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Monday, May 10, 2010
Is mezcal the next big thing?
Jon Bonne/The Chronicle
Granted, it could be because he's unveiling an agave-focused booze list at Nopalito, but bar chief Neyah White is adamant that mezcal is the Next Big Thing, ready to leave Tequila in the dust.
I feel like Tequila — in a serious context — is still awaiting broader consideration in this town (versus New York and L.A., which are getting deadly serious about it) but as Tequila reaches for the mainstream and gets ever more polished, what mezcal has in spades is its authenticity. Knowing how bar trends go in these parts, authenticity — terroir, really — will play. So I'll follow Neyah on that prediction.
To prove the point, he recently arranged a meeting with Ron Cooper, mezcal's presumed high priest. Cooper is an artist and the force behind Del Maguey, the single-village mezcals that have essentially resurrected the category. Well known to Bay Area connoisseurs, Del Maguey is a glorious parade of authentic artisan distilling; Cooper and his associates have spent years convincing the small-time palenqueros (distillers) to let him bottle their wares and ship them north for gringo consumption. Many releases are now certified organic, more a sign of diligence in navigating the certification process, as the agave is basically grown wild and harvested.
If Tequila has taken on airs, being steamed in autoclaves and distilled in pristine new stills, the palenqueros of Oaxaca are seriously old-school. Agave pinas are still usually baked and smoked over coals in pits; the stills are usually small copper affairs, except for Del Maguey's Minero, which is actually distilled in an old clay still that may well have pre-Spanish origins. "The Chinese were in Mexico 71 years before Columbus came to America," Cooper notes.
More to the point, mezcal is a pure white spirit — its level of smoke and complexity is achieved without any barrel aging, mostly from the long cooking process and a slow fermentation with indigenous yeasts. It is almost pre-industrial in its way. And so the resultant spirit expresses itself direct from the still. "I've always refused to put our stuff in wood, just to show the voice of the maker," Cooper told me.
Much ink could be spilled on the various Del Maguey villages. I'll give a brief wrap-up from a tasting last week.
Chichicapa, Cooper's first village from fertile granite and clay soils at lower elevations, is full and powerful; lots of warm spice and a rounder vanilla-edged smoke presence. By contrast, San Luis del Rio hails from hardscrabble soils, flint and granite higher in the hills, and it bursts with saline mineral power — focused, almost leathery and taut. The agave is funkier and edgy; think lemongrass and bark.
Santo Domingo Albarradas, from a remote mountain village ("one bus in and out every Sunday") situated next to a cloud forest at nearly 9,000 feet and grown on yellow granite and chalk, is in a situation Cooper compared to the coastal fog influence on Pinot Noir. A delicacy pervades it, with floral, pineapple and peach scents. Distinctly fruity, it has big pepper and ginger bite to the palate — the most wine-like of the lot in its layered flavors. The hearty Minero is its counterpoint. Grown on sandy iron-rich soils, it is made in that old clay still and exudes a musky, fruity, earthen quality, edged by big pepper and a ripe, plump texture. Its intensity sneaks up on you amid those round fruit notes. If the Santo Domingo is ethereal, the Minero is very much grounded.
And then there is the Tobala, with its distinct label artwork of trucks on a mountain road. The wild mountain Tobala agave is a finicky thing: taking 15 years to mature (about twice the usual time), tiny enough to require far more agave pinas per distillation than usual. This particular agave, grown in the shade of oaks, releases an enzyme that can dissolve the acidic granite soils in which it grows. Its scent is fecund, like lilies gone a day too far, with big fresh and pickled pear flavors, banana, the density of gum syrup and an iodine bite. There are even hints of sweet red-fruit flavors. At $125 per bottle, it is a rare treat.
As for mezcal being hot, that hasn't been Cooper's trajectory thus far. Beginning in 1995, it took him four years to sell his first run of 6,000 bottles. Now he works with at least five villages, plus three more ready to come available in limited editions. While he predicts his distillers could expand their production as much as tenfold, that's still a modest trade seeing as the rarest of his efforts, the Tobala, yields just 600 bottles a year.
Still, Cooper recently unveiled his potential crossover item: a less expensive bottle, Vida, for use behind the bar. One Boston bar is pouring five cases per week. (Cooper also makes the mezcal for the Sombra brand created by wine guys Richard Betts and Charles Bieler.) And the category is going to grow. Cuervo has the Talapa brand, and Cooper says the owner of Patron has planned a high-end mezcal that could hit $100 per bottle. Not farmer stuff anymore.
As for Nopalito? Starting today, it will be serving mezcals in approximately one-ounce pours ($4.50-9), with sal de guisado (conceptually, that's salt combined with the ground remains of the worm associated with mezcal, although the initial version will be more vegan-friendly) and orange. It's a good way to sip through a couple in a sitting, including the Del Maguey lineup.
So, mezcal hot?
"I hope not," Cooper says. "I've always said I wanted to be warm, not hot."
| May 10 at 10:10 AM
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Tequila without the makeup
Russell Yip/The Chronicle
Among our top Tequila picks.
Some work days are just plain fun, and our recent Day o' Tequila would certainly qualify. (You might think we're celebrating Cinco de Mayo today, but since the Food & Wine Department runs on an early schedule — Test Kitchen Thanksgiving comes around Nov. 5 — we had our fiesta weeks ago.)
First we blind-tasted Tequilas to find some surprising, and money-saving, results. Then we put those results to good use in a Margarita or six, finding that the Tequilas we liked best on their own also shone when framed by citrus. That was a good day.
Our choice of Tequila style for the tasting brought some cold shoulders, though. Stacy Finz and I decided that this time out we should focus on blanco, or white, Tequilas. Some readers were none too amused, accusing us of pimping a baser Tequila style while ignoring the refinements of reposado and anejo.
Quick refresher: Blanco is unaged Tequila, more or less straight from still to bottle. Anejo is the complete opposite, aged in oak barrels for at least a year. Reposado exists in a middle realm, aged between 2 and 12 months in oak, providing a hint of wood influence but not becoming defined by it. (In our case we were talking only about all-agave Tequila, made entirely from the blue agave plant, not mixed Tequila — the low-grade stuff that still makes Tequila a touchy topic — that can be partially from other sugars.)
Frankly it seems unfair to think of blanco as a lesser creature. I love a good repo and anejo as much as anyone (though I still don't understand why you'd lend an anejo's talents to a margarita) but our decision wasn't arbitrary.
What we wanted to taste in this case was the quality of the distilling: the texture of the spirit and the depth of agave flavors. The joy of blanco is that it presents those things uninterpreted by wood. It is a perfect window into a distiller's talents at distilling, not aging. And in this case, that's what we wanted to consider.
Others are more strident on this point, claiming that only blanco should be a benchmark for Tequila given the very reasons I just outlined. That seems extreme. But blanco is a vital road map to a distiller's talents and preferences. It's also refreshing and energetic, a roadster to its aged siblings' luxury-coupe stylings.
Interestingly, this very same argument has surfaced lately for evaluating another type of booze, though in a near-case of reverse logic. The recent rise of white whiskey has been marked by the desire to consider whiskey without the influence of wood. As author Max Watman told Paul Clarke for a recent story of ours, the virtue of unaged whiskey is that "you've got nothing but the distiller's craft and the agriculture behind it."
But whiskey has always been defined by oak aging. So the appearance of, essentially, moonshine in legit form demonstrates an interest in considering a liquor removed from its usual finishing. Tequila, however, is unique in being just about the only spirit (rum would be another, presumably) meant to be drunk in both aged and unaged forms. And so a blanco offers a window to the quality of a distillery's aged Tequilas as well.
Plus, to be fair, I really prefer blanco for my margaritas.
So blancos it was. Stacy is already lobbying for repo and anejo sequels for subsequent years' worth of Cinco de Mayo. And why not? But this time, Tequila without makeup seemed like a fine way to pass an afternoon.
| May 05 at 01:30 PM
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Heart and the matter of the Mason jars
Kat Wade/Special to The Chronicle
For our latest Bar Bites I tackled the Valencia St. wine bar/gallery known as Heart.
Heart fills one of those strange gaps in San Francisco nightlife in that it aspires to more than wine-bardom — in the form of a menu from Kitchenette's Douglas Monsalud, including a beautifully conceived brunch. Yet it shies away from being a fully realized restaurant: With no permanent kitchen (though that hardly stops many a pop-up restaurant) it has the luxury of not being tied down to one concept.
In that sense it is absolutely of the moment: unwilling to add to the city's restaurant roster; there to advance an unabashedly populist vision of wine (and some food to accompany) without getting tied up by gas lines or reservations or — in a twist I still can't figure out — a fully functioning credit-card system. (For slightly mysterious reasons, tips can't be added to card splits.) And so no surprise that this Sunday it will host a gaggle of street-food cart vendors, pairing owner Jeff Segal's list to the stylings of, say, the Magic Kurry Kart. Heart is a mashup of San Francisco's current food counterculture in one convenient spot.
Segal, a former financial journalist who worked in wine retail on his way to creating Heart, says one of his inspirations was New York's Terroir. It's good source material: Paul Grieco's list may have its rough patches but its badass prose, Steven Solomon's punk graphics and the chance of wandering into an earsplitting jag of Flock of Seagulls saves Terroir from the realms of pretense. It's a venue (with a great chef) that doles out street cred for wanting to drink weird things.
Heart seems to want to occupy that space too.
Segal seemed thoughtful on the topic when I called him. He is on a mission to put a fork in all the typical wine-drinking tropes.
"I think a lot of people are intimidated or turned off by drinking wine," he explained, and so his goal is "trying to bring it down to where Americans see beer and whiskey."
I'm not sure that's quite the right goal for wine — there's a reason that wine occupies a different place in the culture, and it has nothing to do with fern-bar Chardonnay. But it does explain why Segal's tasting notes read like he spent a long, sleepless night with some Red Bull. He says his goal is to avoid discussing specific flavors, though "Sardines, grapefruit, hazelnut, beeswax. A mindf--- of a wine" for a Bornard Savagnin seems to veer toward that approach. (I'm more partial to his take on the Moric Blaufrankisch: "Syrah, Nebbiolo and Pinot Noir had a baby and gave it a very long German name.")
The big convention-breaker, though, is the Mason jars in which wines are served. Segal knows this is his big anti-snob hook; why else would the wine list come with its own Mason Jar Manifesto?
The manifesto was sure to get my hackles up, though the truth is that the Mason jar thing seems to be a conceit; Segal endorses stemware on some occasions, and you can get somewhat outsized stems upon request (disclaimer: they will make you look like a tool), which softens the impact of the jelly-jar jihad. While Segal insisted the jars "fit Heart well," he also insists he's not anti-stem.
The manifesto is a good road map to understanding the cultural disconnect on stemware. "Go to a cafe (or a winemaker's house) in most of the world's wine-crazy countries," it insists, "and you'll see people drinking wine out of water glasses." Segal sees the jars as an American twist on the rustic vigneron's tumbler, but I'd respectfully throw doubt on that notion. Good winemakers, and certainly those who populate Heart's list, would likely produce a decent set of glasses if you showed up on their doorstep. This is their life's work; they want it shown in the best light.
Segal argued to me that good wines will still taste great out of a jar. The manifesto echoes this: "Respect the grape, and the human hands behind it, not the stem."
But a good wine glass isn't a vehicle for pretense. (A bad wine glass, however, is precisely that.) Those who drink wine for a living have experienced the full spectrum of vessels: jelly jars, Nalgene bottles, plastic cups, Riedel bowls that could comfortably house a tiger shark, probably from our hands if it came down to it. And yet we find ourselves gravitating back to good stemware when we have the chance — sneaking it on camping trips and into Chinese joints in the Sunset.
That guy who totes his own stems to every restaurant because, well, his are better? And the restaurant that saves its best glassware for top- dollar bottles? Those are the pissants who give stems a bad name. But to put fancy wines in Mason jars seems like a slightly self-conscious exercise in high-low.
The puzzling thing here is that Segal's wine list reveals an intellectual curiosity that's far more anti-snob than the glassware. It actually avoids most of the current hipster darlings in favor of more obscure, interesting fare. A Hofer Zweigelt for $7/glass? (Make that $7/jar.) Two trocken Rieslings? Segal is having some freewheeling fun — without falling into the pitfalls of corporate Malbec or ho-hum flights of Viognier — that all wine bars should demonstrate. The Mason jars make the populist case in broad strokes. But they ultimately seem to undermine Heart's message.
Heart: 1270 Valencia St., S.F. (415) 285-1200. www.heartsf.com.
| Apr 22 at 04:30 PM
Friday, March 26, 2010
Grenache: What should it be?
Eric Luse/The Chronicle, 2009
Trimming a Grenache cluster at Alder Springs Vineyard in Mendocino County.
This weekend I'll be moderating the Saturday seminars at this year's Rhone Rangers tasting in San Francisco: one on pairing food with Rhone-style wines, and one on American Grenache.
The pairing topic is a terrific one — one I could talk about all day — and I'm looking forward to some terrific wines: Tablas Creek's Esprit Blanc, Syrahs from Arnot-Roberts, Lagier Meredith and Big Basin, and so on. (If you want to join us, it's not too late. More info atRhonerangers.org.)
But the Grenache is the more complicated topic, and the one that needs some light shed.
A couple weeks ago I reported the results of our first tasting in a while of domestic Grenache. While the best wines were great, the overall results were a mixed bag.
When I factored in price sensitivity, it was difficult to find a lot of bottles that performed on par with their global counterparts. Some that stood out were $40 a bottle or more, making it difficult to put them forward.
Grenache in California is in an interesting place. In 2008, there were 6,962 total acres planted, with plantings tapering off in the past few years. That puts it well shy of grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon or even Syrah, but it's still a sizeable crop. And in premium vineyard areas, the prices per ton can easily top $2,000, making it a spendy grape to buy; in Sonoma County, for instance, Grenache averages more than Cabernet.
But what is Grenache supposed to be? If you look globally, it's one of those grapes that exists all along the price scale. In its native Rhone, it can be the source for simple $8 table wines or extraordinary $100 Chateauneuf; look to Spain and it's no different. On the shelves here, Garnacha can be picked up for $8 or $10, and yet the most ambitious winemakers in, say, Priorat, are aiming for four or five times that, or more.
None of this makes it easy to understand what Grenache should be. It's sometimes called the Pinot Noir of the Rhone, which to me seems to do a disservice to both grapes. Pinot is remarkably heat-sensitive and relatively low-sugar; Grenache can thrive in heat and is a little sugar engine, such that it can (can) produce balanced wines at 15 percent alcohol or more. Their personalities are nothing alike: While Pinot is working to perfectly french a rack of lamb, Grenache is busy firing up the smoke pit. Pinot is Felix, Grenache is Oscar.
And of course there is Grenache Blanc, a white mutation, just to further confuse things.
We'll be looking at a range of Grenache tomorrow in white, pink and red — the full spectrum of homegrown Grenache: Grenache Blanc from Tercero and Katin; rosé from David Girard, Unti and Quivira; and red Grenache from Curtis, Sol Rouge, Stage Left and Edward Sellers.
There's some swing in prices, but we'll be starting somewhere north of $20 for the red wines. Which will prompt the question: How do these Grenaches fit into the market? Where are they looking for inspiration: the village wines of the Rhone, the noble Chateauneuf du Pape, the brooding Garnacha of Calatayud, the berryish Cannonau of Sardinia or somewhere else entirely? Is there a way to sum up the template of California Grenache?
For that matter, where should it be grown? You can find Grenache from the cooler portions of Santa Barbara to the heat of Paso Robles and everywhere in between. Syrah, we know, is a grape with a distinct cooler-climate expression, and on balance I'd argue the best California Syrahs come from some of the coldest sites. But does the same hold for a sun worshipper like Grenache? Is there a perfect Grenache terroir?
We'll sort through these questions over the weekend (again, feel free to come and join us) and hopefully have some answers I can report back.
| Mar 26 at 04:15 PM
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
A lesson from Napanook vineyard
It's unlikely Christian Moueix is out pruning his vines all the time. But for my visit in early March to his Napanook vineyard, he was willing to take time out for a quick demonstration. He carefully matched the number of tiny buds on each shoot to the number of shoots on each side of the vine. When he came to a knobbed cordon, the result of several years of bad pruning, he didn't hesitate to whip out a small saw and hack it off. When you're the boss, perhaps, you can cut as much as you like. (Watch the video above for more on Moueix's ideas on pruning.)
The proprietor of Dominus Estate in Napa and Chateau Pétrus in Bordeaux certainly could be doing other things with his time. But Moueix not only worked in France, he also studied at UC Davis and he really does put an extraordinary emphasis on his vineyard work.
"You would be surprised by the number of wine producers in the world who don't know how to prune," he says.
Moueix is approaching 30 years of work with the historic Napanook, which first was planted in vine in the 19th century and was a cornerstone of the famed Inglenook wines. If my usual vineyard visits are lessons about doing more to create powerful fruit — severely reducing the number of clusters per vine, watering early to set proper soil conditions for a dry summer; meticulously mowing under cover crops so they don't compete with the roots — a visit to Napanook is a study in contrarian thought. At some point I must have mentioned an interested in dry-farming to Moueix, because when he was arranging my visit, that's what he kept returning to as a theme, which is what led to Sunday's column on the topic.
The twist with discussing water at Napanook is that the site — and this might long explain its appeal to growers — if anything has an excess of water. So Moueix and his technical director, Tod Mostero, are looking at all sorts of ways to tweak their farming: elaborate drainage, different shoot lengths, different shapes for leaf canopies and so on. If a generation of winegrowers was trained on the belief that vines might not fully ripen without intervention and irrigation, the work at Dominus is part of a modest trend toward managing vineyards away from ripeness, all while finding ways to use less water.
The water equation is a tricky one. But I've rarely seen it summed up so succintly as in a Powerpoint slide prepared by Thibaut Scholasch of Fruition Sciences, one of Moueix's consultants, who works for a handful of other top names: Ridge, Dana Estates, Ovid, Harlan, Araujo, Spottswoode and so on. (Fruition's work with precise water-need measures are limited to those with deep pockets, as witnessed by that list. The hope is that the emerging technology will grow more affordable in time.)
Slides about water management are a bit wonky for a wine-blog post, so I'll let this one speak for itself. But you can see that bad decisions at different points in the winemaking process can create the results listed in that top row, which in turn lead to the extra costs and problems on the bottom row. The takeaway message, for me at least, was that good water decisions mean both less waste and less work. That's hard to argue with.
| Mar 23 at 10:10 AM
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The wine blog wars, continued
And again. I had intended to briefly note the new online home for wine critic Stephen Tanzer, whose International Wine Cellar scores and reviews have been a reliable source for a quarter-century. Tanzer recently unveiled Winophilia, a blog-and-more that amends his subscription-based IWC with posts from him, contributor Josh Raynolds and others.
Tanzer isn't necessarily the loudest voice in the score-throwing room. But the IWC ratings have an intellectual rigor and diversity that's enormously valuable. If the knock (fair or not) against the usual suspects is that they favor wines of impact, Tanzer and Raynolds are often the champions for wines of nuance and intrigue.
But the virtual welcome for Tanzer quickly soured, mostly due to some remarks on his About page:
At Winophilia, we're not armchair tasters who pretend to speak knowledgeably about regions we've never visited. We're not amateur bloggers whose coverage of wine is limited to a handful of random samples we've just received, a trade tasting we've attended, or a press junket we've just been treated to. We live wine. Each of us spends several weeks to several months on the road each year, visiting wineries and tasting thousands of wines annually with their makers.
Dang. The bloggy backlash was swift. Boston wine blogger Dale Cruse summed up the argument well, accusing Tanzer of "attempting to invalidate our experiences." Other responses were less charitable. (N.B., Cruse has had none-too-kind words for me and other writerly types when we've floated our own issues with bloggers.)
Here commences Blogfight, 2010 Edition. We survived multiple skirmishes in 2009, perhaps the most colorful of which came when Robert Parker took potshots at those darn "blobbers," the backlash to which, as you might imagine, resounded across the Interwebs.
These days both established critics and ascendant bloggers seem to be feeling like they've gotten slapped around a bit. At some point in the past two years (I'd peg it to around the time the first Wine Bloggers' Conference convened, but it could be a different moment) the tone coming from the blog world took on a sense of self-congratulation and self-importance. Talk shifted from an interest in dialogue and discourse to interest in revolution of a sort: toppling writers from their would-be thrones. Many folks, like Paul Mabray of VinTank, maintain a stance of dialogue, but others were on the warpath. [Note: I revised the phrasing about Mabray's position in case it was unclear.]
And it was ugly. It's not surprising that Parker, especially, a longtime pincushion not only for bloggers but every less-influential writer down the chain, would be riled by talk of his profession's impending demise.
What this comes down to is a question of impact, which we've been discussing a lot this past year at 5th and Mission, enough that we were game when Derrick Schneider was willing to tackle the subject last month. Yes, of course, a bunch of newspaper dinosaurs have a dog in this hunt — but Derrick also has pretty unimpeachable blog cred. He has been blogging about wine and food since the early part of the last decade.
I don't know why Tanzer so publicly tried to distance himself from the blogging crowd; it seems evident now that from Parker on down, the modern writer has to blog and tweet and swallow the virtual Kool-Aid. ("Flavors of cherry and tin, short finish. 83 points.") But what's so interesting about the Tanzer flap is that it comes as the conversation seems to have shifted.
The tenor of 2009 was thus: legacy wine writers are a dying breed; professional journalism is toast; blogging is about to rule the world. We writer types gnashed our teeth and drowned our sorrows in many bottles of vin petillant. Yet as the calendar ticked into 2010, journalism was still scraping along. Blogs had not yet struck a fatal blow — in wine journalism or elsewhere (for many possible reasons). It's interesting that the 2009 argument has resurfaced again, with Tanzer as the new pincushion. If you know how much IWC has struggled to emerge from the Wine Advocate's shadow, you probably sense the irony here. And I'd wager 2010 is when authority gets to make its case.
I've had conversations about this with a number of critics in the past few months. They always gravitate back to the questions Derrick posed: What is the impact of any wine writing? Do people listen? And frankly, whose writing moves the market?
Because you can kvetch about the economics of wine writing all you like, and believe in the virtue of contributing to culture at large. But ultimately you can't dismiss that we're writing about a business, which means that what pays the bills is economic impact. People pay for the Wall Street Journal because it gives them actionable information; people buy subscriptions to the Wine Advocate, or Tanzer or Burghound, for the same reason. The Chronicle and the New York Times have a broader economic model to support wine writing, but I think we'd be naive to claim we're immune from the market.
So you may loathe Tanzer's words, but the truth is that only he — and a very few other critics — have figured out how to to taste so broadly and deeply, and to put boots on the ground in wine regions around the world. And their work sells wine.
Some model will emerge that finds a role for both professionals and amateurs. I've put forward my own predictions how pro-am reviews will shake out. But right now, we're all getting singed by yet another silly flame war. And there's plenty of hubris to go around.
| Mar 18 at 11:50 AM
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Monte Bello through the years
Jon Bonne/The Chronicle
The care with which Ridge's Monte Bello is assembled was evident during its recent 50th anniversary. But the deliberate care by Ridge' and winemaker Paul Draper to make it a remarkably long-lived wine was underscored when we finally got to a vertical tasting of about a dozen vintages last week.
We had the chance to try a selection of vintages from 1970 through 2005 (though not the 1971 Monte Bello that rallied at the Judgment of Paris). Everyone had personal favorites, but the takeaway message? Monte Bello truly does age as few other Cabernet-based wines can (it hasn't technically been labeled as a Cabernet since the 1970s) and even with the vintage fluctuations, its high-toned, mineral-intense signature resonates every year. My own favorites? The ripe, powerful, sage-laced 1992; the headily perfumed 2004; the muscular, herbal 1984; and a beefy, shockingly youthful 1978. Others adored the high-acid 1970 and the slightly lean 1991. This was a bit like choosing between diamonds.
A crowning moment came with the evening's final wine, the 1968 Monte Bello, the only wine not made under Draper's watch. It was made by his predecessor Dave Bennion, in the barn that now serves as part of the Monte Bello tasting room. This was Ridge in a different era, with rustic winemaking and what Eric Baugher, who now oversees Monte Bello's winemaking, estimated to be a 25-day primary fermentation. (It's now closer to a week.) No matter. It was stunningly powerful and young, still full of tannin and structure, running circles around the 1978. If there was any doubt that Ridge has one of the world's great wine terroirs, this should end the argument. And I'd gladly drink any of these wines.
I should note that I've now had the good fortune to taste the 2007 Monte Bello twice within the past month. It won't be released until the fall and is still far from being ready, but the charms of the 2007 vintage have extended here as well. It is integrated, lean and simply beautiful, another testament to Monte Bello's agelessness.
A couple notes: I've included notes for the 2006 and 2007 Monte Bello, though they were tasted separately, as well as notes for a couple other wines tasted during a recent visit to Ridge. I've included alcohol levels where possible if only to underscore that the average alcohol for Monte Bello over 50 years has been 12.9 percent; it's currently averaging closer to 13.1 percent. Few wines anywhere manage that consistency.
For more on Monte Bello, read the previous entry.
1970 Monte Bello: Beefy, with a high-toned, sanguine nose. Accents of umeboshi plum and graphite. It's sleek, with dry-earth accents and really defined by its high-acid profile, almost to the point of being sharp. Youthful, if still so edgy it's almost unsettling. 13.5 percent.
1978 Monte Bello: Lots of stuffing. More sweet fruit and beef jerky; think teriyaki and a mineral rush. The palate, too, is darker and beefier, with supple texture and lots of tannin still holding up. Has reached a mellow, ripe place and is drinking beautifully. 13.6 percent.
1981 Monte Bello: A certain animal quality. Distinctly edgy and, again, sanguine in its mineral tones, almost like a copper penny. Edgy dried cranberry and graphite accents; it's a fully mineral-driven wine, with musk, black olive and a subtle freshness. Not as ripe or meaty as some, but that clearly was the style and it succeeds in a raw way. 12.0 percent.
1984 Monte Bello: Leads off with slightly herbal notes: dried sage and rosemary. The red fruit is still buoyant and young, with hints of campfire smoke and lots of mineral energy unfurling. Savory but muscular, with that high-acid signature and still plenty of tannic heft after all this time. 12.9 percent.
1988 Monte Bello: One of the controversial ones. Again, slightly animal (seemingly some brett there), with those coppery mineral high tones and beefy depth, plus a sweet cherry fruit and rounded tannins. More earthy than perfumed, but there's an appealing oiliness to the texture amid that acidic twinge. This had about 50 percent new oak and marked a shift toward the all-new oak regime that's now standard. And it was a more muscular, brooding wine, though not all the pieces seemed to fit together. 12.9 percent.
1991 Monte Bello: In general this marked a shift to the new-oak profile, but here the net result was more herbaceous and almost exceedingly racy. Hints of dry dill, herbs and green olive mark the nose, with huckleberry fruit and slightly more evident tannins. Still generous, but just a bit curt in its profile, and the mineral notes verge toward metallic in moments. It softens over time but the acidity never quite modulated for me. 13.1 percent.
1992 Monte Bello: I just kept drinking this wine. Subtle, meaty, coffee-tinged presence to the nose, plus lovely graphite, dried-sage and bell-clear cherry. It's all in absolute harmony, with tons of tannic structure (this is one of the more muscular vintages) and a big grip left to it. The structure's sizable, yet fully integrated, with incredibly sweet tannins. Still young and gorgeous, so drink it or let it evolve. 13.4 percent.
1995 Monte Bello: Not green but offering dry, warm eucalyptus and dust notes that actually evoked one of those October drives through the nearby hills. But it is a bit angular and acid-driven right now, with more structure than generosity. Still, it kept softening and becoming more approachable, offering hope that it will sort out soon enough. Give it another couple years. 12.5 percent.
2000 Monte Bello: More rich black fruit in here, edged by dry loam, musk and espresso. You might get the sense it's driven by darker flavors, with a subtlety to the acid and a meatier presence. No rough edges at all, which is surprising for a Monte Bello at this point. Delicious, but a curiosity. Consider waiting to open. 13.4 percent.
2004 Monte Bello: Astounding perfume in the nose, with scents of ink, violets, chicory and marjoram. Gripping plum skin and bright red-fruit highlights. There's a distinct ripeness to it, almost a relative softness in the structure, but then an herbal twinge and that mineral power brings you back to Monte Bello, with the impressive structure revealing itself again. Fully drinkable, but still at least five to seven years from its peak. 13.2 percent.
2005 Monte Bello: A full, smoky, rich nose, with more meat and coffee accents, and a licorice sweetness. Then it moves to bright notes, showing its high-acid nature on the palate, with a lean mineral rush to finish. The tannins are a touch exposed right now, but look how young it is in its evolution! Quite simply, a gorgeous Monte Bello to enjoy now or later. 13.4 percent.
1968 Monte Bello: Well, then. Still stunningly powerful, with accents of graphite, loam, beef, Bing cherry and oregano. And frankly, it's pretty youthful, showing gorgeously sweet tannins (apparently softened from their onetime hugeness) around a steely structure that reveals not an ounce of fat. The vibrancy in it really is what's impressive; it was actually running circles around a still pretty youthful 1978. 12.7 percent.
The following were tasted during two winery visits:
2006 Monte Bello: The American oak is showing slightly right now, with more sappy, meaty fruit — extracted cherry, plus watermelon skin and mineral accents. Just starting to shut down a bit, it seems, but it's got lots of plush mouthcoating tannins and will be impressive once the various pieces smooth out in 3-4 years. 13.5 percent.
2007 Monte Bello: A sign of the gorgeous vintage. On first tasting (the wine had been double-decanted 18 hours earlier) it's plush, slightly smoky and showing full integrated oak (which can take a while for Monte Bello). High-toned huckleberry and deeper cassis notes mix in, with lots of beefy power and ripe, supple tannins showing off. Simply beautiful, without fat but with plenty of ripeness. A second tasting a couple weeks later found a quieter expression, with more camphor scents, but still all the perfume and cocoa-like richness matched to edgy acidity. Its showing after a long decanting is a sign of a happy life ahead for at least 15-20 years. 13.1 percent.
2007 Santa Cruz Mountains Estate: Ridge's second wine off Monte Bello, but here's an Estate worth going for. It's undoubtedly more plush and dark, with an immediacy to its fruit and finish, and slightly chunkier tannins. But if it's more straightforward than the Monte Bello, it still has plenty of that complex vineyard stuffing, if in a younger-drinking package. 13.3 percent.
2006 Santa Cruz Mountains Estate: In a difficult place right now. There's a grain to the tannins and at moments it seems just a touch hollow, even as it's a forward, fruit-focused wine. Still lots of currant and black cherry fruit, and celery-seed accents. Just not as subtle as some. 13.5 percent.
2007 Monte Bello Chardonnay: Monte Bello's rare Chardonnay is often the last wine from this site to release. This won't be out for a while yet, and it's really quite closed off, but amid the evident sweet wood character, there's a unity of ripeness, with bright mineral flavors and clear acidity adding an edge to the notably ripe, lemon-inflected fruit. When it finally unfurls, that ripe fruit will be gorgeous.
2006 Monte Bello Chardonnay: Here the powerful oak presence is still up front, with lemon oil, pear skin, toast and a subtle beeswax aroma, plus accents of green apple and tarragon. There's so much power to it, but it's a bit tense and closed right now. Needs at least five years. 14.4 percent.
| Mar 09 at 09:30 AM
Monday, March 08, 2010
A tribute to Monte Bello
Chad Ziemendorf/Special to The Chronicle
The highest point of Monte Bello, around 2,700 feet.
Last week brought a celebration of Ridge Vineyards' 50th anniversary atop the Monte Bello ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains — and, as it happens, also a chance to acknowledge Paul Draper's 40 years of service as winemaker, presiding over some of California's defining wines.
Monte Bello, of course, is the source of that most unique and long-lived of American Cabernet-based wines, and a defining wine in a region, as my recent story noted, that has a history of producing some of California's best. Draper has for four decades run Ridge with an eye toward the sort of less-is-more, noninterventionist winemaking that he studied in his early years. (This theme factored into our honoring him as our 2006 Winemaker of the Year, and surfaced again in a terrific profile from Eric Asimov of the New York Times, in what is sure to be a run in the spotlight for Ridge.)
A highlight of the festivities was a tasting of a dozen vintages of Monte Bello (covered here). But as part of a visit to the Monte Bello facility, Draper and his team, which includes Eric Baugher, who oversees the Monte Bello winemaking, David Gates, who oversees Ridge's vineyards, and John Olney, who oversees the Lytton Springs (hence non-Cabernet) winemaking, arranged for a gaggle of wine writers to get a taste of how Monte Bello is assembled.
That last word is key, because Draper is insistent that in order to create a wine like Monte Bello, you must have a larger program to create, in effect, a second wine — specifically the Santa Cruz Mountains Estate wine, which retails for around $42 compared to Monte Bello's $145 — so that you can seek out the best lots to make your finest wine and have some way to harness the rest. This way the more fruit-forward, less typical lots can find a home in the Estate, while the most long-lived, structured lots become that year's Monte Bello.
Jon Bonne/The Chronicle
Tasting Monte Bello lots with Paul Draper (center).
One sometimes knock against Monte Bello is its use of American, not French, oak. But the oak expression in the wines is generally different from others that spend time in American oak. Some of that is due to Ridge having developed its own intricate program to source American oak from forests that, for competitive reasons, it does not disclose. But Draper attributed more of the impact to a two-year air drying process for the oak that relies on summer moisture to leach out most of the stronger wood tannins. "We really think leaching is that crucial element."
With about 30 different parcels that could go into Monte Bello, each vinified separately, the Ridge team gathers twice for a lengthy series of blind tastings, typically six or eight samples at a time. The best are pushed ahead to another round of blending, and the tweaking of the blend continues for several days. This happens first in early February after the harvest, and then again in May once the final lots have finished their fermentation process. As Draper put it to me last month, "We're saying, does this taste like the last 50 vintages of Monte Bello?"
For a mini-version of this process, we were seated in front of five samples in the Monte Bello tasting room as rain clouds descended. The first glass contained a base blend of 74 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 26 percent Merlot, with each subsequently including an addition to the mix. We tasted, talked and then found out what had been added. The first addition, about 11 percent Petit Verdot, counterintuitively brought out a silkiness and roundness to the Cabernet. An addition of some Cabernet from the Steep Terrace plot brought forward tension-building floral aromas and added a dose of fine, ripe tannins. An addition of more Cabernet from a younger block pushed the wine toward more brightness, but also acidity and angularity. Finally a dose of about 7 percent Merlot smoothed out those sharp elbows, adding more ripe black fruit, plus scents of violets and bright minerals.
The final result was the most generous, with a balance of salty and sweet in the tannins and that taut high-acid bounce that defines Monte Bello. Point proven. This last version is more or less where the 2009 Monte Bello stands. The May tastings will tweak things further.
The real lesson here? Perhaps 40 percent of the vineyard actually lands in Monte Bello, with the rest going to the Santa Cruz Mountains Estate bottling or sold off. In other words, Monte Bello may be an expression of a unique limestone mountain, but it is also a deliberate result of endless tasting and tweaking and experimentation (a French oak lot is prepared each year, just to double-check that the American oak choice is a smart one) to wind up with a wine that is exactly what Draper and his team want it to be. It is achieved not through high-tech tinkering — the wines are all still naturally fermented and handled — but by simple selection, and the luxury of being able to declassify more than half your crop.
The anniversary week at Ridge also included that vertical tasting of more than a dozen vintages of Monte Bello. (Additionally, it included a day at Ridge's Sonoma facilities, which I sadly missed.) I'll cover those in another post. But suffice to say that not only does Monte Bello makes a historic argument for itself, but recent vintages are in truly fine form, including a 2004 and 2005 that are astounding wines and a forthcoming 2007 that equally fits in that realm.
What's evident is that Draper and the entire Ridge team are not only upholding the tradition of one of the greatest American wines, they're making it relevant and appealing to a wine world that doesn't always appreciate subtlety. To maintain that quality after half a century is worth celebrating indeed.
Next: A vertical of Monte Bello.
| Mar 08 at 09:35 AM
Friday, February 26, 2010
Viognier vs. Viognier
Jon Bonne/The Chronicle
Viognier is often the recipient of my mixed feelings. Of all the white Rhone-native grapes, it has the greatest tendency to go off the rails, perhaps because it can easily turn from an opulent, fun-loving bushel of nectar into a dull pile of not much. When it retains enough acidity to keep lively — which is to say, when it's picked at that difficult moment when the ripe fruit flavors come forward without falling off the balance beam — it can be a gorgeous treat. More often, it lands on the far side of ripe. Points off from the judges. So it goes with the Viognier quest.
But there are those who take the the grape seriously and keep it to the colder spots in which its odds for success are best (think of where Pinot Noir grows). I recently had two such examples: the 2008 estate Viogniers from Calera and Cristom.
These are Pinot people, of course: Josh Jensen at Calera, located on Mount Harlan outside of Hollister (San Benito County), and Steve Doerner at Cristom, located in the Eola Hills outside Salem, Ore. Those who know these labels know not only that these are two of the most outstanding sources for Pinot Noir, but also that there's a direct connection: Doerner used to work for Jensen as Calera's winemaker in the 1980s.
What's less known is that both also have both a great interest in Viognier. Indeed, perhaps the greatest challenge at Calera in farming its limestone ridge has been getting its five acres of Viognier to produce a useful crop. Having attempted one of the first U.S. plantings of the grape, Jensen got to face all the challenges of adapting it to new terrain. When it's good, it's very good, one of the defining American Viogniers. Cristom's Viognier is even less well known; grown on one acre in the warmest spot of its estate vineyards, some is blended as a small part of Cristom's (also little-known) Syrah but it also gets bottled on its own.
The two together are a perfect study in how Viognier can ride that razor's edge or go too far. The 2008 Cristom ($27) finds that precarious balance between a jubilant, juicy nature and the unctuous peachy flavors that so mark Viognier. (Think more peach skin than flesh.) It's not a modest wine — 14 percent, but then the Viognier grape is a little sugar-bomb — but there's lots of crunch to the flavors, with a lime-zest edge and edgy restraint.
The 2008 Calera ($30), by contrast, was picked in late October at a meager half-ton per acre, with sugar at 27.2 Brix — a small crop on the high side of ripe, more signs of the tricky times in '08. The resulting wine is mighty and intense, if a touch wide in its stance: lots of creamy fig, honeysuckle and apricot preserve. Calera's Viognier is often marked by mineral intensity, but this time that mineral focus is battling against almond-like richness and some alcoholic heat. (It's also the first time I've seen an organic certification on Calera; the vineyards have long been organic but only recently certified.)
It's still far more energetic than most Viogniers, just not as focused as Calera can be. To me that's mostly a reflection of how hard it is to capture Viognier in its perfect sweet spot. Did we really believe it would be the next Chardonnay?
| Feb 26 at 02:35 PM
Friday, February 19, 2010
Pointing fingers in Pinotgate
AP Photo
The French firm Sieur D'Arques was convicted for supplying fake Pinot.
Let's talk about the Pinot that wasn't.
This week finally brings some resolution to Pinotgate 2010, resolved for the moment with the fraud convictions of 12 people in a French court for selling to E&J; Gallo wine labeled as Pinot Noir that was nothing of the sort. The defendants, vintners and co-ops in southern France, have said they may appeal, according to the AP.
The case alleged that what Gallo received as Pinot Noir for its Red Bicyclette label from Sieur d'Arques, a large wine merchant in the Languedoc region, was in fact Merlot and Syrah. Gallo has said it is "deeply disappointed" in its supplier, and reiterated that only 20 percent of the total wine involved was ever imported, all for the 2006 vintage. (Wine Spectator has a great explanation of the whole boondoggle.)
It's only February, but this whole mess is the wine world's current frontrunner for Schadenfreude of the Year. Not only does it involve an American wine giant getting duped by the French (the freedom-fry cooks are currently heating their oil again) but it goes to the heart of what Pinot partisans have been bemoaning for years: Our precious grape has been ruined by the masses.
Pinot has always been a persnickety soul. One of many "Sideways" ironies is that the crowning moment of the very movie that sparked Pinot's mainstream turn was, in fact, a rhapsody on how difficult a grape it is. When Pinotphiles (who even among wine snobs have a slightly higher snob factor) carp about the arrival of the $8 Pinot, it's partly because we hate our beloved grape being shared with the masses. Cheapen Cabernet if you like — some of the most renowned Cabernet-based wines are still made in tens of thousands of cases — but Pinot's historic context in Burgundy only allowed it to succeed on a miniscule scale. Cab was extensible; Pinot wasn't.
This conviction, then, was an affirmation of every Pinotphile's conspiracy theory: that our beloved Pinot had been defiled by lesser grapes and the forces of large-scale industrial winemaking.
And it has been. It is a well-known reality that the road to cheap Pinot is paved with more robust grapes; many inexpensive Pinot Noirs on the shelf are anything but 100 percent pure, with Merlot, Syrah, Petite Sirah and even Chardonnay blended in. The most scrupulous wine companies simply admit what's in the bottle. Whatever the composition, it's a safe bet that industrial-scale Pinot often requires the sort of winemaking hijinks — sugar additions (for the Europeans), reverse osmosis, maybe a dose of gum arabic or Mega Purple — that are the modern tools of the corporate winemaker. (It reputedly happens for more expensive Pinot, too, but that's a different story.) The net result is a bottle that's drinkable and mainstream, if not distinguished in any way as Pinot Noir.
Curiously, a lot of bile has been directed toward Gallo: How could they not know this wasn't Pinot? Didn't anyone taste it? It's a fair question; a Gallo spokesperson replied that "there is no way to chemically test wine to establish its varietal composition with certainty." And it's entirely possible that no one tasted the wine in more than a cursory way before purchasing it.
At worst this might have been a vinous case of don't-ask-don't-tell. Bulk Pinot Noir mostly tastes red and wet, and beyond that it can be mistaken for any other mass-grown red wine. This is true not only for the Languedoc but virtually anywhere that industrial Pinot plantings have appeared. Perhaps the best compliment I've ever had for cheap Pinot is that it tastes like Pinot, sort of. So I don't doubt someone at Gallo might have tasted the faux-Pinot and found no Pinot character. They might also have tasted real Pinot and found no Pinot character.
Now there's word that Constellation Brands, the world's largest wine company, also bought fake Pinot from the same source. They, too, insist they thought it was the real thing.
But the real story of modern Pinot can be found on any supermarket wine shelf. Look at the fine print on bottles of $8 or $12 Pinot, and you'll see a self-contained tale of globalization. The brands may scream California — Beringer, Meridian, Pepperwood Grove, Redwood Creek — but the labels tell a different story: Vin de Pays de l'Herault (France), Provincia di Pavia (Italy), Valle Central (Chile), Rheinhessen (central Germany).
The metastory to the huge jump in Pinot production from last year's harvest, mostly from warm inland areas, is that those vineyards came online just in time to balance out the flood of European bulk Pinot that has been slaking our thirst for the past half-decade. Ironically, the fake Pinot that hobbled Gallo was for its Red Bicyclette label, which always was branded as a French wine. More typically, all this accent-wielding Pinot has been going to brands that speak fluent American.
So who gets the blame? We all do. The wine industry didn't just wake up one day and decide to make one of the most notoriously difficult grapes into a mass product. It responded to a huge demand for a cheap version of a wine that probably shouldn't be cheap. You could argue that big wineries have been misleading novice drinkers into a false view of what Pinot should be. But an alternate argument — and one I'm sticking with — is that until we accept that some wines just can't be made on the cheap, we're being sold the wine we deserve. If we're so worried about Merlot being quietly blended into cheap Pinot, there's an easy solution: Stop drinking cheap Pinot.
| Feb 19 at 01:30 PM
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