Striking a Match
Several decades ago I met an enthusiastic young couple with a new winery located in the Dunnigan Hills of California's Yolo County. No one had heard of Yolo County in those days or, for that matter, these days. Yet, that young couple, John and Lane Giguiere, built their new winery, R.H. Phillips, into a national brand that reached 750,000 cases in sales by the time they sold the brand in the year 2000. What made the Giguieres so successful was that they made wines that were great values and then took them to market in some of the most fun, innovative packaging in the industry. The labels got people to try the wines, but once they tasted what was inside they were hooked because of the quality. Having not tasted the Phillips brands after their departure, I have no idea if that tradition has been continued.
Like most entrepreneurs, once they attained their success, they longed to get back to what got them into the business in the first place. For the Giguieres this meant getting back to, "making wine again, instead of making sales forecasts." Their new venture, Crew Wine Company, is taking them back to their winemaking roots in the Dunnigan Hills, with some side trips to the Russian River and Mendocino. The several brands under the Crew umbrella include: Mossback, which features pinot and chardonnay from the Russian River; Sawbuck, which offers chardonnay, cabernet and malbec for around $10; and Matchbook, that is built on the Giguiere's estate vineyards in the Dunnigan Hills.
There is a growing buzz for Spain's most important variety, tempranillo, up-and-down the West Coast. Oregon's Abacela Vineyards has been making an outstanding tempranillo for years and there's even a new trade association for tempranillo producers called the Tempranillo Advocates Producers and Amigos Society or TAPAS, which just had their first convention last August in Napa, where more than thirty American tempranillo producers shared their wines and exchanged ideas. The Giguieres and their Matchbook wines are in the forefront of this New World tempranillo revolution offering two excellent wines from this variety that, as you would expect from them, are also good values.
Their 2006 Matchbook Dunnigan Hills Tempranillo is just simply delicious. Round, deeply fruity with just enough tannin to hold its edge, this is a wine that just draws you in and invites another sip. There's big fruit here, but it's no simple fruit bomb. At only $15 a bottle, this tempranillo is a great bargain. The 2005 Matchbook Dunnigan Hills Tinto Rey (43% syrah, 40% tempranillo, 7% malbec and 6% petit verdot) is a bigger, more powerful wine with the syrah showing through in the gamy, butcher shop highlights in the nose and on the palate. It's deep and rich with a bitter chocolate backbone to balance the extracted, ripe blackberry fruit. While these wines are big, they're not monsters. Both are under 14% alcohol and are the better for it as these are two wines you can really enjoy with food. Match these wines with chops, steaks and sausages hot off the grill.
The name Matchbook came from John Giguiere's childhood tendency to play with matches. With their new brand Matchbook he may have started another fire.
Tualatin Treasure Hunt
There seems to be an accepted treasure map for pinot noir. You follow the clues and the dotted line and, arrive at the "X" and the treasure will be yours, with a little digging. The components of the map are simple and the endpoint is always a small, artisanal producer. However, it seems this map can sometimes blind us to treasures somewhat easier to attain.
So it was with only moderate expectations that I opened a bottle of pinot noir from one of Oregon's largest producers. After all, big guys don't make great pinot noir: right? Apparently that's just plain wrong as the 2006 Willamette Valley Vineyards Pinot Noir, Tualatin Estate Vineyard, is easily one of the very best Oregon pinot noirs I have tasted from the difficult 2006 vintage, or any other recent vintage for that matter. This is an exceptional American pinot noir that, unlike most, doesn't just offer simple rich dark cherry fruit, but exhibits real complexity. Starting with a perfect pinot hue of translucent ruby and the slightest touch of garnet, it then offers that most seductive of pinot noir noses: smooth wild strawberry fruit is laced with those funky, earthy aromas like mushrooms, truffles, dried leaves and, yes, a bit of the merde the French so lovingly refer to when discussing the nuances of Burgundy. What this wine is, most of all, is interesting as it's not dominated by simple ripe fruit, alcohol or wood, but the terroir of their Tualatin Estate Vineyard. The wine is unique because the vineyard is unique and, most of all, because winemaker Forrest Klaffke lets it retain its distinctive personality. This is an outstanding Oregon pinot noir that will please those that cut their teeth on Burgundy instead of California.
The 2006 vintage was difficult for Oregon's winemakers with all-to-many making wines exhibiting candied fruit characteristics and unbalanced alcohol levels. This wine is an exciting exception to that rule.
We're Drinking More Wine
“Millennials, Baby Boomers and Hispanics are helping the industry overall. For example, Millennials, which constitute about 70 million people, are more willing to experiment with bottles at lower price points because they “are not as sophisticated about wine as proceeding generations.”Millennials are not as “sophisticated about wine as proceeding generations”? You have to be kidding me! Whoever wrote that was not there when we Baby Boomers started to drink wine. We knew less than nothing and there were few places to learn. Our parents never drank wine, there was no Internet and Blogs to learn from, there really weren’t any wine publications, no wine bars and few wine shops outside of the largest cities. We drank Mateus, Blue Nun, Tyrolia, Riunite and Hearty Burgundy. It seems to me that new wine drinkers today are drinking a little better than that.
Many Millennials grew up with their parents drinking wine at the table and that’s a major difference. They’re comfortable with wine as a beverage and, if anything, are less snobby about wine and less afraid to make a mistake than their Baby Boomer parents. The Baby Boomers may have been the wine pioneers for Americans, but it is the Millennials that are making it part of daily life in the European tradition. The explosion of wine blogs, most penned by Millennials, well represents this weaving of wine into our culture as, instead of relying on the voices of few wine gurus, hundreds of young wine lovers are sharing the pleasure and excitement of their discovery of the world of wine.
We’re just entering the golden age of wine drinking in the United States and the Millennials are leading the way. As a Baby Boomer, I plan on enjoying the ride.
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1982 Château Cheval Blanc
That's not good enough for you? How about Trotanoy 1970, Haut Brion 1982 or Lafite: 1970, 1976, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2003. These are just a few of the wines being offered in an upcoming auction by Hart, Davis and Hart in Chicago. Literally thousands of bottles are being sold and the list, offered in a hard cover book exceeding one hundred pages, offers the very best of Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhone, Italy and California. Owner John Hart, who I have known for almost thirty years, is one of the top rare and fine wine professionals in the country and his firm was selected to offer for auction The Fox Cellar, which includes the wines above and seemingly countless others. They will be offered for auction over two days, September 19th and 20th. Included in the event is a sumptuous lunch at Chicago's famous Tru Restaurant, where the auction is held.
President Paul Hart recounts in the auction book his first visit to the cellar as they prepared for the auction. There he saw more than 1,000 bottles of Domaine de la Romanee Conti, 65 cases of Petrus, 95 cases of Château Marqaux, 150 cases of Mouton, 90 cases of Haut-Brion, 120 cases of Latour, 45 cases of Cheval Blanc and 130 cases of Lafite. What most of us can never comprehend is all of this wine is owned by a person. One guy bought all of this and more than we can imagine and built a place to keep it. Even with the thousands of bottles that Hart, Davis and Hart are offering in this auction only a portion of the Fox Cellar is being offered. He is keeping more than he can ever drink and still offering up over one hundred pages of the world's most famous wines for sale.
If you've ever wondered why these wines sell for such stratospheric prices, this cellar is a prime example. All around the planet obsessed collectors amass cellars with far more wine in them than not only they, but their heirs can drink before their bottles turn into a pale reflection of the glorious nectars they once contained. Wines like these are no longer wines, but things to be possessed as a symbol of success and power. That's why they cost what they do. There is something about the acquisition of 1,440 bottles of Latour or 1,560 bottles of Lafite by an individual that is offensive. Like great art hidden from the public in private collections instead of being shared with all as part of our human patrimony, some things are just too important to all of us too be hoarded away by Scrooge.
Fortunately these gems are being liberated before they fade into feeble old age. I cannot overstate how exceptional many of these wines are and experiencing them at this state of maturity is like seeing the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper for the first time. They are not beverages, but art. Like great art, these bottles are not cheap and the risk in purchasing them is not insignificant. Bottles of 1982 Cheval Blanc can be corked too. In such a situation you need someone to guide you and I can think of no better guide than John Hart and his compatriots at Hart, Davis and Hart. Over the decades, John has devoted himself with passion and rigid ethical standards to bringing wines to his customers in pristine condition. If you're going to spend this kind of money, John is someone to depend on.
Most of us will rarely or ever buy, much less drink such wines, but this is the world that Lafite and Latour live in and why they cost what they do. Even if you're not buying, taking a look at this web site for this auction as it's a real peep show for wine voyeurs. I guess great wine is like pornography, you know it when you see it: and this is it.
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Hail Hits Brunello
First the scandal and now this, it's been a tough year in Montalcino.
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Burn Baby, Burn
Over the last several days I've tasted four wines sporting 14.8% or so alcohol. They were two pinots, a merlot and a sangiovese all from the West Coast. It just doesn't work. These wines burn. Wines for the table that push or exceed 15% alcohol just don't cut it. They're out of balance and they give that burning tingle on the palate that works great with whiskey, but destroys wine. I know people love to point to Amarone when this topic comes up, but Amarone is more a wine for cheese and cigars than something for lamb chops or pasta. I know the hedge fund guys love Amarone with big steaks, but the honest truth is that match sucks and they like it only because Amarone is the only wine they can taste after a couple of martinis. However, Amarone has a lot more going for it than the American wines I just tasted because of its unique production method, which provides the deep fruit extract required to handle all that alcohol. It's a one of kind wine that can soar in the right situation: the main course not being one of them.
American producers need to get their alcohol levels under control. It is destroying not only their wines, but those that drink them. Yes you can have some wonderful wines with higher alcohol levels, but when it comes to food, which is what wine should be all about, when you're closer to 15% than 14% you're over the legal limit. Consumers should seriously consider putting the bottle back on the shelf when they see 14.5% and up on the label. Not that those wines can never be good, but the chances are that if you buy them you'll get burned.
Picnic Pair
Somebody just asked me what I was doing on Labor Day. I thought it strange they ask so far in advance, then glancing at the calendar realized it's this coming Monday. How did that happen? Where did summer go?
As we approach the last picnics of the season, I just tasted two wines that are picture perfect picnic wines. Both are from the 2007 vintage and produced by Oregon's Willamette Valley Vineyards. Better yet, they're both priced less than $20. Their clean, crisp and just off-dry Riesling is an absolute charmer. Flowery with a tart citrus bite balanced by a hint of sweetness, this is a wine you can drink with almost anything - or nothing for that matter. At only 10% alcohol, you can actually enjoy a few glasses without worry. Their Whole Cluster Pinot Noir always makes me wonder why more producers don't make this style of wine, which is clearly inspired by the bright, fresh wines of Beaujolais. Using whole clusters of grapes fermented by carbonic maceration, Willamette Valley Vineyards has produced an explosively fruity, silky fruit-forward wine. This is no fruit-bomb, but a zesty, refreshing pinot noir that lends itself to gulps instead of concentration.
In a world where everyone seems to be trying to make Romanée Conti and sell wines priced in the stratosphere, its great to see wineries like Willamette Valley Vineyards pay equal attention to simpler, pleasure-driven wines that can be enjoyed on an everyday basis.
Worth Reading: Reconsidering Sulfites from The San Francisco Chronicle
“Long viewed as a necessary, if unromantic, tool by winemakers, and either ignored or completely misunderstood by consumers, the role of sulfur in wine has become a hot topic. From health issues (see”Debunking myths,” Page F4) to sulfur as a winemaking tool at a time when there’s a push within the industry for wines made with minimal intervention, sulfur dioxide is in the spotlight like never before.”
Milano's Grand Osteria L'Intrepido Wins Wine Spectator Grand Award
“Getting the award, however, isn’t exactly like winning an Olympic medal. This year, nearly 4,500 restaurants spent $250 each to apply or reapply for the Wine Spectator award, and all but 319 won the award of excellence or some greater kudos, Matthews said. That translates to more than $1 million in revenue.”
No extra commentary required…
Heart of Stone
Scott and Lisa Neal are lost on a windy, dusty gravel road in the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range. They didn’t mind being lost as they were more explorers than tourists. Fate was with them as they soon chanced upon a for sale sign behind which spread out what they were looking for: a place to plant a vineyard. It was a promising site with rolling hills, a rainbow of soil types and the warm protection of the lovely, inappropriately named, Muddy Valley. So in 1998 Scott and Lisa started to plant their vineyard. They didn’t yet have a name, but fate was soon to step in again. During a walk on their new property Lisa spotted a large boulder that, with closer examination, revealed its unique heart shape. So Coeur de Terre Vineyard was born and an appropriate name it is as everything about Scott and Lisa’s vineyards and wines truly come from their hearts and the earth on which they live.
Coeur de Terre is one of the undiscovered gems of Oregon winemaking. The passion and precision with which the Neals are pursuing their dream of making great wine is impressive to say the least. In my opinion they have the potential to be one of Oregon’s most interesting and distinctive wine producers. From their lovely new winery and tasting room to their vineyards, which are planted in blocks by soil type and exposure, everything at Coeur de Terre shows their deep connections to the art, nature and science of winemaking.
One of the most promising things about Coeur de Terre is their decision to expand their plantings based on a massal selection. Today, most wineries buy all new vine stocks based on clone and rootstock from commercial nurseries who start the vines and do the grafts. However, despite all the attention to individual clones of pinot noir, most winemakers agree that site always trumps clone. In other words, each clone reacts differently to each site, which makes some sort of an exact clonal stew recipe for great pinot noir a ridiculous fantasy. What you have to do is observe each individual vine, regardless of clone, to see which ones love the micro-climate of your site. A massal selection means that you take cuttings from the most successful vines on your site instead of relying on individual clones purchased from a nursery that may or may not be right for your vineyard. It seems obvious that it would be best to plant your vineyards based on individual vines, regardless of clone, that clearly thrive on the unique micro-climate of your vineyard, but very few vineyards choose this course. This is the laborious process that the Neals have selected to propagate the best vines for their unique site throughout their Coeur de Terre Vineyard. It should be noted while this practice is rare in the new world, it’s not exactly cutting edge as it is the traditional method of propagating wines in Burgundy, a region that has made more than a few exceptional pinot noirs over the centuries.
The current releases from Coeur de Terre are all excellent wines that are well worth laying down as they will certainly improve with bottle age. By today’s standards they are moderately priced and good values. The 2006 Riesling has excellent structure and a brightly fruity dryness. Notes of petrol are just starting to peek out behind the young, fresh citrus aromas and flavors. I think this will develop into an outstanding riesling with a few years in the bottle. The 2006 Estate Pinot Noir is one of the better balanced 06 Oregon pinots you’ll find. It is rich, but firmly structured as you would expect from the McMinnville AVA. Its bigger brother, the 2006 Renelle’s Block Pinot Noir, is a bolder, more powerful version of the 2006 Estate. Both show ripe black fruit with hints of cassis layered over coffee and bitter chocolate highlights. The Renelle’s Block is still a bit closed and brooding and really requires two or three more years of bottle age to show all it has to offer. The 2006 Estate is certainly enjoyable now, but will be much better in a year. It should be noted that production of all of these wines is in the hundreds of cases, not thousands, so supplies are limited and you can expect them to sell out.
Scott describes their wines as, “time and place in a bottle.” I would add soul to that list, for Scott and Lisa have also put their souls into their wines.
Worth Reading: On Restaurant Wine Pricing in the WSJ
"At Legal Sea Foods in Washington, a bottle of 1999 Dom Pérignon Champagne costs $155. At McCormick & Schmick's, less than half a mile away, the same bottle goes for $250. At Carnevino in Las Vegas, it's $450, and at Per Se in New York, it's $595."If anything ever proved that money can't buy good taste it's that diners experiencing the glories of Manhattan's exceptional Per Se Restaurant actually buy Dom Perignon. You also can't help wondering why a restaurant so obsessed with quality would put Dom Perignon on the list in the first place. Of course, If anyone would like to give me $595 for a bottle I'd be pleased to sell them all they want.
Deep Roots
I arrived in Strasbourg with great excitement as it was my first visit to France. After months in Austria and Germany drinking the best beer I’d ever tasted, for my first meal in France I thought I should try the beverage that France was famous for and ordered a pitcher of Edelzwicker in an inexpensive Weinstube. That was it for me. For the next month I drank carafe after carafe of, what I discovered later, was the most ordinary wine the French could make. It mattered not, I loved it.
That was 1973 and I was just a student “studying” in Europe. Lenn Thompson of Lenndevours has asked us to go back to our vinous roots for this fourth anniversary of his creation, Wine Blogging Wednesday, a monthly project focusing the wine blogging community on one topic. The roots of my love of wine run deeply back over thirty years ago to my first adventure outside the United States. After Strasbourg I spent a month traveling around France drinking wine, none of it of any pedigree, but that mattered not to my virgin palate, which, having been nurtured in the puritanical Mid-West had never been exposed to the tawdry culinary temptations indulged in daily by Europeans. The trip concluded with a week in Paris, where being essentially penniless, I subsisted by going to the store and buying the cheapest wine I could buy, which I took to the park surrounding the Eiffel Tower. That park was filled with hippies and for the price of a bottle of wine you could join in luscious communal meals of fresh bread, sausages and whatever people would bring. These simple repasts were the most exciting meals I had ever tasted. In some ways they still are.
Feeling quite sophisticated on my return to America I sauntered into a store to buy a bottle of wine and suddenly realized I didn’t know a thing. These 
wines had actual names! So I purchased The New Signet Book of Wine by Alexis Bespaloff and there was no going back. Soon I was blind tasting jugs of Almaden Claret and Burgundy and rating them: points and all.
Lenn’s topic taking us back to our roots caused me a dilemma. True to the saying, “you can’t step in the same river twice” I realized that the wines that were the roots of my lifelong love of wine don’t exist anymore. From the simplest to the most complex wines no one is making wines that taste like they did thirty years ago. The dramatic advancements in winegrowing and winemaking has transformed wines in the last decades. I’m not just referring to “spoofulated” wines here, but also to natural wines made with minimalist interventions. Even considering that many producers have taken this new knowledge to extremes and are producing exaggerated wines with no individual personality you cannot deny that overall today’s wines are superior to the wines of the past. Faults like Brettanomyces that were accepted in the good-old-days are now rejected by even casual wine drinkers. We are truly in a golden age of wine quality. Wines have never been better, but then every generation since the first wine was enjoyed can make that claim.
While wines may be better than ever, I confess I miss the naivety and openness with which we were able to learn to love wine. These were the days before wine became a big business, before distributor consolidation and before there was a 100 point scale to define not only what wines to drink if you’re in-the-know, but to precisely rank them. In those days a fledgling wine publication called The Connoisseurs Guide to California Wine rated its top wines with one, two or three “puffs”. It was a softer time indeed.
As I enter my fourth decade of paying attention to the wines I drink, I seem to find myself more-and-more drawn to wines that take me back to my roots and the style of the wines I learned to love in the 1970’s. I’m not talking about those simple country wines of my first visit to Europe, although they still have a soft spot in my heart, but to the wines I started to buy after reading Alexis Bespaloff’s wonderful introduction to the wines of the world. Elegant Cru Bourgeois Bordeaux, Côtes du Rhône, Chianti Classico and Dolcetto d’Alba are more likely to grace my dinner table than wines normally found higher on the point scale. I just can’t separate wine from the food I’m having and am more interested in bottles that enhance and elevate my dinner than those that can win blind tastings.
The greatest thing about the wines from my youth is that they aged beautifully, which is something that today’s cleaner, more fruit-driven wines still have to prove. I’m lucky to have a small collection and still have bottles from those days. Recent wines I’ve had from my cellar include a 1981 Girard Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, 1980 Fisher Sonoma Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, 1978 Monsecco Gattinara, 1978 Prunotto Barolo and 1981 Domaine de la Pousse d’Or Volnay 1er Cru Caillerets, which were all wonderful wines. For better or worse, not one of these producers makes wine today in the way they did when they made these wines.
The only way I can go back to my roots is to try to remember how these wines tasted when I first bought them. Yet, I don’t think my memory, filtered through all the wines I’ve tasted since then, is unbiased enough to remember them as they really were. That’s fine with me. I’d rather remember them through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia, just as I do those “wonderful” wines I drank under the Eiffel Tower thirty-five years ago. Those wines were certainly the most important wines I’ve ever tasted as they gave me the gift of every wine I have tasted since then.
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Washington Wines Reach A New High
Wine-makers turn to marijuana
By Shannon Dininny in Wapato, Washington
Sunday, 10 August 2008
The vineyards of America's Washington state do not all, it turns out, grow grapes. Increasingly, they are growing marijuana, a plant that could surpass grapes in value this year.
So far this summer, law enforcement officials in the Yakima Valley have converged on seven vineyards that had been converted to marijuana. In 2006 more than 144,000 plants were seized; the following year the total more than doubled to 296,611 plants.
Finding farmers willing to sell their property isn't difficult. In one case, drug operatives approached a farmer who didn't have his farm listed for sale. He resisted until, asked to name a price, he threw out a figure: $263,000 (£137,000) for 27 acres and no building. The buyer returned a few days later and bought the property for cash.
The Three Faces of Pinot Noir
Poor pinot noir. As the variety most transparent to terroir and the hand of the winemaker it has become a schizophrenic variety producing a full rainbow of styles from all corners of the planet. The staggering range of wines produced makes it impossible and pointless to define which personality is the best expression of the variety. As usual, lovers of any particular style are absolutely convinced of the superiority of their preferred style.
Most pinot noir aficionados are drawn to the variety because of its capability to produce the most terroir-driven of wines. Vineyards mere meters apart produce astoundingly different wines. Strangely enough, this same love of the wonderful diversity and endless fascination with the nuances of terroir seems to put blinders on many tasters. Instead of being willing to experience the myriad of styles offered by the terroir-sity (take that Colbert), that is the hallmark of this variety, they become stuck in a narrow range of styles with a disdain bordering on the violent for wines produced in other styles, or perhaps more accurately, other terroirs. It seems to be quickly forgotten that the very reason we love pinot noir means by definition that the wines will be, and should be, very different when grown in different places.
It's important to taste wines for what they are, not what we wish they were. You cannot will a Sonoma Coast pinot noir to taste like Pommard 1er Cru because not only shouldn't it taste like a Pommard, but why would you want it to? The interesting part of pinot noir, and, for that matter all varieties, are these very differences. Of course everyone will have their own personal preferences, but personal preference in taste is not the same as superiority.
Having recently immersed myself (almost literally) in pinot noir for three days during the International Pinot Noir Celebration I could not help but be struck by the wonderful diversity and the exceptionally high level of winemaking that exists in the world of pinot noir these days. Four wines highlighted the range of this golden age of pinot we're living in: the brooding, powerful Littorai Wines
, Mays Canyon Vineyard, 2006 from California; the firm, spicy Sokol Blosser Winery, Dundee Hills Estate Cuvée, 2005 from Oregon; the explosively fruity, black current flavors of the Felton Road 2007 from New Zealand; and the closed, biting youth of the Volnay, Vendanges Sélectionnées, Domaine Michel Lafarge, 2005 from Burgundy. These four wines could not be more different or more delicious in their own right. It is their very differences that make them so exciting and make them, well, so pinot noir.
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