Tag Archives: California

Coturri Freiburg Vineyard Zinfandel 2008

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Natural winemaking in Sonoma County pretty much starts and ends with Coturri. In a region full of squeaky clean, commercially styled wines, Tony Coturri’s laissez-faire approach in the winery comes as a breath of fresh air. I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with Tony recently, where we discussed his approach, heritage Sonoma wine styles and much else besides. His way with Zinfandel is especially successful, I think. He allows the wine to ferment wild and, often, this results in an amount of residual sugar once fermentation is complete. He feels this is the manner in which Zinfandel was once made in the region and, despite it being noticeably sweet on the mid-palate, considers it a good food wine.

I tend to agree and, in this, his Zinfandels remind me of Australian Shiraz VP, which I’ve always thought is a great wine with savoury food (and not just chocolate). Like a good Shiraz VP, this is extremely aromatic. The nose is rich, spiced and fruitcake-like, screaming of Zinfandel all the way. Its complexity is heady, with interesting biscuity notes and some greenness too, which is typical of this unevenly ripening variety. This isn’t a fresh fruit style. Rather, its aromas remind me of Old World styles that involve extended barrel maturation, in that their focus is on flavours that show some development.

The palate is a striking mixture of off-dry fruit and biscuity flavours, its line seeming sweet before finishing clean and dry. Structure is beautifully balanced, especially acid, while tannins are dusty and firm enough to prevent the wine’s flavours from cloying. It has power and richness and, like a German Riesling, seems to magically balance its residual sweetness with just the right amount of structure.

A strikingly unusual wine style, this is quite delicious and calls out for a big hunk of hard cheese and sourdough bread.

Coturri Winery
Price: $NA (not yet released)
Closure: Cork
Source: Sample

MacPhail Family Wines Sangiacomo Vineyard Pinot Noir 2010

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When at the MacPhail cellar door, I was especially interested to acquire two contrasting Pinots for later tasting, and purchased this as well as the Gap’s Crown Vineyard wine on the recommendation of Assistant Winemaker William Weese. The two vineyards are near to each other, but the wines to which they give rise are quite different. While the Gap’s Crown wine is a luscious, fruit-forward expression of Pinot, this brings structure to the fore and prefers a flavour profile with more prominent savouriness.

That said, it shares much stylistically with other Pinots I have recently tasted from various AVAs within Sonoma County; that is, it’s a relatively large scale wine. Aromatically, it’s very expressive and quite dark, with a thread of minerality that takes dark berry fruit into quite different territory from the Gap’s Crown. It’s sappy and slightly medicinal; totally varietal, in fact, yet at the same time rich and plush. No wonder Pinots from Sonoma have found such a receptive audience; this is Pinot for Zinfandel drinkers, a gateway to different flavours without the challenge of excessively light colour or body.

The palate is quite sappy and fresh, with noticeably more structure (both acid and tannin) than the Gap’s Crown. Unlike the latter wine, this is tighter through the middle palate, avoiding excess broadness and keeping things brisk, though full. The after palate lightens, perhaps too much, before fresh tannins bring the finish to a close. This isn’t a wine that penetrates aggressively the back of the mouth, but it does in fact have good length in its gentle manner.

It’s difficult to generalise on the basis of two bottles, from a difficult vintage to boot, but there are clear differences between these two labels and I’m excited to find a producer so intent on illuminating special sites through this most transparent of red grape varieties.

MacPhail Family Wines
Price: $US49
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail

MacPhail Family Wines Gap’s Crown Vineyard Pinot Noir 2010

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The first of two Pinots I picked up at MacPhail’s cellar door this week. While in Sonoma, I’ve been especially curious to explore the various AVAs producing Pinot, so different is it in style from French, Australian and Kiwi wines. I was aware of a reputation for big, “dry red” Pinots from the area, and it’s true that most of the Pinots I’ve tasted have been larger in scale. Yet they often show excellent varietal character in terms of flavour, and their scale and luxe presents its own appeal. I’m open to the style.

This is a particularly plush example. As such, it shares something with some older school Central Otago Pinots, though without their, at times, highly extracted structure. I was a little concerned when I opened this, as it showed a fair bit of stink initially. This, however, blew off quickly, leaving behind a clean wine. First impressions are of plush red berry fruit. There’s no mistaking this for anything other than Pinot, though, as it presents a distinctive sappiness along with its fruit, as well as sweet, fragranced undergrowth. That said, it never wavers from its rich, fruit forward nature. The only note that distracts here is a hint of overripeness. I understand there was a very hot period towards harvest in 2010 that may account for this influence.

The palate is predictably full and rich. On entry, soft and immediate, moving to a fleshy middle palate that fills the mouth with red fruits. Acid is only moderately bright, giving a broadness to the mid-palate that some may dislike; soft tannins don’t do much to give the wine shape either. This, though, is a lush style and, for me, lower acid is a valid expression of this fruit; a more highly acidified wine may well have seemed forced. As a drink now style, I like the palate’s soft, supple feel. Still present is that slightly overripe fruit note which detracts from an otherwise correct, straightforward pinot flavour profile. The line is even, with no dips or surges.

Is it great Pinot? Not in any conventional sense, but at the same time it’s a pleasure to find a Pinot made in this style that isn’t either cheap or lacking in character. A fruit bomb for sure, and a bloody good one.

MacPhail Family Wines
Price: $US49
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail

Bonny Doon Vineyard Le Cigare Volant Réserve 2010

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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

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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

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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

The Scholium Project Chuey Cab 2009

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There’s a particular type of wine in which I have an inherent interest; they form part of, for lack of a better term, what I’ll call the postmodern wine project. These are bottlings that draw on a particular view of wine history, elevating practices that have, over time, become outmoded, and attempting to illuminate in modern form things we may have lost from our experience of drinking wine. This project can sometimes take generous form, as in the Mountain X wines, or be somewhat more retaliatory tone, as in this one.

The idea here is to reclaim a not-long-lost style of Napa Cabernet that is earlier picked and more elegant in effect. Those who lived through unripe Australian Cabernets from the 80s may shake their heads at this folly, but I am pleased to note this wine, though it shows signs of a certain greeness, is far from the leaf bombs that Coonawarra was churning out those decades ago. At 14.24% ABV it’s not exactly a lean wine in terms of alcohol, and there is a core of ripe fruit here that supports more questionable edges of green.

To focus on ripeness, though, is perhaps missing the point of this wine, which achieves obvious, genuine elegance. Sure, it comes at the cost of some green tannins and a slightly lean (though purely fruited) mid-palate, but I’m not prepared to dismiss this wine on the basis of pulling back ripeness to provide a different view of the fruit. This seems a sophisticated attempt to do something different and beautiful that engages with a (real or imagined) past. And it’s a very good wine, even when judged by conventional markers like complexity, balance and line. Would I prefer it without a smattering of green tannins on the finish? Unequivocally, yes. Do they ruin the wine? Absolutely not.

Another fascinating Scholium wine.

The Scholium Project
Price: $US85
Closure: Cork
Source: Gift

The Scholium Project the sylphs 2009

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About three days ago I arrived in San Diego, a place I haven’t visited since 1997 when I was here on a student exchange. What a year. I had come to finish my science degree at UCSD, and I did indeed do that. But my fondest memories are of life outside school.

For the first couple of weeks back then, I wasn’t even 21 years old, so was legally unable to enter any of the bars that, as a fourth year university student, I had become rather too accustomed to frequenting in Australia. No matter; my birthday soon ticked around, the school year started, and my time here flew by in a haze of perfect weather, minimal study and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of great beaches.

The intervening years have brought many things, one of which is my friendship with Christopher Pratt, co-publisher of Full Pour and all-around awesome guy. A few years ago, Chris and his partner made San Diego home, and the city has beckoned ever since. Finally, in my year of wine, I’m here again.

Amongst the many Californian wines I’ve been keen to try, few are higher on the list than The Scholium Project’s various bottlings. Chris has written about these in some detail on Full Pour, and I encourage you to browse through the archives to familiarise yourself with what must surely be one of the more intriguing producers working in California at the moment. We’ve already tasted several over the past few days, and none have been less than interesting. This, though, stands out for its sheer perversity.

This is what might happen if you turn Chardonnay inside out. Everything about it seems designed to test one’s idea of what varietal Chardonnay ought to taste like, from its emphasis on flavours that ordinarily sit at the edges to its radical re-rendering of some clearly beautiful fruit. The nose shoves things like nutty aldehydes, salt spray, Mexican candy and your grandmother’s stash of sherry (thanks Chris for that image) right into the foreground; fruit becomes utterly secondary to aromas that are ordinarily used sparingly to add complexity and depth, and that might reasonably be considered faults if too prominent. But do conventional ideas of balance apply when a wine is so determinedly styled to challenge those conventions?

The palate reveals a core of fruit that seems radically distorted yet weirdly beautiful, like trying to see a peach through glass bricks. This styling strikes me as cubist in its reconceptualisation of expected flavours. This extends to palate structure too; weight is much lighter than expected and lacking the sort of flesh one might associate with Chardonnay from California. Flavours aren’t quite as sweet as the nose suggests, although no amount of fiddling can completely rob the fruit here of a certain lusciousness. Texture becomes rough through the back palate, and complexity of flavour is unmitigated from front to back.

In some ways, I’ve no idea what to make of this wine in quality terms. It’s full of intent, shows good fruit and is vastly provocative, stylistically. Does that make it a good wine? Do regular indicators of quality even apply? I’m not sure, but I love that it poses the question.

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

Jalama “Carg” Pinot Noir 2010

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Forgive me, Julian, for I have sinned. It has been some ridiculous amount of time since my last confession tasting note. That being said, it’s a new year, a new site (thank you for your hard work), and it’s high time I pulled my own weight around here and contributed something. Right! Off we go: Last year, I was fortunate enough to have drunk several very, very good bottles of wine with this guy named Tom. Tom and I work for the same company, but at relative opposite ends of the totem pole: I’m a humble support tech, and he’s the capo di tutti support services at the company. Better yet, the guy has a seriously good sense of taste when it comes to wine… and he shares. Now, Julian, you may remember that we used to joke about how those of us in the colonies have an amusing habit of referring to anything exceptionally good as being world class or having European styling; this is of course also very, very true in the wine world. If a wine’s especially good, well, then of course it’s world class. To name one example, there’s a very fine, very exclusive winery called in the Santa Rita Hills AVA called Sea Smoke. Support tech that I am, I’d heard of them, sure, but I’ve never actually seen a bottle of theirs, much less tasted it, until Tom cracked one open. Sure enough, just as the <TITLE> tag of the Sea Smoke website claims, it’s world-class: rich, generous, unobtrusively oaked, with fine grained tannins and impeccable taste. There’s a reason it’s mailing list unobtainium and much sought after, and as much as I wanted to find fault with it (being so close to Los Angeles, surely it would have a touch of vulgar Hollywood surgical amplification about it, n’est-ce pas? But no, it’s pure class.)

But I digress. The wine I have in front of me is superficially similar and at the same time not the same thing at all. This is from a small, family-owned vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills, not a larger, long-established, well-known winery. Although it’s presumably grown with the same care in a similar climat, and also raised in new French for quite a long time, it’s a relative steal at forty-six bucks, or about four times the price of an oak-chipped monstrosity from the California Central Coast. So: Is it worth it? The short answer is thankfully fuck yeah.

Let’s start with the look of this wine. As rock sage Nigel Tufnel once said, it’s none more black, reall. Unlike Oregon pinot, this one isn’t lacking in the anthocyanin department, no sir. This is the kind of manly pinot that screams Hey ladies, check out my excellent taste in wine as well as my bank balance, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. On the nose, it’s got everything you could hope for in a pinot: soft, fragrant oak just hanging out like Neal Cassady at the Salinas Greyhound station, crisp saline air drifting in from the coast with just a touch of smoke from the Spreckels plant down the road. Mixed in with very pretty strawberry-cherry notes, there’s also just a little bit of something very Robert Smith in there as well, serious as a heart attack, nervy and tense, tightly coiled. It’s very, very groovy.

Finally, the taste of the stuff? Yeah, pretty much what you’d expect, but better. Magically, it’s light on its feet in the mouth, not heavy or syrupy as California pinot sometimes tends to be. The French oak is a bit more noticeable on the finish – for my taste, I could stand perhaps a touch less, but then again, this is very much a la mode and it’s absolutely spot on for the local style. It finishes with some very smooth, fine grained tannin and a lingering soft, cedary note that unfurls into a wonderfully refreshing, acid-supported vibrancy that has a real way of making you wonder why you don’t drink this kind of wine more often.

Really, why don’t you?

Jalama
Price: $46
Closure: Cork
Source: Winery

The Scholium Project the wisdom of Theuth 2010

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Here in San Diego, it’s a balmy 25.7°C – sure, it’s technically winter, but it sure doesn’t feel like a good time to bust out the high octane Zinfandel that goes so well with a fireplace (bearskin rug optional, of course). Instead, I’m splitting the difference with a heavy white wine.

On an aside: I’m even more confused about the whole verdejo-verdelho thing after a recent trip to Spain; I came home with a bottle of godello, which is apparently the same as verdelho, which is apparently distinct from verdejo. Go figure. Anyhow: Australians and Californians say verdelho just as surely as we say mataro, so verdelho it is.

You could easily mistake this wine for Asturian cider if you served it in the wrong glass: it’s got that fat, rich, flat sparkling wine color to it. As is usually the case for this winery, there’s obviously a metric ton of alcohol involved, with the kind of legs that would be banned in Utah. The nose is wonderfully complex, with an initial hit of cucumber cold cream, lemon zest, bitter almonds, and empty, waxed wooden floors in a cold German hallway in the countryside, with traces of hay and old leather bookbags.

Unctuous and slippery, the wine is bone dry; all of the texture is strictly alcoholic. There’s a fine-grained acidity that works well against the bitter chalkiness of the wine; there’s an elegant tension between a sense of fresh baked bread with slightly green edges on the nose and the bottom-heavy, quince marmelade of the wine. Finally, apparently only to drive home the point that this wine is serious business, there’s a seductive hint of stony minerality.

Should you age this wine? No, probably not. What you should do is obvious (and a categorical imperative): buy some, cool it (but don’t chill it), and serve it to friends with marzipan or strong cheeses. I know it’s a vanishingly small category, but The Scholium Project is (I believe) far and away the finest producer of verdelho in North America. If you don’t know what verdelho tastes like, this is your best introduction to the genre.

The Scholium Project
Price: $28
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail