Vintage of the Century

It's the vintage of the century!

The pickers take a break as dawn breaks

The hype machine is on for the West Coast. Unfortunately, the noisiest wine press is no longer the one that separates the juice from the skins. Hopefully someday we can get back to the fact that in agriculture there is no perfection, only personality.

Each vintage the weather and soil combine to create a once in a lifetime experience. As with people, the personality you prefer is, well, personal. This, of course, does not apply to the vast majority of wines, which are industrial beverages where the only thing that is important to the consumer and producer is that their wines have no individuality from year to year. Oddly enough, this same rule seems to apply to cult wines.

In the Napa Valley, the weather could not have been kinder to grape growers. Mother Nature’s largess to grape growers and winemakers is not always equal. There’s not an empty fermenter or barrel to be found in the Napa Valley right now due to the bumper crop of grapes bestowed on the Valley this year. More is not necessarily better when it come to winemaking. The growers are already celebrating and headed for some sunny beach. Winemakers still have plenty of work to be done in the cellars with most of the red wine harvest still in fermenters.

It was a vintage Goldilocks would have loved. Not too hot and not too cold, just right. It started with a gentle spring that allowed for textbook flowering and fruit set. Then they just started to come, one after another. Warm sunny day after warm sunny day. Rarely did we hit 100° F for the high and just as rare was the day it did it not hit at least 85° F. The nights were cool dropping down to the low fifties, even nicking the forties. Up and down the temperatures swung wide each day in that dance that makes the Napa Valley such an exceptional place to grow wine grapes. 

September arrived and harvest began. First pinot gris and then we started picking sauvignon blanc, almost on the same date we’ve picked the last two years. Then they started to fall like dominos, coming in just the order you’d expect: first the merlot and then the syrah followed by cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon. The even weather allowed us to pick at a deliberate pace able to wait until the flavors arrived at just the right point. By the middle of October we’d picked almost all of our vineyards. The first real forecast of rain arrived at the same time. On Sunday, October 21st we picked our last fruit. At midnight it started to rain.

By our standards at Cornerstone Cellars we’re very, very happy and optimistic about the wine that is fermenting as I write this article. What makes us happy? Wines with freshness, life, energy and, most of all, personality. We were able to pick truly ripe fruit at moderate sugar levels, which means moderate alcohol levels with crisp acidity that will make the wines sing. I love it.

In most of Europe’s great wine regions a bad vintage means cold and rain, in the Napa Valley it means too hot and dry. For example, take the highly touted 1997 vintage in Napa. The wines are now falling apart, condemned to death by the same high pH and alcohol levels that got them their good reviews in the first place. There’s a sucker born every minute. This will not be a 100 point vintage in the Wine Spectator, thank God, which means we’ll be able to make some real wine.

So the journalists will want to know if this was a great vintage. Of course it was, just like it will be next year and was last year. It’s not a question that anyone who has grown anything would ask. It is the experience of growing the fruit and making it into wine each and every year that makes for greatness. Letting that individuality speak in the wine every year is what makes wine so fascinating. The greatness of wine is in how it speaks to you. Each of us can rate a wine or a vintage 100 points, but we can only do that for ourselves. No one can do it for us.

There is something to love in every vintage. Every vintage is the vintage of the century, even if just for a few minutes. Andy Warhol said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Each vintage should at least get that.

It's a Grind

​Picking merlot in the Oakville Station/To Kalon Vineyard

It's a grind. Another quarter ton bin of grapes is loaded onto the dumper on the sorting line. Another truck arrives and another twenty bins are added to the twenty or so already there. At our top speed it takes an hour to process two tons or eight bins. We rarely hit top speed. Best guess is another five hours to get through these bins. That's on top of the five hours already in. Then when we finish sorting there's another two hours of punch downs and cleaning. 

Its like that every day. It's a grind. Its harvest. The term "romantic" does not enter your mind: at least until it's all over. The only times when the romance of it all fills your spirit are the first day, the last day and the rest of the year. The first day it’s all about the potential, the last day you are a bit awestruck by what you have accomplished. In between it's a blur as you grind through each day. It is very simply the next bin, the next fermenter and the next day.

In the picturesque harvest in the wine magazines it's all about bountiful lunches with happy workers eating hardy meals and quaffing wine from carafes. In a real world working winery its cold cuts, colds, cold wet clothes and hot, sweaty rubber boots. Most of all you are sticky. Head to toe splashed with super-sweet grape juice, which makes you a yellow jacket's dream lunch. 

Then there is all that gleaming stainless steel equipment that looks so efficient and high tech. The reality is more like a Rube Goldberg invention as the whole process is a patchwork of things that don't play well with others. Something always seems to break at just the wrong moment, which makes winemakers the champions of jerry-rigging as equipment is forced to behave with beatings and duct tape. For a winemaker knowing how to convince everything to work in the winery is just as important as knowing when to pick. Let's just say that OSHA would not approve of many of these solutions. 

The day comes to an end with the best beer (or two) you ever tasted in your life quickly followed by an all to short, but very sound sleep. Then you wake up and do it again, and again, and again until one day the last bin arrives.

Then, as the last bunch of grapes from the last bin drops into the last fermenter the romance hits you again. Instantly harvest is once again the best and most exciting thing that happens to you every year. It is the concentrated essence of everything you believe in and the fuel that fires your flame for the next vintage. It reminds you how lucky you are to be working as hard as you can to accomplish something you love.

We finished the last bin at about 5 p.m. last night. Winemaker Jeff Keene and I shook very sticky and very tired hands. Harvest 2012 was done. 

What a grind. I can't wait until next year.

​

One, Just One, Green Grape

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It was just one green grape. It was one green grape too many. It's always something. 

It has been a picture perfect vintage. A lovely spring, with warm, dry weather for flowering and fruit-set. A “three bears” sort of summer: not too cold, not too hot, just right. So why was it there? As you passed through the vineyards you could not miss it standing out like a sore green thumb in the middle of a bunch of gloriously deep purple cabernet sauvignon, there would be one, just one, green berry.

No big deal, right? How could just one unripe grape on some bunches make any difference when all the others were perfectly ripe? One green grape is a very big deal if you want to make wines that are special.

Also there was another issue. Everything else this vintage has been perfect. The gorgeous weather has produced fruit capable of making wines from this vintage something very special indeed. When Mother Nature gives you such a gift you must take advantage of it. There is a sense of duty, responsibility, to take this gift and do everything in your power to make not only great wines, but memorable ones. 

What could we do? For us there was no choice. Out into the vineyards went our crews with one mission: to remove one-by-one those individual green grapes. Armed with scissors they went down the rows with the precision of a Bonsai gardener. Was this expensive? Certainly, but this is the price you pay to go beyond good, or very good, on to greatness in a wine. For us there was no choice.

We’re getting pickier and pickier every year as finicky is a virtue when it comes to winemaking. Not satisfied with just dropping any less than perfect fruit in the vineyard, we are going beyond just sorting out any bunches that don’t meet out standards and this vintage will be sorting individual berries on a special sorting table specially designed for nit-pickers like us. Note this is not a job we farm out, Jeff and I do all the sorting ourselves. 

I'll spare nothing, not only in this glorious vintage, but in each-and-every vintage to make wines that I love to drink and, most of all, that I am proud to share with you.

A perfect bunch of cabernet framed by the light of this morning's dawn​

Light on Your Feet

He was on his annual “tannin death march” slogging through the two hundred barrel samples of the grand tasting of Premiere Napa Valley, the annual trade auction and Napa Valley extravaganza. Wine writer and publisher of Vinography Alder Yarrow attacks such events with a singular focus methodically working his way through each and every sample in the room. He is a better man than I. 

Alder arrived at our table to taste our barrel sample of 2010 Cornerstone Cellars, The Premiere Cornerstone about halfway through his grind. Taking a sip, he smiled, looked up and said, “light on its feet.” My heart almost lept out of my chest. He got it. He understood the wine. 

Now understanding a wine may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you have ever stood in a room pouring wine to tasters whose palates have been hammered into submission by tasting dozens of wines before yours, you know what I mean. All to often tasters arrive at your table with the looks of a punch-drunk fighter their teeth and lips wine-bloodied by roundhouse punches from a room full of bloated heavyweights. In big tastings the Mike Tyson’s of the world get more attention than the Sugar Ray’s. The heavyweights are always the champs in these tasting marathons and wines with quick moves, balance and finesse are lost to palates pounded into submission by knockout punches of tannin and alcohol.

The wines of Cornerstone Cellars are crafted to be light on their feet. This does not mean light as in thin, but light as is deft and nimble; powerful wines that are under control and in balance. Wines that you can taste every nuance of from the first sniff to the long, lingering aftertaste. Make no mistake, our goal is still to knock you out, we just don’t want to knock you into oblivion.  A knock out punch from Tyson or Sugar Ray will still put you on the deck. 

Not far behind the “light on its feet” comment from Alder Yarrow came some equally encouraging and rewarding notes from other wine writers. Joe Roberts at 1WineDude said of our the 2010 Premiere Cornerstone, “a mid-palate to die for.” Meanwhile Fred Swan at NorCalWine noted the, “very long finish.”

To recap, three palates I respect (read no axe to grind) noted that the wine was, “light on its feet”, “a mid-palate to die for” and a “very long finish. In other words a complete wine from start to finish. “Completeness” is a concept to often ignored in a system that honors the first sip more than the last. 

I think this is perhaps the essence of winemaking, that expression of your personal vision of completeness. For some, if not most, it is an expression of economic completeness, that is making a wine that sells and gets good reviews. For others, certainly the minority, to be complete means to make a personal expression even if it’s a harder sell, or, in the case of Premiere Napa Valley, not getting the mega-bids. On the other hand, wines made from commercial inspirations are always at the mercy of the critics, while those whose foundation is built on passion will find a loyal base of consumers that share their vision of what makes a wine meaningful. 

Our Premiere Cornerstone lot at Premiere Napa Valley is the prototype for that vintage’s The Cornerstone, which is the expression of what our vision tells us is the pinnacle of Napa Valley winemaking. A sip of the Premiere Cornerstone is indeed a preview of what to expect in The Cornerstone itself. Our inaugural vintage of The Cornerstone, the 2009, will be released this September.

We could not be more proud of the how we have evolved the wines at Cornerstone Cellars into wines that offer a complete experience. There could be no better representation of this than our 2010 Premiere Cornerstone. It’s wine with a beginning, a middle and a long lingering ending: a complete wine. It will knock you out.

Cornerstone Oregon in Enobytes!

 

 

2009 Cornerstone Willamette Valley Pinot Noir

Posted on 06 February 2012.

Craig Camp may no longer reside in the Willamette Valley but his presence undoubtedly still exists in the wines he is making with Tony Rynders, formerly of Domaine Serene for the California winery Cornerstone. This 2009 Pinot Noir is another great example of how the vintage has been way underrated. With just a little over two short years from harvest, this wine has settled into a smooth well-produced package that exemplifies the vintage. 2009 may have not received the accolades the 2008’s did but in time these wines just may surpass the opulence the much ballyhooed previous vintage has already obtained. This Willamette Valley wine expresses aromas of raspberry and blueberry with a hint of fresh ground cinnamon stick. On the palate, flavors of dark berry and hazelnut are offered up with a vibrant acidity that is balanced by well-integrated tannins. The finish is plush, pleasant and long enough to make this a memorable wine to savor alongside a braised lamb shank elegantly prepared for an intimate Valentines dinner. If your retailer or favorite restaurant does not offer this wine, get it online. I would get it soon because this one will not be around for long.

Rating: Excellent (91) | $50 | 13.9% ABV

Pictured above the 2011 Cornerstone Oregon Harvest

5000 Wines a Year

 

I saw a comment recently from a wine writer noting that they tasted over five thousand wines a year. I could only think how sad. Was this some sort of punishment? Did someone commit a crime? What a pity to turn such a pleasure into such a grind.

Another comment on a forum noted that the writer first scored the wine 88 points , but that it had mellowed into a 89 point wine after about thirty minutes. It improved by a point? I could only think how sad it is to force flavors and aromatics into one point increments. Again pleasure becomes a grind.

While I was attending a wine faults seminar by the University of California at Davis the professor passed off the answer to a question as obvious when someone asked the equally obvious question. “Professor I’ve noticed that the sample with the VA was very strong at first, but now that I’ve gone back to it several times and it gets harder and harder to pick up,” said one of the winemakers in the seminar. The professor almost off-handedly commented that was just how your nose worked. It could take twenty minutes or so before it reset itself.

So, as the Ph.D. from Davis noted, if you get a nose-full from a a wine loaded with VA or Brett or a long line of wine faults you will be severely disabled aroma-wise for a signifiant period of time. Then there is simple palate fatigue on top of that.

What does this mean? It means that the people that taste five thousand wines a year or those that nudge a wine by a point after a half hour are just kidding themselves. It can’t be done, we’re humans not machines. Your senses lose the ability to accurately judge wines even after just a dozen or so. The idea of defining the difference between 88 and 89 points as a relative quality value is simply a joke. Mother Nature did not give us the tools required.

This, of course, extends to all the major wine publications and wine competitions. What they claim to be doing can’t be done. Fact and end of story.

In addition to the fact that they’re totally inaccurate as an indicator of quality, marathon tastings and pointy nit-picking just take the joy and pleasure out of wine. They are also a slap in the face to the intellectual side of wine appreciation.

One thing I appreciate about wine bloggers over the traditional wine press is that instead of pounding through dozens of bottles and pumping out points, most take a more thoughtful approach. Wine blogs are full of tales of wines at the table, which is the only place you can really get to know a wine. Wine writing about the experience of the true pleasures of wine tells you more than any point ranking or gold medal ever can or will. There are so many good wine blogs out there these days that they cover more than enough wine to fill anyone’s needs. What you won’t find in the blogs are reviews of Screaming Eagle or Lafite, but let’s face it, if you’re buying those wines you don’t really care about reviews anyway.

My mind keeps drifting back to the person tasting more than five thousand wines a year. It sounds so terrible to me. I’m more than happy tasting a few hundred or so a year. It also means I get to enjoy wines that I really love more than once. I think it often takes a few bottles, consumed over a period of time with different foods, before you really know a wine.

I doubt there are actually five thousand wines in the world that I want to try. Someone else will have to take that punishment for me. No thanks.

ArrivederLa

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It was a serene experience. Peaceful and focused. We waited and he arrived seeming almost bemused by our presence. For us he was already a deity, which was a title he did not seek for himself, nor one he needed.

It was a cold spring morning and we could just see our breath as our eyes swept over the gentile beauty of Valpolicella. The air around us was hazy with the smoke of burning vine cuttings and the blossoms were just breaking on the trees. Just then his daughter appeared and led us down into his cellar. After a short wait he arrived surveying the group with a casual curiosity.

Over the next hour and a half he talked softly and smiled gently. For him it was enough to let his wines do all the talking. He was not looking for the deference with we treated him, but it fit him well. As always in such a group some did not understand what they were tasting, but he took no offense at their lightness any more than he did at those who where too ernest in their worship.

We tasted through the entire gallery of his creations. Their greatness requires no comment here

When we left I was the last to go. “Ringrazie, arrivederLa,” I said. I stood a good foot taller than the great man, who then reached up and patted my cheek and said, “bravo.”

We live in a “ciao” world, but to say “ciao” to such greatness just seemed wrong.

Ringrazie e ArrivederLa Signore Quintarelli

Pictured above is that tasting with Signore Quintarelli in the spring of 2000

Wine and Food

Thanksgiving brings up the usual stream of articles recommending wines for Thanksgiving. This exercise has obviously gone too far as writers now reach for extreme examples just to be “different” rather than sticking with something that actually makes sense.  Amarone? Grenache? Possibly, but why in the world would you go so far out? The matches for the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner are simple: lighter reds and fuller whites. Common sense and a little knowledge is all that’s needed.  Pinot noir or gamay (Beaujolais) and chardonnay or riesling if you like a little sweetness with the potentially dry bird. With the literally thousands of variations of these varieties there seems little need other than personal taste or a bored writer to practice this new extreme matching reality show. Also, not every menu demands complexity in wine. Mounds of turkey, sweet potatoes and stuffing requires refreshing beverages, not equally ponderous ones. Cool, fruity and zesty are more pleasurable than a wine as ponderous as the meal. 
 
Perhaps all this extreme matchmaking is due to the fact that wine writers taste most of the wines they review without food. This is a very strange thing if you think about it. After all, wine really has no other purpose than to be part of a meal. Critics give wines points based on how they taste against other wines, not how they taste with dinner. This fact alone tells you how pointless points are when it comes choosing what wine to buy. 
 
In all honesty I don’t drink wine without food: with the notable exception of sparkling wines. I just don’t get it. The first sip of wine always has me thinking about what bite of food is going to follow. The idea of a chardonnay or cabernet as a cocktail is beyond me. When I’m getting ready to cook I’m doing one of two things: either I’m looking for something to go with a particular wine or deciding what wine to have with the menu I’ve selected. The concepts of cooking, eating and wine are so tightly intertwined in me that I cannot separate their experience in my mind. I can’t even imagine why you would want to. 
 
A beautiful veal chop thus led me to a bottle of 2009 Tendril, Tightrope, Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, the new release from my friend, winemaker Tony Rynders. Tony is making two Tendril pinots:  “White Label”, a blend of his vineyard sites and Tightrope, a special barrel selection.  The veal chop got the Milanese treatment and the wine was perfect with the dish and it was perfect with the wine. A very nice arrangement.  The only breadcrumbs at hand were panko so the chop was even crunchier than usual. I’d do that again.  The Tightrope’s tart acidity in the proverbial velvet glove was just the right foil to the breaded and fried chop. Being the foil is the wine’s job.
 
Only sixty cases of 2009 Tendril Tightrope were produced and you can only buy it from the winery at www. tendrilwines.com. The $64 price tag is a bargain for a wine of this depth It will be worth putting away for a few years to let it grow up. However, for Thanksgiving I’m recommending the more subtle 2009 Tendril White Label Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. It’s more forward and fruity than the Tightrope and certainly such an American meal deserves an American wine. However, with less than 400 cases produced not many tables will be lucky enough to be graced with a bottle this Thanksgiving. 
 
 Matching food and wine is about the combination of personal taste and common sense. There’s no reason to go to extremes: unless you have to write an annual Thanksgiving wine matching article that is.

 

Night Harvest: Talcott Vineyard Cabernet Franc in St. Helena

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Never Boring

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Their shrill barking woke me from whatever dream I was having. A pack of coyotes was having a debate in the vineyard outside my window. In my sleepy stupor I tried, but could not remember the day of the week. It sounded like dozens of them, but it was probably just a few being particularly rambunctious. Suddenly the report of a rifle echoed sharply across the valley and the coyotes were silent. Just a few hundred yards from our house, in the other direction, the first crew of cooks were arriving for work at The French Laundry. Such is life in Yountville during harvest. There is this incredible mixture of nature and urban sophistication, which only intertwines so completely in the Napa Valley. The reason I could not remember the day was simple: during harvest all days are the same. There are no regular patterns, hours or life. It’s exhausting, stressful and the best thing that happens to you every year.

So what does this vintage mean to us? It means another debate with Mother Nature, much like the coyotes outside my window had last night. As winemakers we all bark at the weather, but in reality we live within it and in the end treasure what we have been given each and every year. Like a parent we don’t have a favorite child, but revel in their differences and the memories of their unique strong and weak points. The critics will give this harvest a rating, but numbers have no soul and harvests, like all things in nature, do.

So what should you expect from a wine or from a vintage? I think you should expect personality. Those who rank vintages by number in the modern era miss the fundamental character of wine and truly do not understand wine itself. The question should never be what is the greatest vintage of this wine can I have with my dinner tonight, but should be what vintage will taste the best with my dinner tonight. The disaster vintages of days past are no more due to the dramatic advances in enology and viticulture over the last decades. On top of it we live in the Napa Valley where, let’s face it, the weather is never really that bad. The ranges of vintages today runs more from producing earlier or later maturing wines and from bigger or more elegant styles. It’s a fact of the matter in the Napa Valley an overly hot vintage has a more negative impact on wine quality than ones that are overly cool.

It often strikes me that critics want all vintages to be the same. I cannot think of anything more boring: or unnatural. Tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. we start picking our Talcott Vineyard Cabernet Franc in St. Helena. It will make a wine different from last year and from the one it will make the next. I would not have it any other way.