered “wallet-wise.” I did not make that up. That is the marketing speak that is on their website, so you know it has to be true. Their founder calls them affordable luxuries, and aims to create a wine that costs $15 and tastes like $50. So, we’ll see, but that is setting the expectations high!

Interestingly, Jayson Woodbridge is behind bothLayer Cake and the high-end, "cult" California Cabernet Sauvignon called Hundred Acre, which makes some very expensive wines - in the $150 - $750 range. They claim to use the same winemaking team and techniques to make Layer Cake. So, if this wine is any good, it could be a steal.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Layer Cake is a mass production winemaking company. While they are not the biggest winery in the US by any stretch, they do make about 450,000 cases per year which puts them in the large category, but not the mega size.

The winery has actually been bought and sold repeatedly, which is usually not awesome. In 2017 they were purchased by Vintage Wine Estates, and then in 2024 they were sold to Total Beverage Solutions. The risk whenever a brand is bought and sold, especially when it happens often in a relatively short period of time, is that there can be serious impact on the quality. It would not be surprising for me that people who frequently buy the wine may be noticing some changes in the quality or taste of the wine. Because we have no experience with this wine, we would be curious to find out from any of you other there in listening land if you have noticed any changes.

So, on that note, I think it’s time to learn a little more about the specific wines we are drinking today. Whaddya say?


Layer Cake Wines We Chose for This Episode 21:22

As usual, all of the wines we have chosen for this episode are under $25, and all of them should be relatively easy to find - you should be able to find them at any decent sized store with a decent sized wine selection, maybe even your local 7-11. These are popular, mass produced wines, which is why we are covering them in this episode. 

The first wine we are going to drink is the 2022 Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay. Now, I will say, we are trying not to be biased, but this is exactly the kind of wine I would never, ever buy because the name in and of itself makes me nervous that this is going to be one of those overly oaked Chardonnays, but we have to be open-minded and give it a chance. I’m not going to lie, though, I am coming in pretty skep about this wine.

It was hard to find out a ton about this wine or really any of the Layer Cake wines, and even the Layer Cake website was strangely no help. However, one website called Lisbon Liquors which is evidently a store in Newark, New Jersey had this to say: they claim there is minimal intervention in the winemaking process as well as a gentle harvesting and aging process. So, not sure where they got the info from, but we are going to believe them. 

The bottle says that the wine is from California, but the Lisbon Liquors website gets a little more specific about where the grapes are from, noting that they come from cooler climate vineyards in Monterey and Santa Barbara - and Santa Barbara is where the wines from California I like best are from. They also say the wine is aged in 3 year old air dried French oak, and as we have said many times, French oak is more mellow than American oak. They do not say if the oak is then toasted, because that will have a significant impact on the flavor - adding more caramel and vanilla - so we’ll see if we can tell if it is or not. They also don’t say if the wine undergoes malolactic fermentation which is typically done for California Chards because it cuts down on the acidity of wine. I would expect that they do, but not sure. For us, we prefer wines that do not undergo malolactic fermentation because we like high acid wines, but the style of California Chardonnays is to kill the acidity.

So, still a lot of questions not answered, but we’ll move onto our second wine, and that is the 2021 Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon. Now, those of you who know us and listen to us with some frequency know we would generally never choose a Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, and never together because these are just not our go-to wines, but we know a lot of people out there like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, especially from California, despite our best efforts to convince you that you should avoid them, so it just felt like if we are going to review Layer Cake wines, we should choose the wines most people are most likely to try. 

I will give these wines one shout out from the get-go, though, and that is they are both screw caps, which we really like. Again, not super easy to find out much about this wine, but ChatGPT helped. Again, this is just labeled as a California wine, but ChatGPT says that the grapes are sourced from Paso Robles and other Central Coast vineyards, and that it is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. Just on a side note, because you may be wondering, a wine can be called a single varietal wine in the US if it is made from at least 75% of a single grape, so the fact that it is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon is significant. 

They also say the grapes are hand-picked and fermented in small batches. They do call out that the wine does undergo malolactic fermentation and that it is aged in a mix of French and American oak barrels for 12 months, so I expect this to be a pretty oaky wine that is going to be a mouth coater with a big body and mouthfeel versus a sleek wine. 

I will say that in the descriptions of winemaking, they are calling out some techniques that would be expected for more carefully made wines vs. mass wine production, and the bottles mention that the wines are 100% hand-crafted, although that sounds like marketing speak without a real definition, like are some wine foot-crafted, or elbow-crafted, or electronic claw crafted, I don’t know, BUT I am really willing to give these wines a fair shot. 

Ok, I think that is enough information - let’s get to drinking! We’ll take a quick break and be right back. And, if you have these wines or similar wines, drink along with us to get some participation points, which you can trade-in for free stickers. You just need to send me an email with your mailing address, and I will get those “I drink with The Wine Pair Podcast” stickers over to you!

LINKS TO SOURCES FOR THESE SPECIFIC WINES



2022 Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay, 2021 Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon Wine Tasting, Pairing, and Review 27:06

Wine: Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay
Region: California
Year: 2022
Price: $13.97
Retailer: wine.com
Alcohol: 13.5%
Grapes: Chardonnay
Professional Rating: Vivino 3.7

What we tasted and smelled in this Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay:

  • Color: Darkish yellow, yellow straw
  • On the nose: Buttery, creamy, vanilla extract, caramel, toffee, kettle corn, pineapple, apple, banana, smells rich, orange Otter Pop, orange creamsicle, vanilla and orange sherbet cup
  • In the mouth: Artificial vanilla extract, orange sherbet, very rich, creamsicle, oak barrel bitter, so big it is almost a meal, very sweet, almost doesn’t taste like wine, strong aftertaste, flat orange soda


Food to pair with this Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay: A cocktail wine, nuts, ice cream, avoid savory foods, almost a dessert wine, salty foods
 
As a reminder on our rating scale, we rate on a scale of 1-10, with no half points, where 7 and above means that we would buy it, and 4 and below means that we are likely to pour it down the sink, and a 5 or 6 means we are likely to drink it and finish it, but we are probably not going to buy it. 

Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay Wine Rating: 

  • Joe: 2/10
  • Carmela: 5/10


Wine: Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon
Region: California
Year: 2021
Price: $14.97
Retailer: wine.com
Alcohol: 13.7%
Grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon
Professional Rating: Vivino 3.6

What we tasted and smelled in this Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon:

  • Color: Lighter red than expected for a Cabernet Sauvignon, not opaque
  • On the nose: Smoke, dark cherry, pomegranate, old basement, wet cement, tar, alcohol, potpourri, flowery, grape juice
  • In the mouth: Perfume, chewing tobacco, black strap molasses, rose potpourri, artificial cherry, a lot of tannic, almost doesn’t taste like a Cabernet Sauvignon, a slap you in face wine (rather than punch), taste like artificial sweetener is in it


Food to pair with this Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon: Cheeseburger, grilled cheese pizza, stinky cheese, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon Wine Rating: 

  • Joe: 3/10
  • Carmela: 3/10



Which one of these are you finishing tonight?

  • Carmela: Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay
  • Joe: Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon



Taste profiles expected from Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay and Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon  42:05

  • Layer Cake Creamy Chardonnay
    • Typical oaky: Rich aromas of peach, mango, and lemon, accompanied by notes of vanilla and butter,  toasted bread. Flavors of butter, vanilla, baking spices, stone fruit, underlying note of apple or citrus. 
    • Winery: Creme Brulee, vanilla cream, candied apple, ripe juicy pear, all come together in a rich mouth full of flavors. The flavors are rich and have generous candied caramel, baked apple pie, buttered toast, juicy fruit and a long crisp finish.
  • Layer Cake Cabernet Sauvignon
    • Typical California: Black Cherry, licorice, black pepper, vanilla, black currant, black berry, plum, tobacco, violet. 
    • Winery: Perfumed with violets and wild berries, it shows strong varietal characters and rich, ripe plum fruit. Seamless and elegant, this wine shows big black fruit on the palette, fine grain soft tannins and a long coffee chocolate finish.
    • Buy Wines Online: The wine opens with a bouquet of ripe dark fruits like blackberry, cassis, and plum, which are seamlessly integrated with hints of mocha, vanilla, and a touch of oak. This leads to a full-bodied and rich palate, where the luscious fruit flavors are balanced by notes of dark chocolate and a subtle spice, creating a layered and satisfying taste experience. The wine's robust tannins and smooth finish make it a delight to drink.


What is the verdict on Layer Cake wine? 44:00
We are going to stick with cake and not drink Layer Cake wine. There are better mass produced wines out there. Not very good, and you can do a lot better for $15 bucks!


Outro and how to find The Wine Pair Podcast 45:20

Ok, so, Carmela, it’s time for us to go, but before we do, we want to thank you very much for listening to us - and if you haven’t done so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast and also a fantastic time to leave us a nice rating and review on our website or Apple podcasts or other podcast app - and it is an awesome and free way to support us and help us grow listeners.

We would also love to hear from you about a wine you would like us to taste and review. You can leave a message for us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com and you can join our email newsletter there - and if you missed our latest newsletter, email me and I will send it to you. You can do that by reaching out at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com. And tell us some things you want to hear us do, or not hear us do!

Alright, with that, we are going to sign off, so thanks again, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine.

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