A few months ago Kayce and I got to enjoy an evening with Adam Lee here in Chicago. He was in town for a few days and his last night overlapped with my first night back from a work trip. Work had and continues to be hectic, hence the dearth of Good Vitis posts in 2021. Towards the end of dinner, Adam suggested I try the 2019 vintage of his Clarice label and do a quick write up. While I’ve said ‘no thank you’ to several sample offers this year, I wasn’t about to decline one of my favorite domestic pinot noir producers, nor a producer who I’ve been able to follow since their first vintage. You can find coverage on the 2017 and 2018 vintages here and here.
These are wines that consistently show the promise of at least three to five years of positive evolution, if not more. However, with Clarice only three vintages deep, we just don’t know whether and how that promise is fulfilled. One way to test a wine’s aging mettle is to taste it over multiple days, and I put the 2019s through the battery of five days. A few weeks later, Adam and I caught up by phone to talk them through. I’ll start with the conversation, and end with the wines.
The 2019 Vintage
As a growing season, 2019 split the difference weather-wise between the inaugural 2017 vintage and subsequent 2018 in the Santa Lucia Highlands, where Clarice sources its fruit. “It wasn’t as hot as 2017 or as cold as 2018, but [we] got three to four more inches of rain. So there was ample water available for the vines,” Adam told me.
Adam farmed similar to 2017, which meant leaving more fruit on the vine and thinning at veraison, which is later than usual. “The vines had enough energy [due to the ample water], so if I had taken the fruit off earlier, I was afraid the vines would have directed the [water-driven] energy into growing more shoots and leaves, and not [maturing] the fruit.” So he left the fruit on the vine longer, and later in the season took thinning down to the normal level. And because the heat ran the gap between 2017 and 2018, he split the whole cluster difference between the two as well.
To help with concentration and structure, Adam did a small bleed off, leading to wines that he calls more structured than either the 2017s or 2018s were at this stage in their development. “I talked to another winemaker, who said it took a lot longer than usual to extract the color [from the skins]. It didn’t come until the very end of the maceration cycle [for me]. I don’t know why, but it’s weird.” Adam wasn’t bothered by it, though, because he had already started to get away from pushing color extraction. “It’s not the end-all-be-all [for pinot],” he noted.
He did, however, leave the juice on the skins “for a little longer [than usual], a couple of additional days” compared to the two previous vintages of Clarice. Beyond that, he “didn’t do much of anything to drive extraction” other than the bleed off. “It’s not an unusual method,” Adam said, about this approach vis-à-vis the nature of a growing season like 2019.
The Barrel Evolution
When Adam and I first connected in 2019 on the inaugural 2017 vintage, we discussed the challenge of making a winery’s first vintage using a significant portion of used barrels. When starting a new winery and wanting to use a mix of new and used barrels, one is faced with the challenge of sourcing used barrels and ensuring they are properly clean and free of bacteria, which is not the easiest thing to independently verify. With three vintages under Clarice’s belt, I wondered if Adam had safely gotten beyond the threat of unclean barrels. In short, he has. Adam had sourced those used barrels from a winery and winemaker he trusted (and had trained himself), and as Clarice entered its third year Adam has avoided the risks associated with purchased used barrels. As Clarice evolves, though, so too does its use of barrels.
“For the [2019] Santa Lucia Highlands [designate], [the barrel regime] was 27.5% new oak. That’s not out of the range of where it’s been before, and was kind of the plan all along. The SLH has never been a declassified wine, but rather its own wine that happens to be a blend [of multiple vineyards].” The Rosella’s Vineyard is about 50% new oak, “which is a lot less than it’s been [before]. Gary’s is 90% new oak, which is more than it’s been.”
Adam continues to experiment with cooperages. The breakthrough in 2019 was Marsannay. “A few years ago, I tried a 3-year air-dried Marsannay, playing with it with some Santa Lucia Highlands fruit at Siduri Winery [and I liked it]. With Clarice, the first couple of years, I did two Marsannay barrels each and didn’t love them. I was about to give up in 2019, and then the ultimate Rosella’s blend turned out to include a significant amount of Marsannay barrels. Something happened, something clicked, and the Marsannay went back and produced the way it had with Sirduri.” Marsannay, it should be noted, does not feature in either the SLH or Gary’s bottlings.
Total production is down in 2019 because Adam decided to steer five barrels he felt were subpar away from the released wines; these barrels are going to charity. SLH production was only eight barrels, while Rosella’s and Gary’s were ten apiece. “I spent a lot of time on the blends,” Adam explained, adding that “it always takes a lot of time, but some years the blends come together more easily.” 2019 was not one of those years. “I actually took a few weeks off between blending efforts because I needed to reset the brain and taste buds.”
The 2019 Wines
The resulting wines demonstrate consistency in the Clarice progression, meaning the development of deeply complex wines that reflect their terroirs as made by a winemaker with a sixth sense of how to read and react to the growing season to make something better than what other winemakers could achieve with the same fruit. While Adam called the 2019s the most structured of the label’s three vintages, I found them to be the most accessible. While “structured” and “accessible” don’t have to be antonyms, it’s hard not to treat them that way. Accessible does not mean a lack of structure, but by my palate I project a quicker evolutionary arc for the current release than the previous two. I always hesitate to disagree with a winemaker, an actual professional, when it comes to things like this, but I’m going to hold firm on this one and die on the sword if necessary.
On this point, I looked back at my notes from the 2017 and 2018 vintages, and made a few notes about projected evolution and longevity. For the Gary’s Vineyard, I projected the 2017 would take the most time to reach peak drinking, followed by the 2018 and then the 2019. Rosella’s was similar, with the 2017 and 2018 seeming to require more time than the 2019. Only with the SLH did I find the opposite to be true, projecting the 2019 in need of a year or two more than the earlier vintages. Take that for what it’s worth.
Santa Lucia Highland vineyard soil
While the SLH hasn’t consistently been the wine of every vintage for me, by year three I’m comfortable saying that it is my personal favorite of the lineup, and shines its best in the current release. The dark nose features blackberry, boysenberry, cherry concentrate, Earl Gray, and cassis. It developed a secondary cocoa overtone on day two. Medium bodied, its thick tannin offers Earl Gray tea and star anise notes. By day two the tannins had disarmed a bit, smoothing and elongating nicely while picking up a peppery note on the back end. The juicy acid core delivers stewed plum, cherry, baking spice, and salmon berry. Day two added mountain strawberry. The balance and structure is impeccably built, this one should be set aside for at least three or four years and followed over the following five years, at least. 96 points, value A.
Like Adam, the 2019 is the first vintage in which I’ve preferred the Gary’s Vineyard to the Rosella’s Vineyard. The nose is a moving target at the moment with extended air exposure adding and subtracting in waves. The most consistent aromas include Bing cherry, mountain strawberry, lavender, black plum, weathered leather, and black currant. It is medium bodied with smooth, lush, and long tannin that parallels juicy, bright acid. The elegant and weightless structure dazzles right now. The flavor profile includes Bing cherry, blood orange, cranberry sauce, cardamom, and black pepper. It feels like the tannins are elevated at the moment, waiting to drop and broaden with some age. Very accessible for such a substantial wine at the moment, I can see this entering a dumb phase within the year that might last two or three years before emerging a weightier, more layered version of itself. 95 points, value A-.
Finally we have the Rosella’s Vineyard. More reticent on the nose than previous vintages at this stage, I was able to coax a briar patch of dark crushed cherry, blackberry, and plum sauce, with star anise and clove putting a toe in the pool. The fruit holds on the second day, while the spice is replaced with potpourri. Nearly full bodied, the tannins are dense and slightly grainy, taking their time to reveal a core of pleasant acid. Flavors include cherry, plum, blackberry, tobacco leaf, wet soil, and just a touch of graphite minerality, all with a slightly savory twinge. The density of this suggests this has an upward trajectory that, if you can sit on this for a solid three or four years, promises reward. 94 points, value B+.
What’s Next
Unfortunately there will be no 2020 vintage of Clarice due to the fires the swept through California. Combined with the slightly reduced 2019 production, that means availability of Clarice will be highly limited, especially outside the company’s club, until the 2021 vintage is released. As to any desire to expand the line up in the future, Clarice is “truly going to be these three wines, it’s never going to get any bigger,” Adam told me.
While we customers impatiently wait for the 2021 Clarice release, Adam continues to experiment and grow his list of special projects. His newest side project is called ENOW, which is a grenache and mourvèdre blend from Paso Robles that rolls out with the 2020 vintage. “Enow” means “enough” and is a homage, if you will, to the rough year of 2020. The label explains:
You can find Adam’s various projects online by heading to Clarice’s website, and the best way to track the wines down is to buy direct from the producer. I can’t recommend Clarice enough for those who like serious pinot noir, and his side projects like Beau Marchais offer opportunities to try serious if experimental wines and winemaking approaches for those palates looking to expand themselves.
Late last year, Wine Enthusiast named Greg Brewer its Winemaker of the Year. The nominees he beat out included South Africa’s first black lead winemaker, Ntsiki Biyela; Gary Farrell Vineyard winemaker Theresia Heredia; David Ramey (of Ramey Wine Cellars and formerly of Matanzas Creek, Chalk Hill, Dominus and Rudd); and Patria Tóth, the Hungarian-born winemaker at Planeta who is driving significant quality improvements in Sicily, one of the wine world’s hottest things these days. So, it’s not like he beat a bunch of chumps. If that weren’t enough of a reason to care, there’s this: he effectively re-gifted the award to the Sta. Rita Hills wine region, and that’s a bit unusual. We ought to take notice.
It’s Not About Greg Brewer
Brewer launched Brewer-Clifton in 1995 with Steve Clifton and $12,000 in the (then and, to a certain extent, now) little-known Sta. Rita Hills, a small wine growing region about an hour and half north of Los Angeles. His response to the award has been to give credit to Sta. Rita Hills, going so far as to say the award is actually for the region, not Greg Brewer. It’s a gracious response to be sure, but isn’t grace how a winner is supposed to respond? Is he actually serious?
Yes, he is. “I was born there, professionally,” Greg told me when spoke not long after the award was announced. “I started in the tasting room at Santa Barbara Winery, by chance, when I was 21. I fell in love with it on my first day and new it would be my profession. And I’ve loved it every day since.”
Specifically, he’s loved Sta. Rita Hills winemaking. “I’ve been working a four mile stretch of road for 30 years. It’s kind of like breathing: very straight forward. I don’t know it all, but I’ve been able to focus. I’ve only worked in Santa Barbara [the hub of Sta. Rita Hills], and only will.”
Greg has had opportunities to branch out geographically, but has always passed. “I’ve been tempted with fruit from other places, but it feels like a one night stand to me: the fruit should remain where it is with someone who lives among those vines. It’s just not me.” Feeling that Sta. Rita has everything a wine region could hope to offer, and being in love with its fruit, wines, and people, he’s remained steadfastly focused on showcasing what it does all on its own by removing himself from the equation to the greatest extent possible.
At Brewer-Clifton, “the core ethos and energy is steeped in a Japanese mindset; I don’t see myself as that important, more as a steward of a place. I’m like the 80-year-old Japanese sushi chef with an apartment in the outskirts of Tokyo and a bike I ride to the fish market where I drink tea, buy fish, and then spend the day doing everything I can to present all of the fish’s inherent beauty. That’s Brewer-Clifton’s engine.”
“We don’t see ourselves as making anything. We’re deliberate in the location of our vineyards, their clones, spacing, farming, but at the winery it’s about removal of self, maintaining a quiet voice. Everything is raised in neutrality. Barrels are 15-20 years old. Everything is raised the same each year, so no prejudice from vineyard to vineyard, block to block. We don’t blend [among parcels]. Who am I to be the judge [of which sections should and shouldn’t go together]?”
To be clear, though, Greg does “understand that mindset [of blending]. It actually makes more sense than what I do. Adam [Lee, a mutual friend] is a great example. He’s seeking the best in things, and he’s done it beautifully at a whole host of wineries and appellations because he can see those beautiful attributes that can be separated or combined. But I’m not comfortable with [doing] that [myself because] it makes me a bigger part of the process than I’m comfortable with. That’s why the [Winemaker of the Year] award is about this place, not me. All I’m doing is displaying Sta. Rita in a very vulnerable, naked, barbaric kind of elementary way.”
Greg’s approach “might be restrictive” to some, but he finds it liberating. “When you truly espouse yourself to a person or vocation, you have confidence in that thing. Then you put a ring on it. That’s what I’ve done in Sta. Rita. I find it liberating, giving into it and being vulnerable, [because] you make decisions based on benefit of doubt, flexibility, and trust.”
Although Greg hasn’t been in the Sta. Rita Hills since they began growing wine there, he’s been “pretty embedded in a lot of the evolution over time. Seeing it go from four or five vineyards in the early 1990s…[I’ll put it this way:] in terms of the wine world it’s the opposite of dog years, no time at all. To see that, the awareness [of the region] globally swell up this quickly is really exciting. It’s a testament to the place, the people, the diversity of the people there, the kind of unanimous qualitative goals that people there have. That’s really it, that’s what this award is about.” Put another way, if the “place wasn’t so special,” he “wouldn’t have won the award.”
It’s About the Sta. Rita Hills
When Brewer-Clifton launched, they “never blended vineyards. We only did designates. However, starting in 2007 we began doing the appellation blends of pinot noir and chardonnay, but those wines have never been built using wine pulled out of designates. They’re made using the best stuff we have because they have to be smoking good ambassadors [for the region]. They’re the most important wines we make.”
Putting the region’s best foot forward has been so critically important because “wines have never been better, and there’s never been more of them. People’s attention span is generally become more abridged; access to information, the media, people check in on something and move on quickly because there’s more of everything and it’s easier to access.” For Brewer-Clifton, putting out wines that showcase the specialness of Sta. Rita Hills is their secret sauce for success. Greg’s “main emphasis is making very singular things” that stand out in this challenging market.
Part of Brewer-Clifton’s approach to showcasing the Sta. Rita Hills is to keep it affordable for people. “I don’t come from money or industry, I’ve always been a scrapper. I’ve been able to do wine and make it work financially with very little. Our [viniculture and winemaking] systems have never been better, and our pricing is lower than ever. That really excites me because ten years ago [the wines] were more expensive, and not as good.”
Brewer-Clifton’s appellation pinot and chardonnay sell for $40 and $36, respectively, on the winery’s website, and are competitive in quality with other appellation wines from pinot and chardonnay regions like Sonoma, Willamette Valley, and Burgundy. “I love picturing a couple in their 20s or 30s: one is an accountant, another an engineer, and they’re into wine,” Greg told me. “I love to see these people go into a store and connect with Sta. Rita Hills because the quality is high and price point is reachable; it’s not nothing, but it’s not $80, either. That part of the market is exciting because I can still give the full Brewer-Clifton experience and encourage people to trial us and hopefully generate some repeat customers if people like it, like a special occasion wine.”
In 2005, Greg launched a separate brand himself called Diatom, a reference to a fossil common in the soils of Sta. Rita Hills. Diatom is an exclusively chardonnay project aimed at producing “a more stark exploration of Sta. Rita Hills chardonnay. Old vines, raised in a pent-up fashion – picked ripe, steel aged, blocked malolactic [fermentation], etc.” It’s an attempt “to capture a wave before it breaks.” Diatom’s line up starts at $32 and doesn’t go north more than $10 from that, offering a different style of Sta. Rita Hills chardonnay still financially feasible for that lovely couple he envisages (pre-COVID) meeting at the store after a hard day’s work on their way home to make dinner.
Won’t you try it?
When we were setting up the interview and samples for this article, I requested that Greg pick the two to three wines that he felt would give people the best introduction to his wines so that if I liked them, I could say “and if you’d like to get to know Greg and his wines, these are the ones he suggests trying first.” (By the way, if you’d like to get to know Greg and his wines, these are the ones he suggests trying first).
I didn’t have the backstory outlined above before I received the samples, so I didn’t know what to make of the selected wines when they arrived. Knowing what I know now, it makes perfect sense that he would choose his Brewer-Clifton appellation blends and a Diatom as those that give a good representation of what he does in the wine world: he dispatched his ambassadors.
Greg with the author’s favorite wine writer, Jay McInerney
I’ve spent just a single day in Santa Barbara, which is also the entirety of my physical experience in the Sta. Rita Hills. I visited the tasting rooms of Au Bon Climate and Jaffurs Wine Cellar, finding wines at each that I really enjoyed, especially the former (whose nebbiolo, made under the Clendenen Family name label, is an undercover gem). I’ve also had the incredible pleasure of tasting the wines of, and with, Michael Benedict (Sanford), wrote recently on the new Beau Marchais project, and tried a four-bottle suite of The Hilt wines (look for an upcoming profile). All told, I’ve probably tried no more than two cases’ worth of Sta. Rita wine. This means I was an open slate for these wines, no preconceived notions or biases.
After trying them, I can say that I’m eager to try more. While I’m not in love with either chardonnay, I do want more experience with body of chardonnay work of Greg Brewer. As far as $40 pinot noirs go, I’m not sure it gets better than the Brewer-Clifton Sta. Rita Hills appellation blend. Where I felt the appellation chardonnay’s quality outshined its depth (the structure is quite good, building desire for an extra layer of depth that ultimately didn’t show up), such a description would be unfair for the pinot.
My favorite element of the pinot noir was while it gave a very inviting and salivating illusion of fruit-forwardness, the actual amount of (gorgeous) fruit was restrained in a way that framed the terroir-specific elements that Greg is so focused on delivering in his wines. I just didn’t get the same sensation from the chardonnay, though I would not be surprised if that’s a function of the wine’s relative youth; perhaps another year or two would be enough time for that hinted-at depth to emerge.
Meanwhile, the 2019 Diatom Bar-M presented as a challenging wine. Meant to be a stark representation of Sta. Rita chardonnay, it is certainly a stark wine: prolific acid, bitter flavor overtones, and damp earth. It is certainly not for everyone. I do wonder if youth is a factor in my mixed reaction to it: I couldn’t bring my attention away from the acid that I felt hadn’t integrated, an unfortunate circumstance given the appealing bouquet and flavor profile of the wine. I would be very curious to try it again in three years.
Both Brewer-Clifton and Diatom make a range of wines, and certainly what I tried for this article has piqued my interest in both labels. They also continue the streak, albeit limited, of great wine I’ve had from the Sta. Rita Hills. Greg Brewer is certainly a leading figure in the region, and his Winemaker of the Year title lofts him to perhaps the very top of his peer group, a position he seems unlikely to enjoy. Rather than celebrate his own achievement, he’s made the effort to leverage it to boost the region’s notoriety. It helps that his own wines show he’s worthy of being an ambassador himself.
Wine Reviews
2016 Brewer-Clifton Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir – This pours beautifully ruby and translucent. The bright nose includes aromas of plum, cherry, mulling spice, white pepper, and scorched earth. Medium-bodied with smooth, velvety tannins that envelope the mouth with smoothness pair well with a nice core of restrained but bright acid. The structure is spot on. The flavor profile leads with brilliant strawberry, blueberry, and red and black plums, but the wine doesn’t give the sensation of fruit-forwardness. There’s a touch of black pepper and licorice as well, and kiwi skin on the finish. Drinking really well now with a short bottle decant. 93 points. Value: A.
2018 Brewer-Clifton Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay – The nose wafts a dessert table of caramel apple, lemon meringue, and graham cracker crumble. Medium bodied with slightly crisp acid nestled nicely in the center of a lush palate. Flavors include green and Opal apples, lime sorbet, gravel minerality, and white pepper. It finishes on orange marmalade. A nicely profiled and structured chardonnay, the quality outshines the depth. 91 points. Value: B.
2019 Diatom Bar-M Chardonnay – The high-toned nose features of honeysuckle, caramel, chamomile, and lime pith. Medium bodied with lightweight, juicy acid that flutters about, refusing to integrate with the structure; even on the finish it remains apart. May be a sign of youth. Flavors include slightly bitter green apple, lemon verbena, damp earth, and white pepper minerality. It finishes on a sweet orange note. I’d love to revisit this in two or three years because if that acid integrates, this improves dramatically. 90 points. Value: C+.
Earlier this year, I profiled legendary California pinot noir producer Merry Edwards and reviewed a number of their wines, including the spring release allocation. To conclude the article, I wrote that:
“It is hard to compare Merry Edwards’ wines to those of other wineries, even her neighbors, because the combination of Merry Edwards herself, the quality of the terroirs of the vineyards, and the meticulous and purposeful viniculture and winemaking of Heidi [von der Mehden] is unique, and uniquely effective. There are lots of reasons to choose one wine over another, but it is hard to be in the mood for Merry Edwards and settle for something else.”
This follow-up article reviews their six fall release wines. Merry Edwards was a pioneer in the California pinot noir movement, focusing on single vineyard designates. Over time, she added chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, and a few other small production wines. For a long period of time, the winery was a pretty stable place in terms of ownership, management, winemaking, and general marketing and public relations. Merry put a lot of work and thought into building and strengthening the winery’s product, brand, and reputation, and like her vineyard approach kept the long game in mind. It worked.
Five Years of Important Transitions
Towards the end of her time in the business, Merry positioned the business for successful transitions to new leadership. In 2015, Merry hired Heidi to be her assistant winemaker, and it went well enough that in 2018 Heidi was made head winemaker when Merry decided to retire from those duties. In early 2019, she and her husband sold the winery, estate vineyards, and vineyard leases to Louis Roederer Champagne House. When Roederer purchased Merry Edwards, they kept Heidi, who is profiled in my earlier Merry Edwards piece, as head winemaker, and brought Nicole Carter in as President.
Merry Edwards President Nicole Carter
Nicole has been a long-time leader in the wine industry, previously serving as Chief Marketing Officer and Director of Winemaking at Hess Family Wine Estates after spending 18 years in global marketing and public relations for Treasury Wine Estates. Before her move to California, Nicole was a public affairs professional in Washington, DC, the same line of work that pays my bills.
Between the spring and fall releases, I had a chance to join Nicole on a Zoom tasting and later connect directly with her by phone. I have found her to be professional, insightful, and thoughtful: a combination of vinicultural, enological, marketing, management, and business skill rarely found in one person. Notably, Nicole is dual-hatting as President of the venerable Diamond Creek Vineyards as well. Merry Edwards is in great hands with her and Heidi at the helm. One exciting thing to watch for, in addition to future wine releases, is a label redesign in the next six to eight months that will bring some modernization while retaining the classic labels’ iconicism.
The 2020 Fall Release Wines
A map of Merry Edwards’ vineyards. The fall release vineyard designates include Bucher, Warren’s Hill, Meredith Estate, and Flax.
Getting down to the new wines, the release includes five pinots and a late harvest sauvignon blanc. I tasted the four vineyard designate pinots over a period of four days, which facilitated great evolution in all four, and gave me a good feeling about the promise they hold. These are seriously dense wines that are going to need time in the cellar to fully express themselves. Nevertheless, they spirit the fall season with some funkiness and earthiness, showing a nice dichotomy from the more fruit and spice-oriented spring release wines. For those who prefer more earthy wines, these fall release pinots are great New World picks. The fifth pinot which I reviewed in the spring, is the Sonoma Coast blend, but was included in this fall release.
While my preference would be to stick these in the cellar and forget about them until at least the 2025 Presidential Inauguration, if you want some seasonally appropriate wines that you can enjoy over a number of days this holiday season, look no further. These wines remain consistent with my previous claim that while there are many pinot noirs out there, there remain no others like Merry Edwards.
Let’s begin with the 2018 Bucher Vineyard Pinot Noir, a tiny parcel of a vineyard (just 2.13 acres) in the Russian River Valley. 2016 was the first vintage of this leased vineyard designate for Merry Edwards, making it one of the few vineyards as new to Merry Edwards as head winemaker Heidi von der Mehden, who was challenged by Merry to make the first rendition of it. Among this fall release, it was the most accessible vineyard designate, though that’s not saying much. Tasting note:
Day 1: The nose features raspberry, blackberry, tar, and black pepper. On the palate, it’s medium bodied with a nice core of juicy acid. The flavors are equal parts fruit, earth, and salt with plum and raspberry, graphite and pepper, and saline. Accessible now with a decant, I see this improving over the next three or four years.
3 Day Update: Left corked in the kitchen for three days. Original tasting note is solid, including the drinking window, though there’s a slightly fungal note on the backside of the palate that adds something interesting to the mix.
92 points. Value: B-.
Next is the 2018 Meredith Estate Pinot Noir, a vineyard at the center of the winery’s identity. Merry purchased 24 acres in the Russian River Valley in 1996 and planted 20 acres of vines on its eight to 12 degree slopes. In the spring article, I reviewed the 2017 vintage of this wine, calling it “full-throttle” wine that would benefit from three to five years of aging. While I awarded it and the 2018 93 points each, I found the 2018 to be even denser and in need of more cellar time. Tasting note:
Day 1: The nose features sweet plum, red currant, blood orange, dried cherry, and dried herb. Full bodied with spread out, densely grained tannin and significant acid, this is quite primary in structure and flavor, which includes salty plum, tar, rhubarb, raspberry and fungal forest floor. A bit backwards at the moment, this needs at least five to seven years of cellaring.
Day 3 Update: Corked and stored for three days in the kitchen. The nose remains sweet and decadent, as does the palate. Aromas and flavors remain consistent, but it has reversed its backwardness. Aging window seems spot on as it should help the structure resolve and the flavors deepen. Adding a point (from 92 to 93) because it deserves it.
93 points. Value: B.
Warren’s Hill Vineyard
As the funkiest of the bunch, the 2018 Warren’s Hill Pinot Noir was my favorite. The vineyard had been used for nearly two decades to produce top notch pinot, and was replanted in 2012 using vine cuttings from the original planting that were propagated in nursery before being planted. At the same time, the vineyard was renamed in tribute to Merry’s late son, who was named himself after two respective Warrens whom Merry was close with herself. Tasting note:
Day 1: The funkiest nose affixed to a Merry Edwards wine that I’ve come across, it’s as if the grapes have absorbed the mushroom mulch used to treat the vineyard’s soil. Aromas include black tea, burnt cherry, forest floor, marjoram, and dried oregano. Medium bodied, it coats the mouth in fine, grippy tannin and sparkling acid that delivers flavors of strong black tea, licorice, dried sage, blackberry and salty dark plum. There is a uniqueness to the wine that sets it apart among Merry Edwards pinots, and indeed apart from other American pinot noirs. I think its best days will come roughly five years from now.
Day 4 Update: Left corked in the kitchen and revisiting today. It’s softened a bit, but is still pretty tight. The funkiness, which remains noteworthy and tasty, is more integrated with the fruit, making it a more interesting and pleasant wine to drink. While it’ll be better in five years, I’m revising my drinking window to say that its best days are probably eight to ten years from now.
94 points. Value: B.
The final vineyard designate is the 2018 Flax Vineyard Pinot Noir, a site well known to followers of Williams-Selyem who have enjoyed its old block Flax designate for some time now. This year’s Merry Edwards is a great example of the wondrous wines that can be produced off vineyards where land, climate, viniculture, rootstock, and clone (Pommard 4 in this case) are well matched for each other. Vines themselves, the combination of rootstock and clone, get shortchanged in discussions on Good Vitis and in 99% of wine journalism and blogging, mostly due to the boring nature of the discussion that neither writer nor reader can easily appreciate. If you want to drink the discussion rather than read it, look no further than this wine. Tasting note:
Day 1: The nose is quintessential Russian River Valley Pommard, dropping seemingly endless dark cherry, plum, and mild cigar tobacco aromas. Extended air reveals wiffs of wet pavement minerality and clove. On the leaner side of pinot, the palate is tight at the moment with fine tannins that build grip with time, and lean and long acid. The flavor profile includes beautifully balanced blackberry, blueberry, tar, licorice and spiced plum. A bit light in the middle at the moment, a few years in the cellar will help the tannins move inwards from the outer edges to fill in the palate. Give this three to five years if you can.
Day 4 Update: Left this corked in the kitchen for four days. The nose is surprisingly muted, more so than when initially tasted. The mid palate has filled out a bit, thankfully, as the tannins have released a bit and moved inwards. It’s picked up a tasty cinnamon note. I think this is going need at least five, if not six or seven, years to hit a solid place. It’s got a ten year lifespan, easy.
93 points. Value: B-.
The 2018 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir represents a compelling high quality representation of the appellation. Tasting note:
A deeply-rooted nose offers aromas of concentrated cherry juice, mountain strawberry, baking cinnamon, cigar tobacco, scorched earth and prune. Surprisingly light and tangy, it offers long, finely grained tannin and sharp, juicy acid. The good bits are all there, but need time to come together. Flavors include bright Bing cherry, strawberry, black plum, blood orange and tar. Not as welcoming as the 2017, but needing just as much time, this will be a very good wine. 92 points. Value: B-.
Finally, we come to the super delicious 2018 Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc, which achieves a level of depth and complexity that belies its existence as just a third leaf wine, and the first (production) harvest, from the Maefield Vineyard that Merry Edwards planted in 2015. Given its youthful source, the promise of this vineyard for late harvest wines is incredible, as is the amount of effort that goes into producing a late harvest wine in Sonoma.
Merry planting Maefield Vineyard
Normally, late harvest grapes are left to hang as long as possible to achieve high sugar accumulation in the grapes, and picked just early enough to preserve some acidity. In Sonoma, however, with the tapering of the hot weather (needed to develop sugar) in the fall and the concomitant fog development, it gets complicated to let grapes hang past the harvest dates used to make dry wine. To balance the need for extended hang time to achieve concentration with the need to harvest earlier in the grape’s development than would be ideal for a late harvest wine to safeguard against fog-induced disease, Heidi and her team reduce the crop by half and remove the canes (young branches that suck up nutrients but aren’t yet producing production-worthy grapes) to coax the vine into pulling less water into the plant, thereby dehydrating the remaining grapes and allowing them to concentrate more rapidly. They were also lucky to find that Noble Rot, a beneficial fungus that shrivels the grapes (thereby inducing concentration), was quick to develop in the young vineyard. I wasn’t able to let this one last more than one night. Tasting note:
The sweet, tropical nose offers boisterous peach, candied mango, orange creamsicle, white tea, and Sprite. Full bodied with gorgeously smooth and thick acid that envelops the mouth in silkiness before piercing the finish with crispness. The very sweet palate includes flavors of yellow peach, orange marmalade, Angel Food cake, guava, and salmon berry. This is downright delicious, but I imagine will do cool things in ten to twenty years. 94 points. Value: B+.
Welcome to Part 1 of our profile of California’s Anderson Valley Appellation. This piece covers some of the history, geography, weather, and other factors that set the quality and uniqueness of the region’s wines apart.
Under the Radar
At some point in 2019, I came to realize that some of my favorite American pinot noirs and chardonnays were coming from Anderson Valley, California, almost irrespective of producer, because I was drawn the region’s unique stylistic signature. Anderson Valley wine has a certain refinement, bordering on elegance, that when combined with its flavor profile is unmistakably Anderson Valley. The next closest in style are Willamette Valley and, to a lesser extent, Santa Lucia Highlands.
The pinots are black-fruited with good doses of baking spice and scorched earth minerality, while the best chardonnays can have unusually incredible depth (more so, I would say, than most of the pinots), and often feature penetrating stone minerality, baking spice, and nuttiness to go with its fruit. Both tend to carry high levels of acid and relatively low levels of alcohol and tannin, making them great candidates for up to a decade of cellaring.
Once this realization occurred, I decided to reach out to producers of the region to see if they would be willing to submit samples and their winemakers’ time to help me put this piece together. Thankfully, a good number agreed, and here we are. Part 2 will cover the wines themselves along with the future prospects of Anderson Valley.
Writing a piece about a wine region that you’ve not visited is challenging, and all the more so when the region in question is a bit of an enigma. Anderson Valley is an off-the-beaten path pocket in the world that hasn’t seen the kind of commercialization that America’s other wine regions have despite the incredibly high quality wine it produces. While Anderson Valley’s wineries and vineyards are as modern as any other, there remains paltry wine tourism infrastructure, and therefore limited fan fair outside dedicated winos. Anderson Valley lives a weird dichotomy in which the wine is widely recognized as among America’s best, yet the region is almost always an afterthought in the discussion of which American regions produce the best wine.
The Wild West
The remoteness of the Valley is often the first explanation for the region’s unremarked status, which usually begins with a description of Highway 128, the road one would drive if heading there from the Napa/Sonoma area. Here are comments from the winemakers interviewed for this piece about Anderson Valley’s location.
Highway 128
“It’s the land that time forgot” Tony Rynders, who consults on Jackson Family Wine’s Maggy Hawk project, explained. “The way [Anderson Valley] is physically set up, the logistics of getting there, you have to endure forty minutes of switchbacks that disincentivizes people from going there.”
The final stretch into Anderson Valley coming from the south includes “this incredibly windy and treacherous road,” Katey Larwood of Goldeneye told me, referring to Highway 128.
“The last 45 minutes is a mountain logging road, essentially,” FEL Wines winemaker Ryan Hodgins said.
To get there, “you have to go fifty miles past Healdsburg on really windy roads that scare people, then you get to a very small town with not much around it commercially,” Julien Howsepian of Kosta Browne said. “But it’s absolutely gorgeous, rural California. Kind of like turning back the clock a bit.”
Siduri Wines’ Matt Revelette pointed out that “when you’re on the 128 up to AV, it’s wine growing for the sake of wine growing…[you’re] not going to stay at the [non-existent] Four Seasons, not going to have a bachelorette party up there… Not many people end up there by accident.”
According to Ashley Holland of Read Holland Wines, Highway 128 “is pretty treacherous. Visitors aren’t increasing because of it. It means Anderson Valley has an untouched feel to it… It has an X factor.”
These descriptions immediately piqued my interest, helping to explain why Anderson Valley is what it is, why more people aren’t visiting, and why the traditional kind of tourism industry that sets up shop in a wine region hasn’t materialized. This has left the region to the people who inhabit it, preserving what seems to be an incredibly unusual and quirky population.
“The people are as much part of the region as anything,” Katey told me. “It’s an area built around community populated by an odd medley of people that you wouldn’t think would live harmoniously, but do. It’s fascinating.” Today’s Anderson Valley community received an injection of hippies who left the Bay Area in the 1970s and ventured north, forming an agrarian society in which the locals lived off their land in a somewhat collective manner. “These are hippies that own guns because there are wildlife and you have to protect your land,” Katey explained.
“Candidly,” Tony confessed, “it’s dope growing country, and that helped make it an early adapter of wine. The volumes were small, it didn’t really have a voice of its own, nor were people listening. But fast forward to today, [the wine industry is] tapping into a coming-of-age type of energy.”
“I really love Anderson Valley,” Matt told me, “and I really appreciate it for being what it is. It has a kind of anti-developmental attitude, but in a charming way. I wrote my senior thesis on why people should live in eco villages, and Anderson Valley reminds me of that thinking: remote, not congested.”
When the hippies showed up, they joined the historic logging community that founded the modern area, which is northern Redwoods country. Katey describes these loggers as “quasi-environmentalists that wear tie die,” which perhaps explains how hippies and loggers could live, at least somewhat, harmoniously. Additionally, “there’s the apple and sheep communities, and then along with the wineries, a wonderful Latino migrant population. The people make the region special.”
The feel of Anderson Valley “is very rustic, very old time,” Katey said. “You come in first through Boonville [if you’re coming from the south]. It’s five stores, no stop signs, and you drive right through it. It opens up into a wonderful valley where you see a long floor and wonderful hills and ridge tops. My first time there was to explore the area, we camped and tasted and were really in the soil and breathing the air.” It was a magical experience for her, and “immediately knew I wanted to come back.” Howsepian called it “tucked away, quiet, super peaceful and tranquil,” the kind of feeling that you can “only find in these remote places.”
For Ashley, whose path first went through New Zealand and other parts of California, and included major producers like Gallo and small ones like Three Sticks, Anderson Valley “is special, it’s untouched; there’s a lot of Californian history there.” This shows through in the wine, she said, which “shows the spirituality” of the region.
From talking to these winemakers, I got the sense that Anderson Valley today might be what we consider a “throw back” to the 1970s Napa as it appears in stories like Bottle Shock, meaning a wine scene full of risk-acceptant serious people who are figuring out how to make the best wine the region can produce, while not worrying about how they might appear to the observers who aren’t visiting. You can hear in the voice of the winemakers as they describe what they’re doing that they feel like they’re in the early days of establishing a truly world class wine region, even as their wines are receiving world-class reception among wine critics.
The Rustic Borderland
The region focuses on chardonnay and pinot noir, just like America’s better known pinot and chardonnay regions, Sonoma and Willamette Valley, though there are a few other varieties, namely pinot gris and riesling. And just as those better known regions are distinctly and uniquely their own, so too is Anderson Valley.
The Valley is historically a cool climate region, especially within the context of California, but to leave the analysis at that is to skip over the geography, which has an incredible impact on the singular profile of Anderson Valley wine. FEL’s Ryan Hodgins sees Anderson Valley as “the tipping point between California and Oregon,” not just because it’s one of California’s most northern wine regions, but because it sits between the better known Sonoma and Willamette styles.
Anderson Valley is only “15 miles long, running south east to north west, so that the north side that faces the south west is dry brown grass hills that look like they belong in Santa Barbara or San Diego County.” Meanwhile, “the south side of the Valley is protected from the afternoon sun and is old growth Redwood and Douglas Fir country, the most northern the Redwoods really grow. I look at these 250 foot-tall trees from our vineyards.”
Just north of the Valley, the forest begins to harken the famously wet Northwest forest. “It’s the tipping point between the warmth and dryness of California and the coolness and moisture of the Northwest,” Ryan added, which means that in the wine “you get some of the elegance, prettiness, and delicacy of the great Willamette Valley wines to go along with some of that California ripeness, though [the ripeness] isn’t turned up to the ten or eleven that the more southern applications can give you.”
Goldeneye’s Larwood noted that the region “is commonly referred to as the Oregon of California from a pinot perspective.” The natural result of this geography is a wine profile that Ryan aptly describes as “light on its feet, with really fresh acid. The fruit tends to be darker – a signature for AV is black cherry, compared to, say, Russian River Valley signature red Bing cherry.”
This geography has a lot to do with why Anderson Valley wine stands out uniquely from other American pinot and chardonnay. In addition to its northern location, Anderson Valley opens up directly to the Pacific, which means it gets the brunt of the storms in the winter that can often lead to a growing season that starts later in the year than its southern compatriots. “Our phenological markers like bud break, bloom date, verasion date, etc. line up more with the Willamette Valley than with Sonoma or Napa,” FEL’s Ryan told me, referring to the pre-2014-2018 draught vintages.
Another aspect of Anderson Valley’s outlier status among California’s other regions is what Larwood described as the Valley’s “really extreme diurnal shifts” that come “mainly during the summer growing season.” She noted, for example, that “on May 5th [of 2020], I came to work at 6:30 in the morning and it was 32 degrees and we had our fans and sprinklers on to protect the grapes from the fog. By 1:00 pm, it was 80 degrees, and when I left at 6:00pm it was windy, foggy and 55 degrees.” While the number of “growing degree days are pretty average compared to the Russian River Valley [for reference], the highs are really high and the lows are really low, and that makes it the perfect pinot place because we are able to ripen and get fruit complexity without cooking any of the grapes; they’re able to hangout, relax and ripen.”
Copain winemaker’s Ryan Zepaltas has a lot of experience with Anderson Valley and Sonoma, which together comprise about 70% of the wines he makes. As a point of distinction between the two, he highlighted the impact of Anderson Valley’s frequent fog. “We work with a lot of Sonoma fruit that comes from nearer the ocean, but even still, those vineyards are just above the fog lines. In Anderson, however, a good amount of pinot sits below the fog line and gets shorter windows of sun exposure. Whereas our Sonoma fruit is concentrated and softer, Anderson is a little more about tannin management and working with fruit that never really gets fully phenologically ripe. It can be ornery.”
“Everything, all weather and temperatures, are determined by proximity to the ocean [in Anderson Valley],” Ryan Hodgins noted. “Boonville fuit gives you a little more California, tends to be more black cherry and fruit forward. As you get to what the locals call ‘the deep end,’ close to the ocean, you get more baking spice, cigar box. The mid-point of the Valley has a bit of both.”
The Balance Challenge
Maggy Hawk’s Tony Rynders called Anderson Valley’s tannin profile “the most striking thing [about the wines of the region],” adding that they “need mitigating” because he “doesn’t want gritty tannins dominating the profile, which can be an inherent property of the appellation.” To achieve the desired tannin profile at Maggy Hawk, the project where he consults, they “have moved away from punch downs” to “lower the extraction.” Instead, they do “gentle pump overs and whole cluster fermentation to reduce crushed skins,” which prevents more tannin from leaching into the juice.
The house Copain style is a restrained, almost elegant structure, with doses of dark fruit and earthiness. To achieve that in Anderson Valley where grapes can have a hard time fully ripening, Zepaltas has to balance the need to “push ripeness” in the grapes on the vine, meaning allowing the fruit to hang long enough to build sugar “to get good concentration,” with ensuring that the fruit doesn’t ripen to the point that it gets too sugary. Compared to other parts of California, Anderson Valley’s wines are “more tannic, less concentrated, and more transparent.”
This balance is a challenge that all Anderson Valley winemakers face from time to time. If they let the fruit hang too long, it loses its Anderson Valley uniqueness. But, if they harvest too early, they end up with high levels of pyrazines and low limits on alcohol and tannin. Under ripe fruit tends to produce less fruit and more green flavors like bell pepper. “If it’s too green [then] it’s gross, but if it’s just on the edge [of ripeness] then it’s snappy and fresh,” Zepaltas said.
The ripeness that he’s looking for is a certain level of “fruit maturity that translates into flavor development.” He likes to pick the fruit “al dente, which is right when the clusters start to soften but still have some snap to them.” The juice of the fruit “will taste like pink lemonade right before this moment hits, and then it turns a corner and picks up fruit flavor and concentration before it starts losing acidity.” That’s the exact time he aims to pick.
Getting to that point is “really about monitoring weather.” While cool weather usually doesn’t stunt maturation, “[if the fruit is at a good spot when cool weather hits] you could pick it and it won’t matter.” However, if “there’s a heat spike, a one or two day difference is huge.” Zepaltas does “a lot of tasting and weather monitoring, which means spending a lot of time in the vineyards. There are differences block by block in terms of ripeness based on the aspect, rootstock, clone, etc.”
“You always have to look at the weather stations to see what the temperature is [of your vineyard’s little micro climate],” Zepaltas explained. “The weather is not only different depending on where you are, but changes a lot throughout the day and throughout the year.” Generally speaking, it’s coolest near Navarro at the most Northwestern part of the valley and warmest near Boonville in the Southwest.
Skycrest Vineyard
Copain is a good example of how this climatic variance impacts viniculture because it produces wines from vineyards spread across the Valley. “I harvest every or every other day [up and down the Valley]; there are lots of things to schedule,” Zepaltas said, explaining that “at Maggy Hawk [Vineyard], say we have eight different blocks, I’m probably picking that eight different times. Skycrest has five blocks, those are five different pick times. Scheduling so that we pick each block at optimum rightness is a huge challenge” that he doesn’t face to nearly the same extent in Sonoma.
Another important element to grape growing in Anderson Valley is the intense sun, which similarly differs from vineyard to vineyard. “We have to make sure that the fruit is shaded from the sun so it doesn’t get burnt from the really intense four to five hours of sunlight each day.” At the same time, though, “fog and wind are big deals here, so we have to make sure that the shading we put on the grapes [by leaving leaves on the vine to cover them] does not trap the moisture around the grape [which causes mildew and mold]. About half the Valley is frost protected by water, the other half by fans.”
Water can be challenging as a factor because it isn’t always plentiful. The climate is commonly referred to as a “maritime desert” in which an average growing season only sees about 40 inches of rain. “With that influence,” Larwood explained, “we have disease pressure and extreme sun exposure.”
Distinctively Anderson Valley
All of these climatic and geographic realities, complications, and challenges add up to an appellation that does not suffer fools. Not a single one of these winemakers got their start in Anderson Valley, and though each’s path to the Valley is different, they are all some variation on a theme of ‘once I got to Anderson Valley, I knew I had to make wine there.’
Another point of distinction for Anderson Valley is that a lot of wine from there is not made by wineries dedicated to Anderson Valley, let alone located there. With notable exceptions like legendary French sparkling wine company Roederer (who began producing in 1988) and Domaine Anderson (which planted roots in 1981), and boutique producers like Read Holland, most Anderson Valley wines are made by big labels that have decided to include some Anderson Valley in their lineup.
Along with Roederer, Jackson Family Wines (JFW) has made enormous investments in the Valley. A number of their projects source from JFW-owned vineyards, leading to cross-pollination across the portfolio. For example, JFW owns Maggy Hawk Vineyard, which is the source of a lineup of JFW-owned Maggy Hawk-labeled wines as well as a Maggy Hawk Vineyard-designate for JWF-owned Copain. JFW-owned Siduri produces an Anderson Valley appellation blend pinot sourced from several JFW-owned vineyards. And the list goes on.
Entire articles could be written on Roederer’s and JFW’s histories in the Valley, but suffice it to say that these major names making major investments have given the region a huge boost in credibility and visibility. “The reputation of AV is growing with JFW’s thoughtful effort,” Ashley Holland (of the very small and boutique-y Read Holland) told me. That effort includes hosting tasting panels and other industry events to which non-JFW producers are invited. FEL’s Ryan Hodgins has “done some panels with them; they’re commitment to quality as far as the bigger wineries out there, and they continue to invest in the Valley.”
FEL is itself a label under Cliff Leade, which owns a number of wineries. Goldeneye is owned by Duckhorn, and so own. Wineries like Siduri, Kosta Browne, Litterai, Failla, William Selyem, and others have made the decision to add Anderson Valley-designate to their line up. “This investment [by larger and reputable wineries] in the Valley is good, it’s driving the reputation in a sustainable way,” Hodgins said. “In the last ten years, there has been a substantial improvement. Attention from great producers in other pinot regions that source from Anderson Valley “has contributed to the growth in the Valley’s reputation.”
“Even down in Santa Barbara,” Goldeneye’s Katey noted, “there are wineries sourcing from Anderson Valley. You have these wineries [from outside Anderson Valley] with the marketing capabilities, clientele and wine clubs that know their wines, and then they see an Anderson Valley wine and it opens their eyes to the fruit profile and the wines that can be grown here. People learn about Anderson Valley through brands that are outside the Valley.”
Kosta Browne’s Cerise Vineyard
This is certainly the Kosta Browne model, from which the Cerise Vineyard pinot noir and chardonnay are the only Anderson Valley wines in their sizeable lineup. They are also the newest, and most expensive. Even still, “we don’t have a problem selling it,” Howsepian told me. “Only our most senior club members [and select retailers] get it. These are the members who, for the most part, have already been with us for five to eight years. We’ve had success selling it and telling the story.”
Further, Katey noted that “most [wineries in Anderson Valley] are still today mom and pop-run businesses, which makes it special because people can still do that there whereas down in Napa, Sonoma, it’s pretty difficult to do that now [because the cost to produce is too high].” The absence of substantial tourism and remoteness has, thus far, allowed small producers to stay in the game.
There is no wine region I know of that shares many similarities with the story of Anderson Valley. In the course of writing this piece, I am often reminded of Tony’s line about the Valley being “the land that time forgot.” It’s obvious that a lot is happening on the wine front, yet the wine world remains largely ignorant about it. Its remoteness isolates us, allowing us to enjoy its wines while never actually connecting with the place.
Or, do we connect to the place through the wines? Anderson Valley wines are distinctly Anderson Valley because the terroir is incredibly strong, and there are no mass produced wines to obscure it. This is a testament to those involved in the Valley’s wine scene, suggesting that the place is really that special that it must be showcased rather than manipulated. In Part 2, we’ll go in-depth into the wines themselves, and discuss what kind of future Anderson Valley may have.
“A portrait of a man, traditionally identified as Pierre de Beaumarchais”
Note #1: This article originally ran on August 4th, 2020. At the time, I had only tasted barrel samples, and had done so in May. My standard practice of not scoring barrel samples being what it is, I provided only tasting notes. Recently, I had a chance to take my time tasting through the finished wine, which were formally submitted as samples, giving me the chance to update this article with scores. I’ve kept the barrel sample notes so that we can all see how the wine continued to develop.
Note #2: Given the uniqueness of the winemaking of these Beau Marchais wines, it is very difficult to provide a value rating of these wines. As a refresher, Good Vitis offers a value rating from A to F based on how how I perceive the wine based on comparing its quality to its price in the global market. In this case, I should be comparing these pinot noirs against the global pinot noir market, which means I’d be trying to compare a trio of pinot noirs made in a vastly different method than any other pinot that have a demonstrable impact on the wine, producing pinot that is fundamentally different from any other, and hardly comparable. It important to note that while these wines are very expensive ($95 retail per bottle), several things are true. First, the methods used are more time consuming and labor intensive than those used in making pinot the standard way, making this a more expensive pinot to produce than others, including pinots sourced from the same vineyards. And second, for pinot lovers and lovers of unusual methods with the resources to acquire these wines, these are the only wines on the market of their kind. As they are are the only wine of their kind, they are the global market, and therefore set the original benchmark. For this reason, I cannot (yet) provide value ratings. The most I can say is that if you fall in the category of the pinot lover or lover of unusual winemaking methodology and want to spend the money on them, you absolutely should for the experience, if not the wine as well.
Last spring, Adam Lee told me briefly about one of his newer projects called Beau Marchais, and sent me barrel samples of the three pinot noirs that will be released this fall under the label. Last week, I joined a crowd of Adam’s Clarice Wine Company customers for a Zoom tasting with Adam and Mike Officer of Carlisle Winery to discuss Beau Marchais in depth. Adam had sent Mike barrel samples, and Mike gave us his thoughts as he tasted through them. The wide-ranging discussion touched on a variety of topics, and provided good entertainment for wine lovers like myself who have missed in-person wine tastings and gatherings.
It was the first virtual tasting event I’ve attended, a decision I made because I’d had the wines being discussed. I’ve been apprehensive so far to register for these events because either I haven’t had the featured wines, wasn’t interested in purchasing the featured wines, or wasn’t going to be able to get the wines in time to give them a proper rest prior to the tasting. While virtual tastings are, I’m sure, a lifeline for some wineries during this global pandemic, I’ve been loath to risk bottle shock and short rest periods during summer weather shipping. It’s brought a topic I think about often to real life, but alas, that’s a subject for a different post.
Beau Marchais is an unusual project because in a certain sense it is virtual winemaking, and is therefore a particularly appropriate one to launch during COIVD. Adam makes the wine, but he takes remote instruction from one of the most famous and respected winemakers in the world, Philippe Cambie, who lives in France’s Chateauneuf de Pape. Cambie currently consults for somewhere in the vicinity of 82 wineries according to Mike Officer, but nevertheless “the opportunity to work with him,” Adam told the gathered virtual crowd, “was too much to pass up.”
Adam and Mike had met Cambie on a trip to Chateauneuf de Pape, in the southern portion of France’s Rhone Valley. “He’s behind a lot of our favorite Chateauneuf de Pape’s,” Mike said, adding that “he’s taken a lot of okay places [throughout the Rhone Valley] and made them exceptionally good. It’s pretty fantastic to say that.”
The Lee-Cambie collaboration genesis, as Adam described it, was that during their trip to Chateauneuf, “we went to enough places that called grenache [the signature grape of the region] ‘the pinot noir of Chateaneuf de Pape.’ I began thinking, could we make California pinot noir in the style of Chateaneuf grenache?” Adam brought the idea to Cambie, and the two agreed that Adam would use his incredible fruit sourcing connections to secure choice California grapes, and Cambie would instruct Adam on how to make the wine. They would do the blending together in-person.
Mike Officer (L) and Adam Lee (R) with Philippe Cambie
As Adam and Mike interviewed each other during the virtual tasting, Adam described the process that he, via Cambie, made the three Beau Marchais wines. “Philippe brought completely different ideas to the project, things I hadn’t thought to do with pinot noir before.” That’s a big statement coming from Adam, a winemaker who by nature is willing to try different things and has made, pretty much exclusively, pinot noir for numerous projects for more than two decades.
To begin with, Cambie had Adam pick the grapes “on the earlier side of things.” Once the grapes came in, “we didn’t do nearly as much whole cluster press as I normally do. Clarice is around 80% whole cluster, Beau Marchais were around 25%. Philippe uses a particular enzyme to extract more from the skins. It tends to give a very creamy texture, something I’d never thought of using before with pinot. We used it during cold soak.” After the addition of another yeast, “the wine stayed on the skin for about 45 to 48 days. Normally, I do about 17 days, maybe 21, of maceration. I’ve heard of people trialing durations this long, but they’re just trials. This is what Philippe does.”
The differences kept coming. “As you get close to fermentation, we’d do this thing where we’d pump out of the bottom valve [of the tank] and back into the wine below the cap to actually push the skins up [as opposed to pumping the juice over the top of the cap to push the skins down]. This meant no aeration during the pump over. Plus, we used completely different barrels then I’ve ever used before. No concrete, just oak, and a good bit of new oak.”
Adam was asked by an audience member what the biggest influence Philippe had on him during the process. In response, he said that “it’s made me look at pinot noir differently across all my projects. I’ve been making pinot since 1994, and I liked to sit there and say I looked at things different each year. But still, there’s a sense of falling back to what you know. So, this helped me really say, okay, there are real differences in how to make really great pinot. This was an opportunity to increase my horizons.” As Mike summed it up, “no dogma. I like that.”
The Beau Marchais line up consists of two pinot noirs from the famed Clos Pepe vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills, and a third pinot from the equally esteemed Soberanes Vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands. Both regions are considered cooler climate for California, and add a sense of history and strong imprints of place to the project. The inaugural release will come from the 2019 vintage. “I’m thrilled to be at Clos Pepe, I’ve worked at it since 2000,” Adam explained. “Getting back to the Santa Rita Hills, I love Clos Pepe. They’re doing great farming, it’s a great opportunity to do something great.”
Beau Marchais’ inaugural 2019 release
The two Clos Pepe vineyard wines, named Clos Pepe Est (“east” in French) and Clos Pepe Ouest (“west” in French), each represent unique areas of the already small vineyard. The Est comes from, you guessed it, the eastern edge and middle of the vineyard and is comprised of 115 and Pommard clones. This area of the vineyard “has some rolling hills, and the portion where the grapes come from is on the backside of the hill where it is more protected [than the west side where Ouest comes from]. It makes a big difference.” The Ouest is a mix of Pommard and 667 clones and “faces the Pacific Ocean, which means it gets direct wind. It produces smaller clusters and achieves higher brix. The wind is so strong sometimes that you can end up with poor fruit set.”
As Mike tasted the two Clos Pepe’s, he commented that the two wines were “totally different” even though they are “from the same hood.” I couldn’t agree more. Not only is the Ouest more integrated at this stage – I get the sense that it responded to the extended maceration in a softer way – but the nose and fruit has developed more quickly as well, offering more differentiated layers at this early stage. It seems to be on the path to being more spicy and hedonistic than the Est, reminding me of Gigondas.
The Est shows a lot of gritty skin tannin, which takes up residence in a distinctly different region of the mouth than the acid. While the acid carries red fruit and florals, the higher level of tannin brings black tea and tobacco flavors than the Ouest has, the latter more dominated by black and blue fruit, with tar and black pepper.
“It was actually Philippe’s decision to split [the vineyard] like this,” Adam noted. “When we were together to blend, I was looking to make one blend, but Philippe said we should do an east and a west.”
2019 Beau Marchais Clos Pepe Vineyard Est – Violet and lilac immediate jump out of the glass, followed by cherry, strawberry preserve, tanned leather and cassia cinnamon. The body has polishing juicy acid and late-developing grippy tannins, contributing to the softest pallet and most elegant structure of the three 2019 Beau Marchais wines. Bursting with tangy cherry, strawberry and plum, the deep flavor profile also includes violet, orange zest, graphite, moist earth, fresh leather and green bell pepper. This is the most unusual of the three wines, though the combination of tanginess and bell pepper may make it the most divisive. Two to three years of cellaring should help it coalesce. 92 points.
2019 Beau Marchais Clos Pepe Vineyard Ouest – This deep, nearly hedonistic, nose runs deep with Maraschino Cherry, strawberry preserve, prune, black pepper and nose-tingling spice. Smooth and very fluid, the full body combines densely packed gritty tannin with smooth, velvety acid to form a seriously statured profile. Red cherry, red plum, orange zest, tar and rhubarb form the backbone of the wine’s flavors, finishing on a graphite and earthy minerality. I think this will be at its best in two to three years. 94 points.
Soberanes Vineyard. Picture credit: Santa Lucia Highlands
The Soberanes Vineyard bottling was the hardest to put my finger on. While it initially struck me as the most delicate of three despite it’s darker color, it gained weight with air and developed a nose and palate with distinctively different profiles. I noted that “it is the most classically pinot-esque of the three.” While the nose is all pastels and florals and red fruit, the palate is a concentrated combination of dark fruit, teriyaki, rose, orange blossom, sweet tobacco and tar with sweet, long tannin and modest acid. At the end of my notes, I wrote that “it is the closest these wines come to being sappy though it isn’t cloying. Best balance of the three at this stage. It evolved more than the two Clos Pepe between the two rounds of tastings (which were two hours apart).”
2019 Beau Marchais Soberanes Vineyard – The grapey, saturated nose features aromas of Bing cherry juice, rich baking spice, black plum, rhubarb, tobacco leaf, graphite and black pepper. Full bodied, though the result of pairing big, round and lush tannin with equally big, but juicy, tannin, is that the palate retains liveliness and buoyancy. The tannin slowly dries the mouth, allowing the flavors to smoothly fade as the finish persists. Flavors include Bing cherry, raspberry, graphite, blood orange, moist earth and plum. Best over the next five years. 93 points.
The project is named after a man named Pierre Beaumarchais, a French playwright, inventor, musician, spy “and so much more,” who helped with the foreign financing of the American Revolution by creating a company that smuggled money from the French and Spanish governments across the Pacific and into the Colonies. “We thought it was a great parallel to Philippe helping to make pinot in America. Also, it means ‘the beautiful walk’ in French.”
I asked Adam and Mike for their thoughts on the ageability of the three Beau Marchais wines. “If I’m comparing them to the Clarice wines, I’d say enjoy Beau Marchais while you’re letting the Clarice wines age,” Mike said. Adam added that “Clarice is aging more on acid and the stem tannins. Beau Marchais will be aging on skin tannin, it’s going to be fascinating. I don’t know the answer yet. I’d guess Mike is right, but neither are certain.” I’d approach it the same way myself, though I’d be tempted to let the Beau Marchais sit for a year or two post-release to allow for more integration and softening.
The inaugural Beau Marchais release will come this fall. You can sign up on the website to be notified when they are available, and they will also be made available to Clarice Wine Company customers. Beau Marchais is a fascinating project that will appeal most to those who like experimental wine, but also appreciate the incredible experience that Adam and Cambie to bring to the experimentation. This isn’t some new technique applied by someone with five years of winemaking experience trying to make a name for themselves before they know what they’re doing.
The trees adjacent to Carlisle Winery
I want to plug Carlisle Winery briefly, which I visited in early 2019. Located in Sonoma, it is primarily known for its zinfandel, which Mike aptly describes as “the Rodney Dangerfield of grapes” and California’s only true “benchmark grape (you think of Bordeaux for cabernet and merlot, Rhone for syrah, Mosel for riesling. But zinfandel, globally, it’s California).” While I really enjoyed several of Mike’s zinfandels during my visit, especially their estate Carlisle Vineyard bottling, I was most taken by two of his white wines, a grüner veltliner from the Steiner Vineyard and a field blend from the Compagni Portis vineyard, which is comprised of gewürztraminer, trousseau gris, riesling, roter veltliner “and several other varieties yet to be identified.”
The virtual tasting included a trio of Carlisle wines selected for Clarice customers, including a newly released 2018 syrah from Radiant Ridge, a high elevation vineyard in the Bennett Valley. Adam called it “my favorite syrah [Mike] has ever made” and “the most French-style syrah I’ve tasted from Mike.” A number of attendees chimed in, adding their praise for the wine. Carlisle is a fantastic producer, and one to dig into if you haven’t already.
I’m going to end by recommending these virtual tastings for those who miss winery visits and wine dinners with friends these days. Countless wineries are doing them, and offering expedited shipping on the wines chosen for the tastings. I won’t give a final verdict on whether I think a week or less of post-shipment resting is sufficient to clear the effects of bottle shock, but I will encourage people to order as far in advance of the event as possible. Besides that risk, there’s very little downside to taking advantage of the ability to virtually taste with winemakers around the world. It’s a great way to explore the wine world during a time when we cannot otherwise travel.
“A portrait of a man, traditionally identified as Pierre de Beaumarchais”
Last spring, Adam Lee told me briefly about one of his newer projects called Beau Marchais, and sent me barrel samples of the three pinot noirs that will be released this fall under the label. Last week, I joined a crowd of Adam’s Clarice Wine Company customers for a Zoom tasting with Adam and Mike Officer of Carlisle Winery to discuss Beau Marchais in depth. Adam had sent Mike barrel samples, and Mike gave us his thoughts as he tasted through them. The wide-ranging discussion touched on a variety of topics, and provided good entertainment for wine lovers like myself who have missed in-person wine tastings and gatherings.
It was the first virtual tasting event I’ve attended, a decision I made because I’d had the wines being discussed. I’ve been apprehensive so far to register for these events because either I haven’t had the featured wines, wasn’t interested in purchasing the featured wines, or wasn’t going to be able to get the wines in time to give them a proper rest prior to the tasting. While virtual tastings are, I’m sure, a lifeline for some wineries during this global pandemic, I’ve been loath to risk bottle shock and short rest periods during summer weather shipping. It’s brought a topic I think about often to real life, but alas, that’s a subject for a different post.
Beau Marchais is an unusual project because in a certain sense it is virtual winemaking, and is therefore a particularly appropriate one to launch during COIVD. Adam makes the wine, but he takes remote instruction from one of the most famous and respected winemakers in the world, Philippe Cambie, who lives in France’s Chateauneuf de Pape. Cambie currently consults for somewhere in the vicinity of 82 wineries according to Mike Officer, but nevertheless “the opportunity to work with him,” Adam told the gathered virtual crowd, “was too much to pass up.”
Adam and Mike had met Cambie on a trip to Chateauneuf de Pape, in the southern portion of France’s Rhone Valley. “He’s behind a lot of our favorite Chateauneuf de Pape’s,” Mike said, adding that “he’s taken a lot of okay places [throughout the Rhone Valley] and made them exceptionally good. It’s pretty fantastic to say that.”
The Lee-Cambie collaboration genesis, as Adam described it, was that during their trip to Chateauneuf, “we went to enough places that called grenache [the signature grape of the region] ‘the pinot noir of Chateaneuf de Pape.’ I began thinking, could we make California pinot noir in the style of Chateaneuf grenache?” Adam brought the idea to Cambie, and the two agreed that Adam would use his incredible fruit sourcing connections to secure choice California grapes, and Cambie would instruct Adam on how to make the wine. They would do the blending together in-person.
Mike Officer (L) and Adam Lee (R) with Philippe Cambie
As Adam and Mike interviewed each other during the virtual tasting, Adam described the process that he, via Cambie, made the three Beau Marchais wines. “Philippe brought completely different ideas to the project, things I hadn’t thought to do with pinot noir before.” That’s a big statement coming from Adam, a winemaker who by nature is willing to try different things and has made, pretty much exclusively, pinot noir for numerous projects for more than two decades.
To begin with, Cambie had Adam pick the grapes “on the earlier side of things.” Once the grapes came in, “we didn’t do nearly as much whole cluster press as I normally do. Clarice is around 80% whole cluster, Beau Marchais were around 25%. Philippe uses a particular enzyme to extract more from the skins. It tends to give a very creamy texture, something I’d never thought of using before with pinot. We used it during cold soak.” After the addition of another yeast, “the wine stayed on the skin for about 45 to 48 days. Normally, I do about 17 days, maybe 21, of maceration. I’ve heard of people trialing durations this long, but they’re just trials. This is what Philippe does.”
The differences kept coming. “As you get close to fermentation, we’d do this thing where we’d pump out of the bottom valve [of the tank] and back into the wine below the cap to actually push the skins up [as opposed to pumping the juice over the top of the cap to push the skins down]. This meant no aeration during the pump over. Plus, we used completely different barrels then I’ve ever used before. No concrete, just oak, and a good bit of new oak.”
Adam was asked by an audience member what the biggest influence Philippe had on him during the process. In response, he said that “it’s made me look at pinot noir differently across all my projects. I’ve been making pinot since 1994, and I liked to sit there and say I looked at things different each year. But still, there’s a sense of falling back to what you know. So, this helped me really say, okay, there are real differences in how to make really great pinot. This was an opportunity to increase my horizons.” As Mike summed it up, “no dogma. I like that.”
The Beau Marchais line up consists of two pinot noirs from the famed Clos Pepe vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills, and a third pinot from the equally esteemed Soberanes Vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands. Both regions are considered cooler climate for California, and add a sense of history and strong imprints of place to the project. The inaugural release will come from the 2019 vintage. “I’m thrilled to be at Clos Pepe, I’ve worked at it since 2000,” Adam explained. “Getting back to the Santa Rita Hills, I love Clos Pepe. They’re doing great farming, it’s a great opportunity to do something great.”
The new Beau Marchais label
The two Clos Pepe vineyard wines, named Clos Pepe Est (“east” in French) and Clos Pepe Ouest (“west” in French), each represent unique areas of the already small vineyard. The Est comes from, you guessed it, the eastern edge and middle of the vineyard and is comprised of 115 and Pommard clones. This area of the vineyard “has some rolling hills, and the portion where the grapes come from is on the backside of the hill where it is more protected [than the west side where Ouest comes from]. It makes a big difference.” The Ouest is a mix of Pommard and 667 clones and “faces the Pacific Ocean, which means it gets direct wind. It produces smaller clusters and achieves higher brix. The wind is so strong sometimes that you can end up with poor fruit set.”
As Mike tasted the two Clos Pepe’s, he commented that the two wines were “totally different” even though they are “from the same hood.” I couldn’t agree more. Not only is the Ouest more integrated at this stage – I get the sense that it responded to the extended maceration in a softer way – but the nose and fruit has developed more quickly as well, offering more differentiated layers at this early stage. It seems to be on the path to being more spicy and hedonistic than the Est, reminding me of Gigondas.
The Est shows a lot of gritty skin tannin, which takes up residence in a distinctly different region of the mouth than the acid. While the acid carries red fruit and florals, the higher level of tannin brings black tea and tobacco flavors than the Ouest has, the latter more dominated by black and blue fruit, with tar and black pepper.
“It was actually Philippe’s decision to split [the vineyard] like this,” Adam noted. “When we were together to blend, I was looking to make one blend, but Philippe said we should do an east and a west.”
Soberanes Vineyard. Picture credit: Santa Lucia Highlands
The Soberanes Vineyard bottling was the hardest to put my finger on. While it initially struck me as the most delicate of three despite it’s darker color, it gained weight with air and developed a nose and palate with distinctively different profiles. I noted that “it is the most classically pinot-esque of the three.” While the nose is all pastels and florals and red fruit, the palate is a concentrated combination of dark fruit, teriyaki, rose, orange blossom, sweet tobacco and tar with sweet, long tannin and modest acid. At the end of my notes, I wrote that “it is the closest these wines come to being sappy though it isn’t cloying. Best balance of the three at this stage. It evolved more than the two Clos Pepe between the two rounds of tastings (which were two hours apart).”
The project is named after a man named Pierre Beaumarchais, a French playwright, inventor, musician, spy “and so much more,” who helped with the foreign financing of the American Revolution by creating a company that smuggled money from the French and Spanish governments across the Pacific and into the Colonies. “We thought it was a great parallel to Philippe helping to make pinot in America. Also, it means ‘the beautiful walk’ in French.”
I asked Adam and Mike for their thoughts on the ageability of the three Beau Marchais wines. “If I’m comparing them to the Clarice wines, I’d say enjoy Beau Marchais while you’re letting the Clarice wines age,” Mike said. Adam added that “Clarice is aging more on acid and the stem tannins. Beau Marchais will be aging on skin tannin, it’s going to be fascinating. I don’t know the answer yet. I’d guess Mike is right, but neither are certain.” I’d approach it the same way myself, though I’d be tempted to let the Beau Marchais sit for a year or two post-release to allow for more integration and softening.
The inaugural Beau Marchais release will come this fall. You can sign up on the website to be notified when they are available, and they will also be made available to Clarice Wine Company customers. Beau Marchais is a fascinating project that will appeal most to those who like experimental wine, but also appreciate the incredible experience that Adam and Cambie to bring to the experimentation. This isn’t some new technique applied by someone with five years of winemaking experience trying to make a name for themselves before they know what they’re doing.
The trees adjacent to Carlisle Winery
I want to plug Carlisle Winery briefly, which I visited in early 2019. Located in Sonoma, it is primarily known for its zinfandel, which Mike aptly describes as “the Rodney Dangerfield of grapes” and California’s only true “benchmark grape (you think of Bordeaux for cabernet and merlot, Rhone for syrah, Mosel for riesling. But zinfandel, globally, it’s California).” While I really enjoyed several of Mike’s zinfandels during my visit, especially their estate Carlisle Vineyard bottling, I was most taken by two of his white wines, a grüner veltliner from the Steiner Vineyard and a field blend from the Compagni Portis vineyard, which is comprised of gewürztraminer, trousseau gris, riesling, roter veltliner “and several other varieties yet to be identified.”
The virtual tasting included a trio of Carlisle wines selected for Clarice customers, including a newly released 2018 syrah from Radiant Ridge, a high elevation vineyard in the Bennett Valley. Adam called it “my favorite syrah [Mike] has ever made” and “the most French-style syrah I’ve tasted from Mike.” A number of attendees chimed in, adding their praise for the wine. Carlisle is a fantastic producer, and one to dig into if you haven’t already.
I’m going to end by recommending these virtual tastings for those who miss winery visits and wine dinners with friends these days. Countless wineries are doing them, and offering expedited shipping on the wines chosen for the tastings. I won’t give a final verdict on whether I think a week or less of post-shipment resting is sufficient to clear the effects of bottle shock, but I will encourage people to order as far in advance of the event as possible. Besides that risk, there’s very little downside to taking advantage of the ability to virtually taste with winemakers around the world. It’s a great way to explore the wine world during a time when we cannot otherwise travel.
Earlier this year, I wrote about a (relatively) new winery in the Sta. Rita Hills called Peake Ranch that I said was on the path to becoming a winery with few peers. In this piece, I get to write about a winery that is already part of that exclusive club, Merry Edwards Winery and Vineyards.
Merry Edwards the woman was a pioneer in the California wine industry in several ways. Not only did she enter a male-dominated industry in the 1970s when sexism was a both a systematic and casual force holding women back, but she also helped shape the development of pinot noir, especially in the Russian River Valley. It is anything but hyperbolic to say that without her, California’s wine scene wouldn’t be what it is today. The Culinary Institute of America inducted Edwards into their hall of fame in 2013 along with the impressive company of Robert Parker, who himself deemed Edwards “one of the masters and pioneers in California.” My recent exploration of a range of their wines from 2017 and 2018 vintages offer evidence of what makes the winery so legendary.
Merry’s path to Merry Edwards Winery and Vineyards is a bit circuitous. She began at one of the most esteemed estates in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Mount Eden. While there, she formed a friendship and mentor-mentee relationship with Joseph Swan, a relationship that would often take her to Sonoma Valley in those years. Her interest in Sonoma and the Russian River Valley developed as a result of these travels, and led to her move from Mount Eden to Sonoma’s Matanzas Creek in 1977, where she was the winery’s inaugural winemaker, to fully immerse herself in the area.
In 1984, she launched Merry Vintners, though production lasted just five years before the financials went south, a victim to a wider downturn in the wine market that wiped out a good number of wineries in California at the time. After consulting for a number of wineries, she launched Merry Edwards Winery in 1997. Her impressive portfolio of vineyards would increase over time, growing to today’s count of twelve owned and leased.
Today’s pantheon of Merry Edwards Russian River Valley vineyards
It is hard to talk about the boom in Russian River Valley pinot noir without talking about Merry Edwards because of what she has done there under her own name. However, her earliest mark on the Valley came before she planted roots there. While working at Mount Eden in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south of San Francisco, she helped treat and propagate a pinot clone that became known as UCD 37, or the “Merry Edwards selection.” It would go on to be a star of the Russian River Valley AVA.
In a sign of the significance of the Edwards brand, Merry and her husband Ken Coopersmith (who himself had been instrumental to the winery’s success) sold the business to Louis Roederer Champagne in 2019, which announced that no changes, including to the winemaking and vineyard staff, were going to be made.
One person thankful for Roederer’s staffing decision is Heidi Von Der Mehden, Merry Edwards’ head winemaker since 2018. Recruited by Merry in 2015 to be associate winemaker, she was promoted three years later when Merry retired from head winemaking duties. It went without saying that she was glad to remain on the payroll after the sale to Roederer.
I spoke with Heidi after tasting through a few of the wines sent to me for this article. One of the first questions I asked her was how closely she could identify with the sexism that Merry overcame in her career. Thankfully, Heidi herself had not experienced such systemic sexism. She observed that her career had been largely a series of positions under men who were looking to retire, and perhaps because of that did not see her as a threat, but rather for her talents and intelligence. It was some of the younger men around her who were more competitive, which could be a sign of sexism, or less harmful competition between talented people. At Merry Edwards, she says, it’s not gender that helps someone advance, but talent.
Her instinct was that the kind of sexism that Merry faced was both more numerous and more blatant than what exists in the industry today. “There is less of it today, but it’s probably more subversive and harder to prove. Now, it’s someone gets a job and you’re told it’s because they’re more qualified but you realize it’s actually because of gender.” Though she’s seen that kind of dynamic from time to time, Heidi says she hasn’t experienced it herself. “I’ve been lucky that I’ve not faced the kind of gender discrimination that Merry did. She has ridiculous stories.”
Heidi Von Der Mehden
We also talked about her recent transition to head winemaker. Having taken over recently from a luminary, it would be understandable if the process was challenging. However, calling it “smooth,” Heidi noted that she had previous experience taking over head winemaking duties coming to Merry Edwards. “I had taken over for another luminary, Richard Arrowood, at Arrowood Winery, but in both cases I never looked at it as an opportunity to take over from a big name, but rather as an opportunity to learn from one of the best. I knew I wanted to get into Russian River Valley pinot, so when this opportunity came along, I was going to grab it.” Because Merry intended for Heidi to eventually take over when she was hired to be the assistant winemaker, “I learned a ton from her. She wants the brand to succeed; after all, her name is on it and it’s her baby. So we worked together very well to make sure the transition was seamless and the legacy of great pinot continues.”
Coming into the job, Heidi had very little pinot experience. While her first winemaking job was at Kenwood, a large(r) scale Russian River Valley winery that makes pinot noir among many other varieties, the approach was different than it is at Merry Edwards. Though both wineries did a few similar things like whole cluster, the scale was very different.
“It was very large format and we only had large, closed top fermented and did pump overs, things you wouldn’t do for high end pinot [like at Merry Edwards].” After Kenwood, she would work mostly with Rhone and Bordeaux varietals for a number of years, leaving pinot behind. However, “Merry actually liked the fact that I had little in the way of pinot experience because it meant I came in with few notions and ideas of how it should be made. I didn’t push back against her approach.”
Merry’s approach included a few things that surprised Heidi. One example she gave me was the use of relatively large five ton fermenters. “A lot of small producers like small fermenters and small lots, but Merry likes bigger fermenters to get as much phenolic extraction as possible.” Extraction requires heat, which is naturally produced during fermentation. So, in order to bigger extraction, larger fermenters are needed to achieve the requisite temperatures.
Another difference is how the vineyards are planted. Rather than the more traditional north-south orientation, Merry Edwards vineyards are planted at 20 degrees off magnetic north. Paired with appropriately oriented leafing, the fruit gets more sun protection during the hottest parts of the year while increasing exposure to the cooler morning sun, an approach to avoid sunburn while still developing sufficient tannin. An added benefit to this approach is that while it necessitates even more leafing than usual, it results in concentrating more nutrients in the grapes. They begin leafing right after fruit set, which also gives the young fruit early training in sun exposure, building the grapes’ tolerance to heat young to prevent sun damage later in the growing year.
A Merry Edwards vineyard
These vineyard decisions and practices are instrumental to developing the tannin structure of the bottled wine. Heidi explained to me that one of the things that drew her to Merry Edwards was the in-house phenolics lab, which helps track what otherwise must be detected by taste and sight. Heidi and her team take full advantage of this capability, testing phenolic levels (the chemical compounds of tannins) on all pinot lots. “It’s awesome that we have our own lab, because it means we get real time numbers. I’ve trialed outside services, and it takes longer and is harder to trust.” Further, “the research that’s been done on phenolics is heavily weighted towards Bordeaux varieties, so there’s relatively little solid data available on pinot. That doesn’t help us very much, so being able to test as we want and build our own dataset is huge.”
Phenolics are tested as soon as the fruit arrives from harvest, giving Heidi a baseline to use throughout production as they are again tested at various points during the winemaking process. “I’ll run anthocyanin [the tannin extracted from the skins] to see how color is developing during cold soak [which occurs prior to fermentation] and whether we’ve gotten all we want from that phase to determine when fermentation should be started. I’ll run it again mid-fermentation to decide if we need to do delestage [a process that gently extracts tannins by adding oxygen to the juice], or hold back on punch downs, or implement any other extraction regime.” In addition to the taste test, the lab helps Heidi more preciously develop her tannin profile.
Perusing the Merry Edwards website prior to our conversation, I noticed lots of vineyard pictures showing generous cover crops, a term referring to the vegetation covering the ground between the rows of vines. Using covers (as opposed to not using them) is a tactic many winemakers and vineyard managers use because they want to add or remove something from the soil that is affecting the vines in a positive or negative way, for example adding vegetation that helps replenish potassium in the soil, or a using type of plant that improves aeration in soil that otherwise may suffocate the vine roots. They are often used as an alternative to fertilizer.
It turns out that Heidi is a big believer in cover crops. “I used to have a lot of organic vineyards at Arrowood, cover crops are a huge point of pride in that context [because without non-organic pesticides and fertilizers, they become very important]. At Merry Edwards, I’ve always wanted to do more cover crops. We decide on it vineyard by vineyard, focusing on what the vineyard in question needs.”
In one vineyard, “the soil was just so vigorous and the canopies were so huge that they kept the fruit from coming in, so we planted a modest amount of orchard grass to introduce competition for the nutrients and water so the fruit had a chance. We got a better crop and better flavors.” In another vineyard, “we had an issue with Pierce’s Disease–it was a big issue in the Russian River Valley in 2014 and 2015–so we targeted a cover crop that increased the number of beneficial insects and wasps by sprouting a lot of flowers, which in turn attacked Pierce’s.”
In her quest to continue improving the quality of the wine, Heidi is excited because she was recently greenlit to do soil sampling in the vineyards, which hasn’t been done in many years. While many wineries do a lot of soil sampling prior to planting a vineyard to inform which varieties, clones and rootstocks they choose to plant, it is rare that they are done once a vineyard has been up and running for as long as some of Merry Edwards’ plots. “The soil changes over time, especially when it is feeding vines,” Heidi told me. “I’m hoping I can start focusing more on each vineyard and giving them what they need to produce better fruit.” Updating the winery’s knowledge of its soils can uniquely help her achieve that ambition.
Merry Edwards wine is not exactly cheap. A major driver of cost is the choice to use a high percentage of new, versus previously used, oak barrels. If every vintage requires new oak, that means a larger barrel order each year. Merry Edwards uses “quite a bit of new oak,” Heidi explained, “with a minimum of about 45% new oak depending on the vineyard and vintage.” For the sauvignon blanc, one of the few non-pinot wines that Merry Edwards produces, “it’s about 18% [new oak] and 100% barrel fermented.”
The pinot noirs see exclusively French oak. “We work with different coopers and every year when we taste the vintage [before blending and bottling], we taste each barrel set blind so we can see the difference in cooperage.” She then ranks them, and that ranking informs her barrel purchasing decisions for the next year. “This process has also helped be see how the vineyards themselves change with age. As the vineyard matures, the tannin structure and fruit profile change, so a barrel that worked for the vineyard five years ago does not always work as well when the vineyard gets another ten years into its life.” Despite the judicious use of new oak, the wines show little in the way of oak-dominated aromas and flavors.
In addition to a range of pinot noirs, Merry Edwards produces a revered sauvignon blanc and a spectacular chardonnay from the sourced Olivet Lane vineyard. The sauvignon blanc entered the winery’s portfolio after Merry became frustrated pouring other people’s white wines at her winemaker dinners and industry events, feeling like she was giving free advertising to other wineries. Merry had worked with the variety at Matanzas Creek, and decided to give it ago. She originally produced just enough for these small events, but after receiving multiple requests from restaurants and others to purchase some for their lists, she decided to make it part of her annual production that now represents about half of all wine produced each year. In its own right, it has become a collectable wine widely recognized as one of the best examples of the variety from California and is, like the pinot noirs, very age worthy.
A Merry Edwards tasting featuring its own sauvignon blanc
If there is any theme to draw out from my conversation with Heidi and experience with the wines listed below, it’s that we’re essentially talking about one effort undertaken over many decades to produce the best possible pinot noir from the Russian River Valley in a style that reflects the woman whose name is the winery. The approach is manically focused on fine-tuning every part and component of the process, and hyper localized to a distinct set of vineyards that, while each has its own personality, allow the winery to make a signature style of wine.
The wines have significant, sometimes stout, structures while displaying a harmonious array of fruit, earth and floral aromas and flavors at high levels of concentration. I was particularly taken by deftness of the tannins, which were long and especially thick for pinot, yet somehow elegant. The balance between power and beauty is a rare, rare find. All of them, even the sauvignon blanc, appear to benefit from at least short term aging, if not ten years. I found the 2017s to be significantly more accessible at this point than the 2018s, suggesting to me that the more recent vintage is going to need longer in the cellar to present their best selves.
It is hard to compare Merry Edwards’ wines to those of other wineries, even her neighbors, because the combination of Merry Edwards herself, the quality of the terroirs of the vineyards, and the meticulous and purposeful viniculture and winemaking of Heidi is unique, and uniquely effective. There are lots of reasons to choose one wine over another, but it is hard to be in the mood for Merry Edwards and settle for something else.
Wine Reviews
2017 Merry Edwards Chardonnay Cuvée Olivet Lane – The decadent nose offers toasted aromas of creme brûlée, burnt lemon peel, marzipan and lime spritz. Full bodied and creamy, it is offset high-toned acid that runs through the core of a structure that is as elegant as it is substantive. Flavors include a roof-coating brioche and a very pure core of sweet clementine, mango, slate, white pepper and lime zest. Tasty enough to be tempting now, there is huge upside to those who wait five-plus years, after which time the oak influence will integrate and allow more complexity and depth to develop. 94 points. Value: A-.
2017 Merry Edwards Russian River Valley Pinot Noir – There is a deep core in the nose of crushed dark cherry, muddled blackberry and seasoned leather. There are also light notes of violet and scorched earth. It’s full bodied with big, dense and round tannin balanced nicely by bright acidity. There is strong graphite minerality that establishes a serious tone, allowing the bold fruit flavors of blackberry, plum and cherry to feature prominently without entering jammy territory. This full-throttle wine is quite tasty, but warrants another three to five years of bottle age to hit its early stride. 93 points. Value: B.
2017 Merry Edwards Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir – The nose has a heavy backdrop of scorched earth, wet bark, graphite, dark cherry, blackberry and black plum. It’s medium in weight, but spreads across the palate with fine tannin and juicy acid. Flavors include salty and sweet cherry, blackberry, plum and raspberry; black pepper; black tea; and cassis. This is a very intriguing wine aromatically, structurally and flavorfully. There are a multitude of layers that will take a solid five years to start unwinding. I’d love to try this in ten years when everything has sorted out and come together. 94 points. Value: A.
2017 Merry Edwards Meredith Estate Pinot Noir – There is a deep core in the nose of crushed dark cherry, muddled blackberry and seasoned leather. There are also light notes of violet and scorched earth. It’s full bodied with big, dense and round tannin balanced nicely by bright acidity. There is strong graphite minerality that establishes a serious tone, allowing the bold fruit flavors of blackberry, plum and cherry to feature prominently without entering jammy territory. This full-throttle wine is quite tasty, but warrants another three to five years of bottle age to hit its early stride. 93 points. Value: B.
2018 Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc – A beautifully refined nose wafts aromas of guava, pineapple, green apple, banana peel, crushed chalk, lime ice and white pepper. It’s on the heavier side for the variety owing to barrel fermentation and routine lees stirring, but the acid is juicy and keeps the structure feeling flirty. Flavors include sweet green and Opal apples, pineapple juice, lime sorbet, canned mandarin wedges, spring florals and white pepper. A beautiful and beautifully made wine, this has the stuffing to improve over the next 5-7 years and hold tough for another 3-5 beyond that. 93 points. Value: A-.
2018 Merry Edwards Klopp Ranch Pinot Noir – This really benefited from a two hour decant. A dark, concentrated nose featuring Bing cherry, strawberry preserve, rose hip, smoke and blood orange. The aromas are reticent to give themselves up at the moment, there is more buried beneath the surface. Nearly full-bodied, it has a juicy quality that splashes the tongue, balancing nicely with the long, slightly grippy tannins that coat the cheeks. The structure holds a lot of promise. Flavors, like the aromas, are hesitant to present themselves fully but are edging towards a richness that should only develop further. Right now it offers cherry juice, Acai, raspberry, scorched earth, graphite, tar and a sort of blood orange burst on the finish. This one ought to be put in the back of the cellar and forgotten about for a good five years, and the consumed over the following five to seven years. 93 points. Value: B+.
2018 Merry Edwards Olivet Lane Pinot Noir – The under ripe and primary nose offers aromas of crushed strawberry, pastel florals, red plum and tar. Medium plus in weight, the broad tannin offers surprising depth and smoothness give their tender age. The acid is likewise smooth and lush. Together, they form a pleasant substantive structure. Flavors include bright muddled strawberry and raspberry, sweet huckleberry tartness, scorched earth, unsweetened cinnamon, red plum, and red currant. There is a lot going on with this wine, but in order to transform its prettiness into depth, the fruit will need to shed its tart edge. Only time will tell, and on that front I’d be tempted to give it at least four or five years of aging. 92 points. Value: C-.
2018 Merry Edwards Russian River Valley Pinot Noir – Really benefited from a 3 hour decant. The saturated nose features aromas of muddled black cherry, black pepper, blackberry liquor, scorched earth and a hint of juniper berry. Almost full bodied, it offers modest grainy tannins and robust, bright acid that gives the wine a sheen over its still-forming dark, earthy flavors of blackberry concentrate, Bing cherry, tar, graphite, lavender, rose petal and blood orange. Attractive at the moment, two to three years of bottle age should help the tannin and acid integrate better, which I imagine will help the flavors fatten a bit. On its way to a gorgeous RRV AVA pinot. Scored for today, but this has another 1-2 points of upside. Score: 92 points. Value: B+.
2018 Merry Edwards Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir – A deeply-rooted nose offers aromas of concentrated cherry juice, mountain strawberry, baking cinnamon, cigar tobacco, scorched earth and prune. Surprisingly light and tangy, it offers long, finely grained tannin and sharp, juicy acid. The good bits are all there, but need time to come together. Flavors include bright Bing cherry, strawberry, black plum, blood orange and tar. Not as welcoming as the 2017, but needing just as much time, this will be a very good wine. 92 points. Value: B+.
Amber wine in the making at G.Wine in the Republic of Georgia
“Skin contact wine” is all the rage these days, owing in part the significant fan base overlap it shares with “natural wine,” and the coinciding of both “movements” with a wider industry return to winemaking basics motivated by a consumer base that is socially repulsed by the engineering of food and beverage.
Wow, what a sentence, right? It’s like I’m writing a social justice doctoral dissertation on both the past and the present. Though this is no dissertation and I’m not your most fervent social justice warrior, I do hold these judgments. As I’ve said in multiple posts, good wine is good wine regardless of how it is made, and it can be made many different ways. To construct protections for wine based on winemaking approaches is to create artificial borders between wine that is deemed good or bad, real or fake or manipulated. The distinction would be silly if it didn’t have impacts on people’s livelihoods.
Though I love many skin contact wines, the category is regrettably a major driver of this nonsense. The problem starts, as can easily be the case in wine, semantically, but it quickly (d)evolves into an issue of substance. The term “skin contact” refers to wine made by letting the skins and the juice spend time together during fermentation. However, rather than being something new, it is actually a process known as maceration that has been around for as long as wine has been made; it is nothing novel. If we must label skin contact wines in a distinctive way, we can more easily refer to them as “macerated wines,” which make more sense because the term has been around for much longer, is well-defined and more descriptive.
One reason we don’t call them macerated wines is because baked into the term “skin contact wine” is the understanding that the grapes are of a white variety. Though that distinction is often left out because it is used by people in the know, it remains necessary because many people are not in the know and leaving them behind is classic wine douchebaggery.
Though semantic, precision in wine language matters a great deal. I often cannot help myself by responding to people who tell me they like skin contact wine by asking them if they prefer cabernet sauvignon to merlot. Wine gets a bad reputation for being precise in ways people do not comprehend and thus reject, but wine lovers do ourselves an injustice when we are not specific enough. More responsible wine professionals make sure they use the full term, “skin contact white wine,” or some of its acceptable alternatives like “orange” or amber” wine, which reference the color of the final product, or “Ramato” if referring to a skin contact pinot grigio made in the historical winemaking style of Fruili, Italy. Though it often does not, this category of responsible wine pro needs to include the 28-year-old clerk at your favorite hipster wine shop, and the twat bar tender at your favorite hipster wine bar.
In this spirit, I want to suggest some macerated wines for Good Vitis’ readers to try. I should first acknowledge the huge oversight that is the exclusion from the list of an amber wine from the Republic of Georgia, the most famous skin contact white wine-making country these days, and likely the original source of the style. Avid Good Vitis readers will know that I am a huge fan of that country and its wine, and everyone should know that the absence of a Georgian amber wine from this list has everything to do with not having any handy. Nevertheless, the wines listed below are all great wines worth the effort of sourcing, and have the power of demonstration of the points made above. Try these wines because they’re good, fun, and will help you better understand and more accurately describe “skin contact wine.”
How to refer to it: Skin contact or macerated white wine, or skin contact or macerated roussane.
Yangarra is a historic estate in Australia’s McLaren Vale wine region focused on producing Rhone varieties off its single estate vineyard, which was first planted in 1946. In 2001, the estate was purchased by Jackson Family Estates. A year prior, it took on then-new winemaker Peter Fraser. I got to meet Peter in 2019 and try a new series of high end Yangarra wines, this one among them, that use techniques different from the rest of the winery’s lineup.
Half of the grapes for the 2017 Roux Beaute Roussanne go through 193 days of maceration (skin contact) in large ceramic eggs, which allows more oxygen to interact with the wine than the traditional stainless steel fermentation vessel used for most white wine. The remaining 50% of the grapes went through fermentation in ceramic egg, though without skin contact. This approach, combined with the use of wild yeast, gives the wine more structural layers than it would otherwise have, and adds flavors and aromas impossible without maceration. Tasting note:
A slightly musty aroma gives way to peach, apple cider, nectarine, petrol and something I can only describe as “dank.” Though medium in body, it floods the mouth with juicy acid and ripe skin tannin, forming a glycerin sensation. Flavors include white peach, apricot, sour tangerine, orchid, white pepper and dandelion. 92 points: Value: C-.
How to refer to it: Skin contact or macerated white wine, skin contact or macerated gewürztraminer.
Two Vintners is a small producer in Washington State owned by winemaker Morgan Lee. Morgan makes wine for a number of labels, and his combined experience covers what I imagine is essentially the entire state’s geography and varietal offering. He is one of my favorite winemakers because his wine is exceptional, the prices overly competitive, he has a ton of fun doing it and his product is entirely bank-able; I don’t need to try his wine to know I’m safe buying it.
An early example of his fun-loving spirit was the creation of the O.G., a macerated gewürztraminer sourced from the Yakima Valley’s esteemed Olson Vineyard and named in a double reference to Orange Gewürztraminer and the Original Gangster. I believe the first vintage was 2012, which puts it on the cutting edge of this more recent skin contact trend. This 2018 vintage spent 55 days on its skins and was then aged in neutral barrel for 9 months. Tasting note:
The nose wafts a beautiful set of aromas including honeysuckle, orange blossom, orchid, gooseberry and raw cranberry. It is medium in weight on the palate with crispy acid and a smooth mouthfeel. The skin contact adds weight to an already structurally complex wine, while simultaneously bolstering the delicacy and florality of a profile that includes a slightly sweet and slightly salty combination of orange peel, vanilla, nectarine, red plum and gooseberry. This is yummy stuff. Give it an hour decant to help it blow off a slightly bitter edge. 92 points. Value: A.
Yes, rosé is skin contact wine. See why I think the moniker is silly? Rosé is what would be a full-blown red wine if the maceration lasted longer. That said, the best rosé starts in the vineyard where the grapes are treated differently than if it were intended for red wine to emphasize bright acid, lighter colored fruit and floral notes. This is intentional rosé. After thought rosé is made with grapes harvested for red wine, but for some reason are made into rosé. That route often produces flabby, out of balance wine that’s big in body and light in acid, which is exactly the opposite of what makes a good rosé. Either way, though, rosé is macerated wine.
L’Ecole No. 41 is one of Washington State’s original modern wineries and remains one of the industry’s standards today. This 2019 rosé is made from grenache harvested from the Alder Ridge Vineyard in the heart of the Horse Heaven Hills AVA, which gives it great pedigree. Alder Ridge is among the very best grenache sites in the state, its fruit finding its way into wines from other esteemed producers like Gramercy Cellars. This newly released 2019 is both substantive and refreshing, and a great one to stock up on for the coming summer. Tasting note:
Pours a beautiful light pink hew. Aromas waft from the glass, featuring strawberry, rose hip, watermelon, guava and lime sorbet. It’s medium bodied for a rosé and coats the mouth with juicy acid and a fair amount of weight. Sweet cherry and strawberry come through immediately, followed by hits of chili flake spice, tangerine and yellow peach. It’s an interesting and entertaining profile that offers a significant presence. 92 points. Value: A.
The Standard Skin Contact Wine: 2017 Flora Springs Trilogy
The Trilogy is Flora Springs’ top of the line red wine blend, comprised in this vintage of 80% cabernet sauvignon, 17% petit verdot and 3% malbec. It is, by definition, a macerated, or skin contact, wine. In fact, it represents the standard macerated wine: red wine. Unless one says “skin contact white wine,” they can be reasonably assumed to mean the Flora Springs Trilogy.
And what a macerated wine it is. Flora Springs was founded in 1978, but its Napa Valley property was first planted with vineyards in the late 1800s so the terroir is for real (it has been replanted since). I’ve had several vintages of the Trilogy and they all deliver. Although it sells for not-so-cheap $85, it is reasonably priced within the context of its pedigree and competitors, and a good examples of a refined and elegant Napa red blend. Tasting note:
The potent nose offers scorched earth and graphite-infused blackberry, black plum, violet, kirsch and dark chocolate ganache. It is full bodied, balancing lush, smooth and broad tannin with juicy acidity. The balance is really on-point. Flavors include blackberry, coconut, (real) maraschino sauce, black pepper, teriyaki sauce and cigar tobacco. It has a strong core of wet earth minerality. This is nice now with an hour decant, but I imagine it’ll start hitting its stride in five years and drink nicely for the following five to ten. 93 points. Value: B.
How to refer to it: white pinot noir, or non-skin contact red wine
This is a contrarian wine, the rare example of a wine made from red grapes that escapes maceration. This is pinot noir that comes out of the bottle looking like a completely white wine. Is your mind not blown? If it’s not, a smell and sip will surely get the job done. But like our macerated Flora Springs, let’s not get carried away with this one’s revelatory power: much of the best Champagne in the world includes or is made entirely from pinot noir and/or pinot meunier, but pours white as well. The absurdity of skin contact being considered something new or different continues to grow.
Maggy Hawk’s winemaker is Tony Rynders, whose distinguished career includes Oregon’s Domaine Serene, a winery that sued him after he left alleging he stole the trade secret of making white pinot noir. See supra regarding Champagne to get a sense of the absurdity of the lawsuit. Tony has consulted for Zena Crown, also in Oregon, which is one of Good Vitis’ favorite Willamette Valley wineries. And, he is the owner and winemaker of Tendril Cellars where he makes a white pinot noir as well. I’ve had what I believe to be all of Tony’s white pinot noirs, and they are my favorite wines he produces.
Perhaps counterintuitively, what makes white pinot noir fun is what can make any skin contact white wine fun: a grape you know presented completely differently from what you know. The 2018 Maggy Hawk does exactly that in a very appealing package. Tasting note:
The nose offers plush fruit-forward aromas of cherry juice, guava, passion fruit, slate, orange zest and white pepper. Full bodied with round, juicy acid that creates significant structure and weight, it offers flavors of cherry, pineapple, mango, sea mist and loads of sweet tangerine juice and donut peach. This unusual and high quality wine is very enjoyable and almost too easy to drink; drink too quickly and you’ll miss some of its depth. 93 points. Value: A.
Peake Ranch. Credit: Santa Barbara Independent/Macduff Everton
A few days before speaking to Peake Ranch Winery’s owner, John Wagner, I tasted the estate’s 2016 John Sebastiano Vineyard pinot noir. It was my favorite of their pinots that I got to try, and offered a tomato leaf flavor I do not associate with the variety. The most vivid memory I have of tasting tomato leaf in wine is with Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, and especially Emidio Pepe’s bottling of it, which is a very different grape grown in a very different climate. Abruzzo is incredibly hot, whereas Central California, where Peake is located, is cool. It was one of those bizarre moments that makes you question yourself. However, because the wine was so good, I drank through the entire bottle, and from sip one to sip last, that tomato leaf was there. No fluke.
I told John about this tomato leaf note, how it reminded me of Emidio Pepe Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, how that winery has a special place in my heart because my wife and I stayed there during our honeymoon, and how drinking the Peake Ranch took me back there (you can read the Good Vitis coverage of Emidio Pepe here). “It is thrilling to touch people like that,” John responded, “That is exactly why I started a winery. It’s way cooler than rolling into Saint-Tropez on a yacht.”
That last thought requires some explanation. John runs a hedge fund in Los Angeles. I don’t know how many of you know “hedge fund guys,” but I know a few. Hedge fund guys have what some refer to as “stupid money,” meaning so much of it that no hobby is surprising, no display of station too absurd (so long as it’s fun). I should clarify that the hedge fund guys I know, like John, spend a big percentage of their stupid money on good causes and side projects that make the world a better place in one way or another.
I’ve been writing this blog for over three and a half years, and after a while I realized that there are wineries that just have it. They have a long-term vision, the right people and vineyards to realize it, and the will to survive the first ten to twenty years by making decent wine, which is frankly long how winemaking and grape growing takes before someone starts to get the hang of it. Think about it this way: winemakers and vineyard managers do their job but one time per year. Imagine a surgeon that cuts once a year? Would you lay on their operating table? Not that winemaking carries the significance of saving lives, but at that rate, it takes a lot of dog years to become truly good, let alone great. Despite harking from this decade, Peake Ranch is on that path. I knew the wine was good before talking to John, but after talking with him, I understood that the kind of long-term foundation needed to build and sustain an industry standard-setting winery is there with Peake.
John has some stupid money that he’s put into Peake, and had some stupid luck to balance the bad luck as he got it set up and running. However, as is key with any winery project funded by someone capable of losing money on the venture yet still keep it going, he wants to make at least a small amount of money, which is hard to do in the premium wine business. The formula I’ve seen that most closely correlates with a boutique winery that turns a profit combines great people, great vineyards, a drive to push quality even in the best of vintages, a track record of improving techniques and processes in worst of vintages, and not over-making the wine. If a winery does this, and it is far from a simple formula to get right year after year after year, and has some luck along the way, it can grow and strengthen its customer base, and that generates sustained profits, which are reinvested into the winery, and the beautiful cycle continues long enough to master the land and the craft.
Peake’s tasting room
Of all the indicators that Peake is set up to make the formula work, it was John’s staffing decisions that stood out. From the list of people involved, it is clear that John has decided to set his team up for success. Not only does he have the obligatory winemaker, vineyard manager and tasting room manager, but he has as head of marketing and a national sales representative, not to mention some “support” staff with impressive resumes in their own respective rights. For the kind of case production coming out of Peake, the quality and quantity are high.
“Eric [Grant, the head of marketing] is a longtime friend who needed something to do. He used to run some things at Goldman Sachs. We hired him to give me an excuse to talk to him twice a day.” As a wine blogger, I know my share of the industry’s marketing people, and when they are in-house they tend to work for much larger wineries than Peake. John also “had a national sales rep in the back of my mind because I figured to be taken seriously we would have to be distributed nationally, so I hired Rachael Pfaff who had done that for Merry Edwards.” Not many wineries Peake’s size have an in-house national rep.
What about Adam Lee, I asked, referring to our mutual friend who had actually introduced me to Peake Ranch several months back during a meal together and is a consultant to Peake for winery business-related matters. “Knowing Adam helps a lot,” he told me. “You miss a lot of the more obvious pitfalls [with someone like him on board]. So on some levels [getting Peake up and running] hasn’t been horrible.”
Referencing his vineyard manager, John told me that with Mike Anderson, “when I knew I needed a vineyard guy, I knew I wanted him. He has a PhD, 30 years’ experience and a lot of opinions.” Peake’s winemaker, Wynne Solomon, is maybe the most humble winemaker I’ve ever met, and I had that thought before I ever spoke with her: she has to manage John’s ego, Adam’s ego, and this guy Mike’s ego. John is like the other hedge fund guys I know: direct, opinionated, but accepting of and differential to expertise that proves itself. Adam, though he never offends with his opinions, has many of them and the experience and accolades to back them up. I haven’t spoken to Mike Anderson, but if John says he has an ego, he has an ego. It takes a good amount of humility to manage those three guys.
That fact is what gives me the feeling that Peake has it: the incredibly successful trio of John Wagner, Adam Lee and Mike Anderson bring their experience, knowledge, skills and resources to bear in ways that acknowledge their roles and limitations, and they give them to Wynne to empower her. People like that only give what they have to people whom they trust and respect. That’s a level of partnership rarely seen.
Enter here
“I am super excited about what Wynne is doing,” John told me. “So much of making great wine is being meticulous, not making mistakes. Wynne is so detail oriented. If you give her high quality fruit then she is going to make really good wine. Not through blind strokes of genius, but through maniacal attention to detail. I have a huge amount of admiration for people who can do that; it is a special and under-appreciated quality. A lot of great authors don’t create good books because they write great detail, but because they write one really good sentence after another. That’s what Wynne is doing. A great idea that is poorly executed is shit. Good ideas fantastically executed are unreal. Wynne gets to obsess one sentence at a time, and that is what generates the experience you had with the John Sebastiano pinot.”
For his part, Adam called Wynne “young, dedicated to quality and cleanliness, which is so key and rare, and it is just fantastic to see it is big part of her regime and ethos.” John noted that “Wynne has been lovely in dealing with us fat old white guys. I really appreciate that. She works well with the tasting room people. She’s been a huge part of our success and we are really lucky to have her. At least she gets super good fruit.”
Wynne’s first vintage at Peake was 2018. She got her start at Stephen Ross Wine Cellars in San Luis Obispo. “I learned how to make beautiful, clean Burgundian style pinot and chardonnay there. We sourced from the Santa Maria Valley and Santa Lucia Highlands,” both cool climates. She eventually got to Santa Barbara’s Melville, where she started to become acquainted with that region’s fruit. When John was looking for a new winemaker, a friend mentioned Wynne and the rest is history.
Her experience with these cool climates in California’s Central Coast must have been a positive sign for John, not just because of her familiarity with making wine there, but because it also demonstrated a commitment to the region where he focused his intentions of owning a winery. Having grown up in the region, he is fiercely proud of it and wanted to use his entry into the business to show “the rest of the world that it can make wine as good as anywhere in California. I’m a regional supremacist.” He landed on a spot in Santa Rita Hills, figuring “it was a combination of a marketable area – it is beautiful – that can make great wine, and has good vicinity to where I grew up. It already had a good reputation, which was key because I did not want to invent a new wheel. And it turns out that when properly done, the area turns out better wine than I expected.”
Peake Ranch Vineyard, located on the eastern end of the Sta. Rita Hills AVA.
Even with Wynne’s regional experience, the transition from Melville to Peake presented some challenges for her. “The two wineries get their grapes from different areas, different soils, slopes, elevations, etc. I was curious about [Peake’s] section of the AVA, I didn’t know anything about it. The biggest new thing on that front is the great structure of the sandy soil.”
The most challenging difference in the winemaking from Melville to Peake “was remembering what it is to work with new French oak. Everything is aged, fermented in oak. I [hadn’t had] that kind of spice rack [to work with in a while], so I had to dig into notes of prior vintages to recall the differences between coopers, toast levels, which types of barrels pair well with varieties, etc. We don’t use a ton of new oak, but still, it makes a huge difference [in the wine] so you have to get it right.” She works with five cooperages now, and had just completed their 2020 barrel orders before we spoke. “It’s very elaborate,” she explained, “the seasoning lengths, toasts, etc. There is a lot to play with in that sense.”
The facility “is very state of the art,” she told me. “It has a different barrel room for each vintage, which allows me to control temperatures for what each vintage needs based on where it’s at in the process. The winery is also a gravity flow facility. Making wine that way needs to be more intentional and planned out than in a normal set up; you have to really think through the whole life of the wine before you move into even the first step.”
Most importantly, though, Peake’s vision “for the wine starts in the vineyard. Mike has a huge contribution to it. His farming is so precise that it sets the tone for the wine’s entire life.” As if to emphasize a theme, she continued that “he’s keeping [the fruit] meticulously clean and each vine is tended to on its own. It’s my purpose in the winery to continue that. Mike’s contribution is the greatest.” Her focus “is to make the best wine that the property can produce rather than for any particular palate.
One of my favorite elements of Peake’s vision is the tannin profile, which is velvety and gorgeous. “The vineyard plays a huge roll in that,” she explained. “We want to develop tannins that are softer, more elegant, and we do that by not over or under cropping the vines. The right amount of leafing is key to achieve the appropriate balance between airflow and ripeness.” In the winery, “a lot of the tannin is developed and controlled through the pressing and temperatures. We keep ferments a little colder so extraction is lighter. Doing press fractions and treating those separately.”
And then, almost as if an afterthought, she dropped a big piece of knowledge: “longer aging really helps, we leave the wines in barrel for 18 months so they get more of the tannin and body from the oak rather than the oak’s aromatic and flavor expression.” It takes a lot of space, time and money to age your wine in barrel for 18 months. Wineries that do that are few and far between, even at higher price points. It is yet another example of John’s approach with Peake, allowing the right things to be done for the right reasons.
The results are impressive. Peake sent six samples, and the reviews are all below. The 2016 Sierra Madre chardonnay is easily one of the best wines I’ve had in recent memory, and the 2016 John Sebastiano pinot isn’t far behind. It is rare to find wines in which every element is as well-executed as these, especially for the price range.
Peake is following a formula for success. Time will be the true test: can the team continue to make great wine, year after year, and build up the kind of institutional knowledge necessary to hit that elevated state. It is impressive how far they’ve come in less than ten years, but it will be these next ten that determine how few peers they have. With people like John, Wynne, Mike and Adam involved, I’d bet on them leaving most in the dust.
Sierra Madre Vineyard on the western side of the Santa Maria Valley
2016 Peake Ranch Sierra Madre Chardonnay – Decanted in bottle for about an hour, it takes on increasing character and depth with time in the glass. Aromas include sweet honeydew, honeysuckle, orange blossom, mango, pineapple, and Jelly Belly buttered popcorn with an edge of lime zest and slate minerality. Full bodied with round, lush edges of juicy acid and a cream-filled mid-palate that gives way to a textural finish. Flavors include a flavorful variety of mango, pineapple, yellow peach, vanilla bean, strawberry lemonade and strong bites of lime zest and white pepper. A world class wine, this is gorgeous now with a solid five-plus years of positive evolution leading into a further five years of prime drinking. 95 points. Value: A+.
2017 Peake Ranch Sierra Madre Chardonnay – Beautifully sweet aromas of caramel apple, lime sorbet, orange creamsicle, dried pineapple, dried apricot and vanilla curd. Though nearly full bodied, it is decidedly leaner on the palate with a pleasant juxtaposition of precise, linear acid with a mouth-saturating glycerin sensation. The structure is elegant and the mouthfeel indulgent. Flavors hit on Fuji apple, Asian pear, lemon curd, marzipan, vanilla custard, lemon zest and clementine. A really, really good chardonnay with depth and intrigue. 93 points. Value: A-.
2017 Peake Ranch Santa Barbara County Chardonnay – The very prototypical nose features vanilla and lemon curds, lime sorbet and buttered toast. Nearly full-bodied, it offers tactile acid and an angular structure that is sturdily framed. Flavors include slightly unsettled Sprite, toasted oak, zesty lime, vanilla bean, Granny Smith apple and some unidentified bitter herb. Clearly a wine of quality, the slightly twitchy acid adds excitement, but needs a year or two in bottle to balance with the rest of the wine and allow the flavors to find a better harmony. 91 points. Value: B-.
2016 Peake Ranch Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir – The nose features an intriguing juxtaposition of dark fruits and dark earth, wafting cherry, blackberry, plum and cassis with wet forest floor, BBQ burnt ends and saline. It’s barely full bodied with big, round acid and refined finely grained tannin. The structure is spot on, with a plush and buoyant ride that races along a precise acid path. Flavors include raspberry, strawberry, graphite, tar, black pepper, dark currant, cassis and bell pepper. This is a beautiful example of a serious wine that delivers loads of fun. I’d love to have two bottles a year for the next five years to enjoy its evolution. 92 points. Value: B-.
The John Sebastiano Vineyard, located on the eastern edge of the Sta. Rita Hills AVA
2016 Peake Ranch John Sebastiano Pinot Noir – The rich, pure nose offers aromas of saturated cherry, baking spice, red plum, black currant, blood orange and kirsch liquor. Full bodied in weight with plush, wide tannin, the slightly crispy tannin adds levity and cut. The balance is good now with a firmly-framed structure, but another 3-ish years in bottle will really elevate this. The flavor profile has a bit of a Burgundian edge that comes from an abundance of richly-delineated layers that feature black cherry, wet fungal earth, raspberry, red currant and black pepper, finishing with a strong dose of tomato leaf. One of the best pinot noirs I’ve had in a long time, this offers a promising ten-year horizon. 94 points. Value: A.
2017 Peake Ranch Bellis Noir (60% syrah, 40% grenache) – The inky nose offers muddled dark cherry, blackberry, raspberry, lilac, rose petal, iron and tar. The medium weight carries smooth acid and plush, modest tannin that gains grip in the mouth. Flavors include blackberry, strawberry, black plum, lilac, black pepper and sage. This is enjoyable now, but I get the sense it will benefit from short-term aging, maybe 2-4 years, as it seems just a bit tight at the moment. 91 points. Value: B-.
Last year I wrote an in-depth piece about Adam Lee’s then-new project, Clarice Wine Company. It was an exciting piece to research and write because the wines were very good and, more importantly, compelling because they offered a kind of depth and complexity rarely found in today’s wines. I’m lucky to taste a lot of wines each year, and few have been as good as Clarice.
I titled last year’s piece “Clarice Wine Company: The Next Evolution in How We Wine” because Adam had designed a business model that uniquely responds to how customers are increasingly engaging the premium wine industry. While many wineries try to offer various ways for customers to experience their wine, Clarice aims to build community with and, unusually, among its customers. From the original article:
“The winery offers three wines that are only available to its club members, and sold once per year in a single case shipment comprised of four bottles each of the three wines. Despite the wine being very good, being a Clarice customer is about much more than the juice. The membership includes a number of unusual benefits all designed to achieve a goal Adam believes is critical to building a bigger and more profitable wine market in the United States: creating a robust combination of customer education and genuine relationship formation.”
There’s no quick way to summarize the business model, so instead I’ll list the perks:
Regular exclusive written content produced, at Adam’s request, from well-known winemakers and other wine professionals. Example: a post on winery financing written by the Silicon Valley Bank, which finances many wine projects;
An online private Facebook forum;
In-person parties, including a Clarice vintage release party and several others organized at various wineries; and
Discounts at other wineries within Adam’s sizable personal and professional network.
Since Clarice has had a year under its belt, Adam and I figured it was time to talk through how things have gone, as well as taste through and discuss the 2018 vintage, which will be released later this year.
The first reflection he shared was that, at least until the COVID pandemic, the amount of people interested in the Facebook forum were less than expected. Based on feedback he received, it came down to the apprehension of many who did not have Facebook accounts to set them up simply to access the Clarice forum. “A lot of people don’t want to deal with the BS of Facebook feeds, so a smaller fraction [of members] that I expected were participating,” he said, even though those using the forum were building and enjoying their own community of wine, food and travel aficionados.
However, he’s seen a big uptick in activity on the Facebook forum since the COVID crisis began. “The sign up period for the club is happening right in the middle of the pandemic and I’m seeing people signing up because they cannot visit wineries and are taking to the online forum. [In the last month or two] the forum has been more active than ever.” Leave it to Adam to find success in the midst of a global crisis.
He also found that “the people who were interested in the parties were very interested. However, some members who didn’t live near where the parties took place didn’t get the same benefits and a number of these people dropped out [of the club]. I’m making it a point to do some more events outside of California in the future once this COVID stuff dies down.”
New member sign-ups are down about 10% from where they were this time last year, but he hasn’t spent any time or effort pushing the sign up campaign. “I feel people need to adapt to the new normal before I ask them to sign up for a fairly expensive wine that’s a year from being delivered.” He has changed the payment process from six-consecutive monthly payments of $160 to 12 monthly payments of $80. To incentivize people to pay 100% upfront, he is giving those who make the single payment an entry into a drawing to win one of two etched three liter bottles of Clarice. “A fair amount have chosen to take that option,” he noted.
All-in-all, it seems the inaugural year of the Clarice business model faired well, and Adam is making tweaks rather than wholesale changes. It’s interesting to look at how other wineries are adjusting to social distancing. Many are doing online tasting events to keep communication with clientele up in the vein of where Adam was with Clarice over a year before COVID hit. Adam himself has set up a Zoom tasting for his customers, and is partnering with a number of wineries to do joint offers so that customers are able to get a wider variety of wine without paying to ship it independently from each winery.
Having tasted the 2018s for this piece, I can say with total confidence that the trajectory of quality is going in the right direction and it won’t be long before the club is full. The inaugural releases, which I reviewed in the previous article, were excellent and established a high bar for the label. While the those were very, very good – “It’s incredibly difficult to find pinot noir this good” I raved – the 2018s are even better.
“2018 was just a better growing year. 2017 had numerous heat spikes; it would not have been my vintage of choice for any new project based on pinot,” Adam told me. “2018 was a longer, cooler growing season in ways that are pretty much ideal for pinot noir. It wasn’t as cool as the historically cool vintages I’ve done like 1995, 1999 or 2005, but 2018 had no heat spikes or anything that forced us to rush. I would’ve even moved my picks by a few days if my growers had asked.”
The 2018 vintage appears to be a dream vintage for winemakers with patience and experience. “I saw some people struggling,” Adam told me. “They looked at the long, cool season and worried there would too much of this or that, so they got their picks in early. I figured, yeah maybe, but maybe not. At this rate the weather is cool, I can continue the hang time [of the fruit on the vine], so I gave it some time. Nothing bad is happen during slow ripening, just good stuff. It allowed for better ripeness for the stems, which allowed me to up the percentage of whole cluster a good bit and I found that it helped a lot.”
We agreed, ironically, that the 2017s actually tasted more stemy than the 2018s even though, as I learned, they had a lower percentage of whole cluster than the 2018s. Adam explained this was because the stems did not achieve the same ripeness in 2017 as they did in 2018. “I try to build more structure into Clarice than I did at Siduri, and I’m doing that through stem inclusion and tannin development.”
Stem inclusion contributes to tannin development (as well as aromatics and flavors) in good or bad ways depending on how it’s done. In explaining this, Adam said that “stem ripeness has more to do with hang time and less to do with brix than you would think; sometimes it’s antithetical to brix. Stem ripeness is entirely dependent upon hang time. If you have hot years and sugar builds quickly [in the grapes], you don’t have the opportunity for the stems to get ripe [because you’re harvesting on the early side, reducing hang time]. But if you can keep both in line with each other, it can work out incredibly well, and that’s what happened for us in 2018.” Just to be clear, I asked him, was this the most pivotal difference between 2017 and 2018? “Yes, absolutely,” he replied, though upon prodding he explained the few other differences.
First, his barrels were all a year older, which is a good thing for those who like softer, longer tannins and wines that express the grapes and terrior. Even more crucial is the hygienic advantages this gives a young project like Clarice.
Barrels are often used for multiple vintages out of both economic and winemaking considerations. Because they are a great place for bacteria to grow and live, however, they need to be thoroughly cleaned between uses. So when a new winery starts, if they don’t want to produce wine using 100% new oak, likely because they want to produce wines that don’t taste like they come from 100% new oak, they have to find used barrels to purchase, which introduces greater bacteria risk because you never really know how well-maintained and cleaned the barrels were by their previous owner(s).
For his inaugural release, Adam purchased a mix of new and used barrels, the latter from the personal project of Ryan Zepaltas, who has been Copain’s head winemaker since 2018. “The only reason I felt good about buying barrels is because I could get them from Ryan, whose barrels actually came from our days together at Siduri. Ryan is extraordinarily conscientious about keeping things in good, clean condition.” Even still, “any winery would want to generate their own used barrels.” Coming into 2018, Clarice did that for the first time as the barrels Adam bought new for the 2017 vintage now had a full vintage under their belt.
The second difference was that the variations in growing seasons necessitated different vineyard treatment. Adam did not drop fruit in 2017 because it was the first vintage since 2012 to be a non-draught year: “I figured in 2017 the vines would be something akin to myself getting a food drop on a deserted island after having starved for a month – the vines would over-consume and I wanted to make sure the grapes still achieved good concentration.” Doing it this way slowed the growth of the shoots and leaves, giving the grapes priority access to water. Conversely, in 2018 Adam didn’t feel the same approach was necessary because it was a more normal year rainfall-wise.
Finally, Adam did more saignée in 2018, a reference to the method of discarding some of the juice early in the maceration phase in order to concentrate the future wine. “The yields were higher [in 2018 than in 2017] so I didn’t mind,” he explained, adding that “the fruit had hung clean [in the vineyard], there wasn’t a great reason to drop much of it, and so it looked more juicy in the tank than I wanted. I did quite a bit of saignée in the end, about 20%, because I kept going until I got it to a place I liked. It was like mixing instant oatmeal by eye.”
But, don’t get your hopes up for a Clarice rosé (many wineries use their saignée juice to make rosé). “I’ve made four rosés in my life. The first one was at Siduri and it was great and easy, so I figured I would be able to do it well again. The second and third attempts sucked so much that I threw them out. I busted my ass on the fourth attempt to do it right, but it was so expensive and distracted me from my main job that I decided that was the last time.” The saignéed 2018 Clarice juice was given to a friend who made it into rosé in exchange for a few bottles of the finished wine.
The end result in 2018 is a noticeable improvement across the three wines that had already dazzled in 2017. That said, I didn’t like each 2018 better than its 2017 version. Taking them alphabetically, the 2018 Santa Lucia Highlands bottle was stunning and received a point higher than its older sibling:
Aromas of scorched earth, red and black plums, high toned cherry, leather, lilac and strawberry. On the fuller side, this has fine grained tannin that spreads throughout the palate, spreading elegant and smooth acid. The structure is lovely and built for positive mid-term aging. The flavors are soft yet saturated, offering Bing cherry, mountain strawberry, red plum, ground cinnamon, leather and sweet cranberry sauce. This is quite nice now and I see it getting better over the next five years. 95 points.
Next is the Rosella’s Vineyard bottle. I actually liked the 2017 version of this more, awarding it two points higher than the 2018. Both vintages struck me as needing significant time in bottle to unwind, and the most difficult to score because of it. The difference in structural elegance is what gave the 2017 the advantage for me. Nevertheless, the 2018 is a stellar wine:
The nose remains reticent after having been opened 12 hours ago for a bit and then re-screwed closed. Aromas are a bit sappy, dripping crushed strawberry, sweet cherry, spiced plum jam and charcoal. The full body is round and plush with dense, tight tannin and slightly juicy acid. The structure warrants 5+ years of aging to unwind, and will then evolve nicely over another 5-10 years. Red-fruited flavors include strawberry, raspberry, not-so-tart Sweetart, blood orange, black pepper, red plum and wet earth minerality. Give this time in the cellar. 93 points.
Last but not least, we have the Gary’s Vineyard offering, which scored two points better in 2018. Where the Rosella’s 2017 structure beat out the 2018, the Gary’s Vineyard showed improvement in this department from the older vintage to the newer one:
The aromas jump out of the glass, wafting an array of dark scents: crushed blackberry, black plum, black currant, prune, baking spice and reduced strawberry. It’s full bodied with broad, fine grain tannin and precise acid. Tasted on the second night, it offers a substantive structure that suggests a solid decade or more of positive evolution. Flavors revolve around a similarly dark profile of blackberry, plum and currant, though the baking spice is more accentuated on the palate and some graphite/moist earth minerality emerges. This young wine deserves another 3-5 years of aging before it’ll start showing its best, but it’s quite tasty at the moment. 96 points.
Grapes from Clarice’s section of Gary’s Vineyard
We briefly discussed the 2019 vintage, which Adam called “something of a hypothetical cross of 2017 and 2018.” While 2018 had no days over 100 degrees in the vineyards, 2017 had at least six of them. 2019 had a week of hot weather followed by 10 weeks of cooler weather, then another hot week and then another long stretch cool, then a hot week… “2019 is going to be fascinating, Adam said, “and it’s going to be a great vintage to round out Clarice’s first three-year vertical.”
I’ve been drinking a ton of pinot noir in 2020, and had a lot during the 2019 holiday season as well. Most of it has come from California, and nearly all of it has been current release samples. I wouldn’t call where I’m at pinot palate fatigue (yet), but it’s becoming harder for pinots to stand out from each other these days. That said, Clarice has been the clear standout of excellence, depth, quality and personality.
If you’re willing to spend $960 on case of wine (as well as the additional perks), the only potential downside to Clarice that I see may be that you don’t want to buy a full case of it. It is tough to commit to four bottles each of three wines, even though they are as different from each other as they are compelling. To be frank, this is the dilemma I face.
That said, I may be just a year or two away from membership myself because, as silly as this sounds, I’m not sure I can be indefinitely happy with a set of samples. Two years in a row now I feel like I’m getting teased because what I’d really love is have multiple bottles to age and enjoy over many years. I love variety in my wine life, but there are rare occasions like Clarice where I want more of the same.
I know it’s hard to take someone’s word when making a $960 bet, but I’m as confident recommending Clarice as I am any wine I’ve tasted for Good Vitis. These aren’t the best of economic times to drop that kind of money on luxury goods, so at least put Clarice in the back of your mind and on your wine to-do list for the future.
