The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture Read online

  In the aftermath of the Paris tasting, some French winemakers wisely recognized that France could no longer take its viticultural supremacy for granted, and they responded by improving the quality of their wines. Aubert de Villaine, the coproprietor of Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, had been one of the judges in Paris, and although he was briefly persona non grata after returning home, he said that the result of the tasting had been a great “kick in the ass” for French winemaking. As for American winemaking, the result was, not surprisingly, cause for euphoria, and it was also a source of motivation: it was affirmation that California could indeed make truly great wines, and it spurred other vintners to seek to maximize the quality of their reds and whites.

  Indeed, it quickly became an article of faith that California had one enormous, possibly decisive advantage over France: it had a reliably warm, sunny climate, and France did not. Winemakers in Burgundy and Bordeaux were lucky if they got two or three good vintages a decade. In California, by contrast, it was a rare decade that didn’t cough up eight or nine good vintages. It seemed that the future belonged to California, and for a long time California lived up to the lofty expectations. Some sensational wines were produced there during the late 1970s and through the 1980s.

  But in the early to mid-1990s, something went wrong. In my opinion, the last truly great vintage for California was 1991, which yielded a bumper crop of brilliant wines—Ridge Monte Bello, Dominus, Montelena Estate, Phelps Insignia, Spottswoode, Mondavi Reserve. These were sun-splashed but elegant wines, equal parts power and finesse. In subsequent vintages, however, the power began to eclipse the finesse. Alcohol levels shot up, as did the influence of new oak. It probably began with the 1994 vintage, was unmistakable in the 1997 vintage, and became the defining attribute of higher-end California wines by the early 2000s. What drove the trend is the subject of spirited debate. Some attribute it to climate change; others claim that it was due to winemakers’ catering to Robert Parker’s taste for hedonistic fruit bombs. But I think that the original sin was believing that sun mattered more than soil. California wines may have triumphed in the Judgment of Paris, but centuries of trial and error had taught the French two critically important lessons: it is essential to match the right grapes to the right sites, and the most interesting wines don’t merely taste good, they reflect the particular attributes of the vineyards from which they emerge. Only now, forty years after the Judgment of Paris, has California come to the realization that terroir matters above all else, and as a result, a truly golden age of California winemaking may be at hand.

  This is not to suggest that no one in California grasped the importance of terroir a generation ago. Paul Draper at Ridge Vineyards, arguably California’s greatest winery, certainly understood that site selection was critical to making distinctive, compelling wines. Ridge’s Monte Bello vineyard, located high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Ridge produces its benchmark Cabernet Sauvignon, is one of the world’s great terroirs. Ditto the Geyserville vineyard in Sonoma County, which produces Ridge’s completely sui generis Geyserville Zinfandel. Josh Jensen, a Yale graduate who became convinced that limestone-rich soil was the key to Burgundy’s success with Pinot and Chardonnay, established a winery on the site of a former limestone quarry in the remote Galivan Mountains near Monterey back in the 1970s. Calera Wine Company, as it is known, has been producing some of California’s finest, most expressive wines ever since. Moreover, several California vineyards have also demonstrated the ability to yield brilliant wines via multiple producers, which is one test of great terroir. For instance, a half-dozen different producers, dating back to the early 1970s and including names like Ridge and Joseph Phelps, have made sensational Cabernets using fruit harvested from Napa’s Eisele Vineyard. The Eisele property is as good an example as one could hope to find of the importance of terroir, but it is only belatedly that terroir has become a mantra among California producers.

  THE SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS:

  CALIFORNIA’S REAL SWEET SPOT?

  The Judgment of Paris elevated the stature of California wines; more than that, it catapulted Napa Valley to stardom. Foreign oenophiles flocked to Napa to see the vineyards and taste the wines. It quickly became received wisdom that Napa was America’s viticultural heartland, the source of our finest wines. In time Sonoma acquired considerable cachet of its own, and later, thanks in no small part to Sideways, the Central Coast was heralded as the third leg of this stool, the third of California’s three great wine regions. But while Napa, Sonoma, and the Central Coast are capable of turning out fantastic wines, the Santa Cruz range south of San Francisco has proven itself over the years to be California’s true sweet spot. Rhys Vineyards is writing just the latest chapter in this often-overlooked region’s illustrious winemaking history, a history that dates back to the late nineteenth century and that includes such iconic names as Martin Ray and Paul Masson.

  What’s so impressive about the Santa Cruz range is not just the quality of the wines it produces but the variety. This fairly compact area has shown itself capable of turning out brilliant Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs, and Syrahs. The mere fact that it has had so much success with Cabernet and Pinot Noir, grapes that generally flourish under very different circumstances and that yield polar-opposite wines, speaks to the unrivaled versatility of the San Francisco peninsula. And while this is just one man’s opinion, I can say that the finest California Cabernets, Pinots, Syrahs, and Chardonnays that I’ve tasted have all come from the Santa Cruz range. The wines of Ridge, Mount Eden, and now Rhys are benchmarks as far as California goes—yardsticks against which all other wines must be measured. The fact that some of the brightest stars from other parts of California, such as Pax Mahle and the team of Duncan Arnot Meyers and Nathan Lee Roberts, are now making wines in the Santa Cruz range speaks to the quality that this area is capable of turning out. It is not an easy place to make wines; it is very rugged, and crop yields tend to be pretty meager. Because the output is so relatively puny, the Santa Cruz range will surely never have the kind of broad recognition and appeal that Napa, Sonoma, and the Central Coast enjoy. Nor is it ever likely to be a tourist mecca, though its spectacular scenery and proximity to both Silicon Valley and San Francisco make it a natural attraction. However, based on past and present performance, a strong case can be made that the Santa Cruz range is the source of California’s most compelling wines, and given the intrinsic quality of the area’s vineyards, the future promises to be just as lustrous.

  For most of the past two decades, a lot of vines were planted in California not because they were necessarily compatible with the vineyards but simply because they were fashionable grapes. Pinot Noir is hot—let’s plant some Pinot here! Even at the highest end, proper site selection was often treated as a secondary concern. Fueled by the tech boom, a number of newly enriched tycoons started wineries in Napa in the 1990s. Their aim was to produce boutique wines that would garner high scores from Parker and the Wine Spectator and become trophies for other rich people, and they all seemed to think that hiring big-name consulting winemakers—Helen Turley, Michel Rolland, Heidi Barrett—ultimately mattered more than their choice of vineyards. For the purpose of achieving ecstatic reviews from Parker and the Spectator, that seems to have been true.

  However, a lot of those wines have lost their cachet in recent years. Part of it is the economic downturn—consumers are no longer quite so willing to drop $150 or $200 (or more) on a bottle of Napa Cabernet—but I have to believe that part of it is also that many of these wines just weren’t very interesting. They all had the same basic taste profile: overripe fruit, lots of new oak, and little, if any, obvious site expression. These wines provoked a strong backlash in the geekier precincts of the wine world; indeed, California became every wine geek’s favorite punching bag. Denouncing California wines as overripe, overoaked, overwrought, and overpriced was commonplace in these circles. In fact, scorning California was considered a mark of sophistication, a measure of one’s wine sa
vviness. The scorn wasn’t unjustified: many higher-end California wines were oafish confections.

  But recent years have also seen the emergence of a group of winemakers who are fixated on the notion of terroir and who are determined to put a different face on California wines—to show that California can produce balanced, elegant, subtle wines. With Burgundy rather than Bordeaux as their beacon, they have been seeking out cool-climate sites in which to plant Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (as well as some other grape varieties, notably Syrah), and the results have been hugely impressive. These are some of the most exciting wines to emerge from California, and they suggest that after a two-decades-long detour, California is back on track to realizing the promise that the Judgment of Paris hinted at.

  So who are the winemakers at the vanguard of this movement? They include a former Wall Streeter turned Pinot Noir specialist named Jamie Kutch, the San Francisco sommelier Rajat Parr, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Kevin Harvey. All three honed their palates on Burgundies and set out to make wines that showed the same finesse and site expression of Burgundies. Others followed a more twisted path. Take Wells Guthrie, a Los Angeles native in his early forties. In 2000, Guthrie launched a Sonoma-based winery called Copain. His lush, high-alcohol Pinot Noirs and Syrahs quickly earned stellar ratings from Parker and other critics and a loyal following among consumers. There was just one problem: Guthrie wasn’t all that jazzed about his own wines. They didn’t have the freshness he wanted—fruit with some crunch to it—and he found that they grew soft and flabby as they aged. Also, because of the alcohol and density, they weren’t great with food. Guthrie had trained in the northern Rhône Valley and had also tasted his share of great Burgundies, and he wanted his wines to have some of that Old World nuance. At no small risk to his business, he decided to take his wines in another direction. He began focusing on cooler vineyards and went north of Sonoma, to Mendocino County, to find sites that could yield the kind of restrained, graceful Pinots, Syrahs, and Chardonnays that he hoped to make. He also started picking grapes earlier to keep the alcohol levels in check and to lock in the freshness that he sought. Some fans weren’t pleased with the slimmed-down Copain, but Guthrie was much happier with the wines, and the market has now come around to his point of view; the wines have been enthusiastically embraced by sommeliers on both coasts and by many consumers, too.

  For my taste, the most thrilling of the newer wines are coming from Kevin Harvey, whose winery, Rhys Vineyards, is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Rhys is a classic case of one man’s obsession run splendidly amok. Harvey, a tall, genial Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, caught the wine bug in the early 1990s. It soon mutated into a Burgundy fixation, and in 1995 he decided to dabble in fantasy by planting some Pinot Noir vines—Burgundy’s signature red grape variety—in the backyard of his Woodside, California, home, set in the foothills of the Santa Cruz range. He vinified the grapes in his garage, and the wine turned out to be shockingly good. (He insists that he had no clue his lawn could cough up such quality; he says it was “pure serendipity.”) He had been thinking about starting a winery in Sonoma, but it now occurred to him that there might be gold in the mountains behind his house.

  Further exploration—and Harvey was nothing if not diligent—revealed that the steep inclines of the Santa Cruz Mountains were carpeted with rocks and also had very shallow, weathered soils. From his travels, Harvey had observed that many of Europe’s most acclaimed vineyards were situated on land just like that. Thin, poor soil is desirable because it forces vines to struggle for nutrients, which has the effect of limiting their output and yielding very concentrated fruit. According to Harvey, it also causes the grapes to ripen relatively early, which keeps alcohol levels in check. As for those rocks, it wasn’t just their prevalence that was notable; it was also their variety. The Santa Cruz appellation is bisected by the San Andreas Fault, which is where the North American and Pacific tectonic plates collide, and all that churning has created remarkable geological diversity. The hillsides are strewn with chert, shale, limestone, mudstone, and sandstone. Intuitively, at least, this combination of factors seemed to account for the piercing minerality that Harvey had found in his backyard cuvée and other Santa Cruz wines.

  He began scouring the region for potential vineyards and between 2001 and 2005 identified and developed four sites to go along with the one behind his house, which he had aptly christened Home Vineyard (there is now a sixth vineyard, located in the Anderson Valley north of Sonoma). The vineyards ranged in elevation from 400 to 2,300 feet and had cool microclimates and very distinct soils. They were farmed biodynamically, and the winemaking regimen, overseen by Jeff Brinkman, was uniform across all the vineyards—mostly whole-cluster fermentations, natural yeasts, limited use of new oak—in the belief that this would isolate and accentuate the soil expression.

  The results have been pinch-me brilliant. The Rhys wines are hypnotically good—crisp, poised, succulent, with sensational minerality and structure. Deceptively pale in color, as the best Pinots often are, they are also astonishingly low in alcohol; some of them clock in under 13 percent. What makes the wines even more impressive is that they share all these qualities yet are strikingly different from one another. Harvey’s experiment is succeeding. The Rhys wines truly are vins de terroir, with an individuality that seems clearly derived from the soil.

  Known as the “heartbreak grape,” Pinot Noir is a notoriously capricious variety. Burgundy, where it has reigned since the late fourteenth century, seemed to be the only place it was capable of flourishing, and even there it could be maddeningly hit-or-miss. A lot of Pinot has been planted in California, Oregon, and New Zealand, and some good wines have been made. Even so, Burgundy nuts like me were convinced that Pinot was truly at home only in the limestone-rich soils of east-central France and that New World renderings were forever destined to be also-rans. Rhys has cracked the code, however, turning out delicious Pinots that in their subtlety, elegance, and sense of place approach the very best red Burgundies. I think all they lack at this point is the same intensity and length of flavor, which will presumably come with vine age, and a demonstrated ability to gain complexity as they mature, and I am confident that will happen, too.

  SHOULD THERE BE FORMAL CLASSIFICATIONS

  FOR CALIFORNIA WINES?

  A few years ago, Sea Smoke Cellars, which is located in Santa Barbara County, put the words California Grand Cru on the labels of all six of the wines that it made in 2009. It was a pretty bold claim, considering that California doesn’t have a formal hierarchy of vineyards or wineries. The fact that Sea Smoke had been in existence for barely a decade, with a vineyard that in its previous incarnation had been a bean field, made it a particularly brash move.

  The controversy kicked up by this act of self-aggrandizement raised anew the question of whether California should have an official pecking order—a ranking of wineries à la the 1855 Bordeaux classifications, or a ranking of vineyards à la the Burgundy cru system. My take? No way. For one thing, although wine has been produced in California since the mid-nineteenth century, the state has too short a viticultural history to contemplate that kind of codification. Sure, some California wines are clearly first-growth caliber—the Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon leaps to mind. But the Monte Bello is also an anomaly as California goes, in that it has been an outstanding wine for more than four decades. When two or three dozen California wines have shown that kind of sustained excellence, we can talk about classifying California wineries.

  As for categorizing vineyards, that would be seriously misguided at this point. California is still trying to match the right grapes to the right soils and microclimates. With all due respect to Sea Smoke, it is a little premature to be handing out (or appropriating) grand cru honors. Many of California’s most promising sites are fairly new and have only ever had one owner. The strength of the Burgundian model is that its top vineyards have demonstrated their worthiness over hundreds of years and in the hands of multiple
growers. (With rare exception, ownership of vineyards in Burgundy is divided among numerous parties; one producer will own two rows of vines, another will have four, and so on. The twenty-acre Montrachet vineyard, for instance, source of Burgundy’s most coveted white wines, currently has eighteen different owners.) There are certainly sites in California that have hinted at that sort of consistency; a number of producers have coaxed great wines out of the aforementioned Eisele Vineyard, for instance. But they are few in number.

  Beyond all that, I just think the idea of binding wine classifications is somehow un-American. Whatever its merits, the 1855 ladder in Bordeaux created a viticultural caste system, and the cru mechanism had a similar effect in Burgundy. Obviously, a winemaker in Burgundy can improve his lot merely by acquiring land in a great vineyard, whereas in Bordeaux he would have to purchase an entire château. But the point stands. Sure, there are good vineyards, bad vineyards, and great vineyards; the same is true of wineries. Those distinctions exist irrespective of whether they are formally acknowledged. But we Americans don’t do caste systems; we are all about upward mobility (or at least we used to be), and establishing official rankings strikes me as antithetical to that spirit. And yes, for any classification to be meaningful, it would necessarily have to be unchanging, or at least glacially slow to change. If the rankings were constantly being shuffled, they would quickly lose their credibility.