Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc 2012

One of the more puzzling experiences of my recent tasting foray into Russian River Valley (and more specifically Green Valley) wine has been the stylistic diversity and, at times, highly variable quality of Sauvignon Blanc produced in the region. It runs the gamut from Kiwi-inspired styles to insipid dry whites to this Merry Edwards wine, stylistically by far the most resolved of any I have tried from the region.

I was quite looking forward to visiting to Merry Edwards Winery, it having received some solid recommendations, but nothing could have prepared me for the brutally efficient cellar door experience, which is as close to a drive by tasting as I have seen. The wines, though, were without exception intriguing, and by far the best of my day’s tasting in Green Valley. A Pinot specialist, the portfolio contains several single vineyard Pinots and this one Sauvignon Blanc. After extended tasting, some of the 2010 Pinots made less of an impression than they did at first, fading rather more quickly than I thought they might, but this wine impressed from beginning to end. It’s a multi-clonal blend, including 20% Sauvignon Musqué, that is barrel fermented and aged with lees stirring to build weight and texture. What pleases me about it, though, is that it retains outstanding freshness and character; that is, it always plays to the variety’s strengths.

The nose is quite pungent, with aromas of tropical fruit and sharper gooseberry. It’s fresh but rounded, lacking the sharp bite of a Marlborough style. In place of this incisiveness is a smoother sense of generosity and greater complexity in the form of some mineral edges and fresh herbs.

In the mouth, this is happily acid driven but with a fullness on the middle palate that softens some of its linearity. Tropical, herbal, mineral flavours echo the nose, with some good weight and texture through the after palate. This has good line and surprising length for the variety. It’s not particularly funky in flavour or texture, but it has oodles more interest than a more straightforwardly made wine, and I feel this is a particularly good style for Sauvignon Blanc if one is to turn one’s back on the highly aromatic, stainless steel approach.

Good fruit, obviously, and particularly well handled.

Merry Edwards Winery
Price: $US32
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail

Bonny Doon Vineyard Le Cigare Volant Réserve 2010

On my first day at Bonny Doon Vineyard, I helped to wash and fill several hundred glass carboys with 2012 Le Cigare Volant. On my second and third days, we washed and filled several hundred more. While doing this work, it occurred to me more than once that maturing wine in this manner had better be worth the effort.

As it turned out, the timing of my visit to Bonny Doon coincided with this annual event, reserved for the very top wines of the estate (the reserve Le Cigare Volant and reserve Le Cigare Blanc). The first step in preparing the carboys for the 2012 Le Cigare Volant was to decant from them the 2010 vintage, which went to tank and, later in the week, to bottle. I assisted with bottling the ’10 and was given a freshly bottled example to taste. I wasn’t sure how the wine would show, given the many phases through which it had passed in just a few days, but found it already-enjoyable with its essential character intact.

The point of ageing these wines on lees in carboys, it seems, is to create for them a highly anaerobic/reductive environment in which freshness can be maintained and desirable flavours developed. On tasting, I was especially interested to see what, if anything, I might discern in the wine from this method of cellaring, and it seems to me the most striking influence is a savoury minerality that asserts itself through the latter half of the wine’s line. This creates for the wine’s palate a nice sweet-savoury narrative. It begins with almost-plush red berries and spice, deceptively friendly given the progressively more savoury countenance the wine adopts from mid-palate onwards. There begins notes of dried meat, minerals and a range of quite subtle reductive components (of the struck match and smoke sort) that create an impression of seriousness and detail. Tannins are fine and firm, meshing well with the after palate’s angularity of flavour.

Although it’s difficult to assess a wine so recently bottled, I do feel the way in which it was raised has contributed a distinctive character to the wine. These more savoury influences add further sophistication and interest to a wine that already benefits from pretty, restrained fruit aromas and flavours. I will look out for this when it’s released.

Bonny Doon Vineyard
Price: $NA
Closure: Stelvin
Source: Gift

Ridge Monte Bello 2008

During my recent visit with Chris, I was lucky enough to taste several vintages of Monte Bello, Ridge’s flagship Cabernet blend. Not a single bottling was less than excellent, and I found exciting transparency as to vintage conditions across years.

This particular bottle was tasted in a lineup that included Grosset Gaia, Penfolds Bin 707, wines from Cayuse, Clonakilla and more. In other words, some stiff competition. It jumped out at me immediately, though, as the most appealing wine in the moment, and I couldn’t get enough of its power and layers of flavour.

Some wines leap lithely into the mouth, placing flavour delicately and with finesse. This isn’t one of those wines. New World Cabernet this most definitely is, and joyously so. This has presence in the mouth, real impact and body, but it’s only mid-weight, and its charisma instead comes from density of flavour combined with a cascade of notes that land on top of each other, both sweet and savoury, meshing and building down the line.

Texture weaves in and out of these flavours and is an integral experience of the wine; I wouldn’t say it’s forbiddingly tannic, but there’s a firm framework of acid and gloriously luxurious tannin within which this wine’s components rest. All in balance and certainly with a few years ahead of it yet. More than any one thing, though, this wine just begged to be tasted again and again when the other wines in the lineup had said all they had to say.

Is it a matter of absolute quality? No more than in art or friendship.

Ridge
Price: $NA
Closure: Cork
Source: Gift

The Scholium Project Michael Faraday 2010

I have no interest in diminishing the role of viticulturist and winemaker through my practice of wine writing. Making wine is an inherently interventionist process; a simple fact, but one worth repeating in an age where we deify a nature curiously devoid of people and fetishise a past of naive wholesomeness. The right degree of intervention is, of course, vastly contested, and guiding principles like “minimal intervention” are both hopelessly reductive and damagingly misleading. Many wines benefit from extensive work in the winery which, when done with sensitivity and skill, helps to illuminate the underlying qualities of the fruit and create a more complete wine. To the deniers, I simply direct you to unwooded Chardonnay.

Intervention oughtn’t, however, be the focus of a sophisticated criticism of wine. Viticultural techniques and winemaking operations are means to an end, and it’s in connecting those means to the achieved end where a truly interesting conversation about wine is located. In other words, we judge a wine with reference to why it was made, how it was made and what it tastes like.

Straightforward commercial styles yield easily to this analysis, made as they are to be both technically sound and easily accessible. No faults and plenty of fruit? Check. To effortlessly produce these wines in large quantities is one end point of many New World wine industries, and represents a collective achievement I respect enormously. But these wines are often boring to drink, boring to write about and, as such, contain little to engage one’s interest critically. Monumental efforts in the service of bland ends.

Jumping to the other end of the spectrum we have producers like The Scholium Project, who seem determined to (re)invent, discover and pervert conventional notions of wine style. It’s part punk, part hipster and, as an enterprise, vastly more interesting than yet another clean Cabernet. Especially daring are experiments with wine faults, something Scholium seems to explore with its white portfolio in particular.

Clearly, then, not styles for those without a certain tolerance for winemaking eccentricity. There’s a slight urge I feel to celebrate these wines simply for existing, and I do believe there’s value in an ongoing curiosity about how wine ought to taste. In a way, though, by requiring a greater role of the winemaker, these styles expose themselves to greater criticism. When production decisions are so obvious, they become very large targets for the critic.

This wine goes further than the 2009 the sylphs in its focus on aldehydes and its suppression of primary fruit. Indeed, the distorted but complete view of fruit in the sylphs is here reduced to remnant flashes of flavour; slight darts of citrus, peach and minerality. So thick is its blanket of nutty, sherry-like aromas and flavours that few other elements make it out alive. Yet it’s curiously lacking in freshness too, not at all like a good flor sherry. There’s structure here, but somehow the flavour profile suggests a sort of stasis, like wading through mud.

Clearly, the defining act of winemaking was to allow the wine to sit on ullage for a year or so, developing the nutty aldehydic notes that so emphatically dominate this wine. The consequences of this choice are so significant they come to define the entire flavour profile. That’s ballsy winemaking.

One must ask at this point, though: does allowing the wine to develop so oxidatively illuminate the fruit’s underlying qualities? Do the winemaking inputs help to achieve balance? Is this a wine of beauty?

For me, the answer is no in all cases. I believe the style has a precedent in the wines of Jacques Selosse, but what might work in Champagne seems less successful in the world of Sonoma Chardonnay. Drinking this wine is an exercise in frustration. It’s not totally without beauty; there are beguiling flashes of minerality and fruit, bright and pristine enough to suggest some exceptional raw material. Yet I resent having to fight for these moments, and I regret not knowing what the fruit might have made if handled more sympathetically.

As with all the Scholium wines I’ve tasted recently, this is made with clear intent and conviction, qualities I applaud. It takes guts to be so bold in the winery, a domain that is too often about avoiding faults and too rarely about chasing a vision. That this wine ultimately fails, though disappointing, is perhaps unavoidable in a project so intent on experimentation.

The Scholium Project
Price: $US75
Closure: Cork
Source: Gift

Cayuse Armada Vineyard Syrah 2009

A true sense of discovery is one of the most exciting and, for we jaded drinkers, rarest pleasures in wine, especially when it concerns an object of some familiarity like Shiraz. There are any number of sound, delicious expressions of this variety around the world, some more distinctive than others. But to stumble across a region that seems capable of something truly new is rare. With this Cayuse wine, I feel confident that Walla Walla, in Washington state, is one such region.

This isn’t the first Cayuse wine I’ve tried. Several years ago, Chris shared the Cailloux Syrah with me and, looking back on my notes, I was quite blown away by it. Since being in the States again, I’ve tasted two further Cayuse wines, of which this is the second (and best). They are unified by an entirely peculiar flavour profile, filled with savouriness and angularity, spiced but not warm, full but not plush. Winemaking seems consistently clever, with oak and reduction used delicately to season cores of distinctive fruit flavour.

This particular wine, though showing a consistency of regional and house style, blows the roof off in terms of layered complexity. It’s terrifically vibrant, with aromas of dark berries, meat, spice and reduction, each well balanced with respect to the whole. It’s both sinewy and muscular, bouncing between an almost floral dimension to the depths of savouriness and back again, like a fragrance no-one would dare make. So pure, so elegant.

The palate maintains form, a certain heft being offset by the wine’s fundamentally angular set of flavours. This is a big wine, but it’s not a blockbuster, and this balance between body and delicacy is a key pleasure. There’s real definition here, each group of flavours shooting down the line with clarity and freshness. Palate structure is firm without undue assertiveness; the focus here is very much on a kaleidoscopic flavour profile, moving from sweet to savoury, almost-plush to linear. It’s quite a performance.

Tasting this wine was an invigorating experience, like immersing one’s self in a novel that yields a new pleasure with each page. I will be watching Walla Walla Syrah.

Cayuse Vineyards
Price: $NA
Closure: Cork
Source: Gift