“Colorado lacked good sparkling wine, that’s why we built this place,” Sauvage Spectrum Wines winemaker and partner, Patric Matysiewski, told me from behind the bar at their tasting room and winery in Palisade, Colorado. Having just tasted six sparkling wines, I can confirm the results from this very young effort are highly encouraging and we should all be excited for Colorado sparkling wine.
With Patric on the winemaking side, his partner Kaibab Sauvage handles the grape growing. Kaibab has been growing grapes in and around Palisade for over two decades, which means he knows how to keep up his end of the effort to produce the vision they share. Kaibab’s extensive experience really stacks the deck in Sauvage’s favor.
Patric helped me understand that “the latest Colorado wine iteration [which Sauvage is attempting to evolve] was led by people from the oil and gas world, and they wanted to push the varieties and style they were used to drinking,” namely Bordeaux varieties they were used to from the California wines they wanted to emulate in Colorado.
Rather than focus on what the generic consumer knows best because they know it the most, “[Sauvage] grow[s] 27 or 28 varieties on 70 acres of estate vineyards,” a mixture of vitis vinifera and hybrid varieties that is helping Patric and Kaibab develop new and terroir-specific knowledge. About 70-80% of the line-up is steadily produced every vintage, with the remainder filled by one-offs and experiments. The result is a wide range of wine types, varieties, and styles, all of quality and promise but to varying extents of refinement.
Sauvage’s particularly smart tasting set-up: cupcake tins
In addition to going outside the mainstream varieties, as previously mentioned Sauvage is doubling down on sparkling wine because to the extent sparkling wine has been produced in Colorado, “they did Méthode Champenois, which means they had to charge $60 for a bottle [and that’s ridiculous for this market].”
Sauvage’s focus is on simpler and less expensive ways to deliver high quality sparklers to the customer. They produce a range of péttilant naturel, or “pet-nat” for short, wines, which are bottled prior to full fermentation and therefore produce natural carbonation while in the bottle. The result is often less, and certainly less defined, carbonation that traditional Champagne or wines made in that method, but because they require significantly less human involvement and wine facilities to produce, they can to be sold at a fraction of the price and do not require the aging that benefits Champagne and Champagne-style wines.
Pet-nats are a fan favorite of the geeky wine world, but are reaching broader audiences as they feature in more local wine stores and on wine lists at prestigious and popular restaurants. My favorite of the lineup at Sauvage was the Pet-Nat White, a blend of 85% albarińo and 15% aromella. A hazy and yeasty unique wine, the nose wafted Meyer lemon, vanilla, honeysuckle, and cantaloupe. It has a mousse that is both thick and light that combines with bright and brisk acidity and a little residual sugar to build a substantive structure. The flavor profile includes sweet butter cream, pineapple, Opal apple, and orange rind. In making this wine, Patric keeps it on the skins for 10 days and actually foot treads the grapes. I gave it 90 points and, at $25, a value rating of A-.
My favorite wine from the lineup was the Sparklet Rose, a wine that Patric admitted he force carbonates. It’s the same theory as the pet-nats: produce a really tasty wine that’s accessible to a lot of people, especially those with discerning palates and an open mind. The nose offers strawberry, lime, nectarine, cherry, and green pepper corns. Medium in weight, the carbonation is robust, mingling with significant acid and modest skin tannin to produce a refreshing structure sure to stand up to summer meals. On the flavor side, it has watermelon, cherry skins, and raspberry. I give this one 91 points with a value rating of A.
My favorite still wine was the 2020 Roussane, which is barrel fermented and aged. The nose features guava, cactus fruit, curd, and apricot. Medium in stature, the acid and oak influence produce a thick and smooth texture with a nice grippy sensation. The lightly buttered flavor profile includes quince, persimmon, guava, and peach cobbler. It deserves (in my estimation) 91 points and an A value rating.
The red wines showed for me the greatest room for improvement. Malbec seems to be the most promising red variety, a notion that Patric confirmed in our post-tasting conversation. Like the rest of the Sauvage line up, I hope to be able to follow them over the coming years.
Despite the growing tally of terrible things happening in the world every day, there’s a lot of good wine being made, perhaps more than at any point in history. This is a thing to celebrate. Wine is not only an expression of what the Earth can do, but what we as humans can do as well, especially when we pay attention to the Earth and work well with others. Wine brings people together, is capable of engendering pure joy, and elevates everything around it, from the food it accompanies to the conversations we have while enjoying it and connections we make when talking with others who love it as we do. Try Colorado sparkling wine, and Sauvage Spectrum in particular, because we could all use another positive surprise in our glass that only good wine from off the beaten path can deliver.
A disappointingly brief afternoon with Kathy Corison in St. Helena
A couple of years ago, a friend of Good Vitis organized a shipment of wines from the St. Helena appellation in Napa Valley that we shared with a few friends. St. Helena is in southern-most tip of what might be considered the upper third of Napa Valley, bordered by Rutherford to the south, Spring Mountain to the west, Diamond Creek and Calistoga to the north, and Howell Mountain to the east. It’s always been my base of operations when I’ve visited Napa, offering proximity to a number of my favorite restaurants in the area and great views no matter which direction one looks. It is where my mind goes when it imagines “Napa.”
I haven’t written about the wines that we tasted, nor posted the tasting notes to Cellartracker, as I never got around to interviews with the various winemakers. However, a subsequent visit to one of the producers and additional samples from them have motivated me to put something together and get it out because the wines and the appellation are more than deserving of it.
Corison’s rosé and gewürztraimer are bottled under the Corazón label
Corison Winery
The entire sample line up included wines of quality, a number of them quite tasty, and one winery in particular of notability: Corison Winery. Founded by Cathy Corison, one of the most widely respected winemakers in America, Corison produced its first vintage in 1987. Corison is among the southern most wineries in St. Helena and uses both estate and non-estate vineyards. The entire Corison line up includes three cabernet sauvignons, a cabernet franc, a rosé of cabernet sauvignon, and a gewürztraminer with grapes sourced from Anderson Valley. There’s not a winemaker in Napa who I’ve spoken to about Cathy and Corison who haven’t had anything but the upmost respect for her and the wines.
On a trip to Napa last year, my wife Kayce and I spent an hour touring and tasting with Cathy. It was an hour masterclass in the complexity that cabernet sauvignon can achieve when grown appropriately and produced by a scion of winemaking. The notes from that experience are unfortunately long gone, but the sense of wonder and respect that both of us experience remain vivid.
Kronos Vineyard cabernet sauvignon
The most ingrained memory of the September visit was the brief walk into the estate Kronos vineyard with Cathy and the size of the clusters hanging from the original 1971 vine plantings that were the size you’d expect to see in early-middle summer. A single bottle of the current Kronos release will set you back around $200, which makes a lot more sense when you hold one of its tiny clusters in your hand and appreciate how a production of 1.25 tones of fruit per acre of vines translates into the bottle. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how big my hand looked while holding a Kronos cabernet cluster.
I also remember us talking about what it was like for Cathy to arrive at Freemark Abbey in 1978 for a harvest internship. She also spent time at Yverdon, Chappellet, and Staglin. Beginning in 1987, she began buying fruit and making her own wine under the Corison label on the side. In 1995 she bought Kronos and in 1999 built an adjacent winery, allowing her to focus for on her own project. Twenty years after the Kronos purchase, she and her long-time partner William Martin bought the esteemed Sunbasket vineyard after purchasing its fruit for the prior two-and-a-half decades. These two vineyards represent the estate portfolio.
Cathy guiding us through the tasting in the crush pad
One item that came through clearly in our conversation about these experiences was just how much of a force she is – a force of winemaking, force of business acumen, and force of creative vision. I understood then, as we tasted a good half dozen of her wines, why everyone who I know that has commented about her or Corison in my presence has professed their utmost respect and admiration.
The wine that stands out most clearly from that tasting is the Helios cabernet franc. While I’m fond of the variety, I’ve never been drawn to it as I’ve yet to find my personal sweet spot between the uber-funky Chinon-style and the so-ripe-it-might-as-well-be-cabernet-sauvignon New World style. The Helios is probably the varietal example I’ve most liked.
As we were leaving, Kayce and I signed up for the wine club and looked over the library wines available, seeing my wife’s birth year on the list. As we were in Napa for her birthday, it was an easy purchase that we drank later that evening. I didn’t want to disrupt from the celebration by taking tasting notes, but I remember it being pure, infinitely layered with complexity, and regal.
Cathy’s Wines
The cabernets are challenging to review when young because they reveal a small fraction of their eventual quality, intrigue, and appeal. To be frank, it seems impossible to me to spend this kind of money on a bottle of Corison if I were to drink it before its tenth birthday because there are less expensive Napa cabs that are more enjoyable in their youth. The experience with a 2006 we tasted with Cathy and the birth year wine, which I would guess was at its best around age twenty, really cemented this sentiment. Please take this into account when digesting the reviews below; the reflect where the wines were when I tasted them as well as some amount of aspirational hope about what they will become when adequately aged.
We’ve since received a few club releases of the Kronos and Napa Valley cabernets, which have stowed in the deepest depths of the cellar where they will remain for at least ten years, as well as the rosé and gewürztraminer that we opted into when signing up after really enjoying both during the tasting. Friends of ours have subsequently visited at our behest and decided to splurge on a few bottles because it was just too damn good to ignore. Try Corison’s wines for their quality, history, reverence, and humility.
2016 Corison Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon – Very purple for a Napa cab, and a wine that takes on weight and depth the longer it is exposed to air. The nose is big and savory with tomato leaf, cigar tobacco, well-seasoned leather, blackberry, stewed blueberry, and plum. Medium plus in body with really sooth and fine tannin. The acid is well-tuned and integrated. Quite dense, but laser focused and silky. Mulled cherry/blackberry pie and a bit savory, it offers mountain strawberry, saline, tomato vine, and dried basil. Super tasty right now, but the layers need time to unravel. Incredibly only 13.1 ABV. I’d sit on this for five to seven years and then drink over the following ten. 94 points. Value: B+.
2018 Corison Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon – Decanted for three hours. The young nose wafts cherry, blackberry, boysenberry, black currant, sweet leather, and black plum. Boarding on full bodied, the black tea tannins are broad and thick while the acid is formidable but integrated. The fruit flavors are dark and have a dehydrated quality to them, while the earthy notes include tobacco, baking spice, and black pepper. The depth is evident in the mouthfeel, suggesting a good five to seven years will usher in some unveiling of complexity. Give it ten to fifteen years to enjoy it at its best. 94 points. Value: B+.
2018 Corison Sunbasket Vineyard – Decanted for about three hours. The elegant nose emits dark cherry compote, black plum, delicate sweet chocolate, violet, rose hip, cassis, and modest sweet and toasty oak. Seemingly medium bodied, it adds weight as it sits in the palate, while the sweet, slightly dense tannins fill out and surround a core of dense and juicy acid. Precious little cabernet from anywhere in the world hits this combination of elegance and depth, especially considering the complimentary lifespan it achieves. The flavor profile includes semi-tart cherry, raspberry, mountain strawberry, cigar tobacco leaf, tanned leather, lavender, graphite, and moist soil. This is an impressive wine right now in its built, but if you can sit on it for at least a decade there likely won’t be anything about it that won’t blow you away. 96 points. Value: B+.
2019 Corison Corazón Gewürztraimer – The boisterous nose wafts guava, banana peel, orange blossom, daisy, and white pepper. Medium bodied with bright, tincil acid that keeps the structure sharp. The flavor profile includes guava, Opal apples, starfruit, slate minerality, and lychee. This is a technically sharp, vibrant wine with great depth and shine that I’d be happy to drink several times a week. 93 points. Value: A-.
More from St. Helena
The other samples that we tasted from the St. Helena sample shipment are listed below. The stylistic range is impressive. One on end, the Calafia is a big wine that is tasting well from sip one and probably won’t improve much with time (but will certainly evolve a bit). On the other end is Corison. The range shows what this tiny area is capable of producing, and signals that there’s something for all but the snobby Bordeaux-only cab lover in the appellation. Writing this up and revisiting these tasting notes makes me want to hop a plan there tomorrow.
2016 Calafia La Reina red wine (70% cabernet sauvignon, 20% malbec, 10% petit verdot) – The slightly salty nose reveals stewed blackberry, savory-smoke, and loads of plum. Full bodied, big, dense, sweet, and very ripe. The acid is barely enough to balance the size, but it gets the job done. The chewy mouthfeel and flavor profile demonstrates the significant oak that’s put on this: coconut, condensed milk, cherry and blueberry pies, and toasted oak. Finishes with big pepper, menthol and alcohol. A Hedonistic wine, I’d drink over the next 5-7 years. 91 points. Value: C-.
2018 Ehlers Estate sauvignon blanc – Aromatically true to type: lime zest, slate, flint, banana peel, juniper, and tangerine waft from the glass. Medium plus in body with integrated and smooth acid. Nice smooth profile and structure. There’s a driving saline note that delivers seaweed, Meyer lemon, clementine, white pepper, slate minerality, under ripe banana peel, and bitter greens. 90 points. Value: B-.
2016 MC4 Martin and Croshaw Vineyard cabernet sauvignon. The nose offers dark cherry, strawberry, dark plum, and cassis. Full-ish body, the substantial tannins are elegant. It is very round and smooth with a pleasing structure. The fruit is saturated and semi-sweet, very professionally done: cherry, blackberry, strawberry, clove. Pure and clean, this is very tasty. I would love this in a decade. 93 points. Value: B+.
2017 Pellet Estate Henry’s Reserve Pellet Vineyard Napa Valley – The nose is monolithically cherry-forward with big plum and mocha. This seems to need time. Big bodied, but bright with juicy acid and refined, fine-grained and dense tannin. Beautiful structure, but very oaky. Very purple in flavor profile: blueberry, plum, violet to go with coconut and vanilla pudding. Give this at least five years. 91 points. Value: C-.
2014 Pellet Estate Napa Pellet Vineyard Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon – The nose balances fruit and savory aromas, offering blackberry, cherry juice, dark roast coffee, blood orange, and scorched earth. Full bodied, it is ripe with small-grained grippy tannin, mid-line acid and sharp, but integrated alcohol. Very elegant profile with a structure built for 10+ years. Flavors include plum, blackberry, cassis, blueberry, Chinese 5 spice, mocha, violet with a dried seaweed and Thai basil finish. Keep this ten years and then drink over the following ten years. 93 points. Value: B+.
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+.
Me, with my COVID non-hair cut, and Marti on the roof
My wife and I recently moved to Chicago from Washington, DC, trading our District backyard for a Chi Town rooftop. Both have their pros and cons, and I’m not sure which I prefer. The dogs, I’m guessing, prefer the backyard because it allowed them to run outdoors untethered by leashes, though it’s close because they love the more complex aromas of the city that ride the breeze above backyard fences, as well as the city sounds here that were absent in our quieter DC neighborhood. Two clear rooftop upsides for me, though, are that it offers better vantage points and more contemplation-inducing scenery for outdoor wine sipping.
One of the beautiful things about wine is that the seemingly endless options mean there’s a an appropriate, and even sometimes perfect, wine for every occasion. As a wine drinking season, summer means white and rosé wine for many people. Were it not for the on-going health pandemic, many of us would be spending weekday evenings at patio happy hours with co-workers and weekend afternoons grilling with friends and family. Needless to say, during COVID my wife and I are especially thankful to have a private outdoor space. Regardless of your situation, though, if you’re a wine lover you’re probably constantly looking for summer sippers to add to your hot weather rotation. Good Vitis is here to help.
We’ve been enjoying our early and midsummer as best we can, especially on the wine front. I want to share some of the better wines we’ve had over the last few months, some of which are samples and others we’ve purchased ourselves. All of them have one compelling reason or another for why they’re worth trying. I’m even throwing in two ciders, plus one red that drinks well with a slight chill and will pair well with things like fried fish sandwiches and grilled meats and vegetables. Click on each wine’s hyperlink to find out where to purchase them (from the “all states” dropdown menu, select zip code and then enter your zip code and radius).
Whites
NV Pasqua Romeo & Juliet Prosecco di Treviso Prosecco DOC (sample). I’m slowly coming around to Prosecco, and this bottle gave me a not so gentle nudge in the right direction. It’s both fun and somewhat complex, and for the price is an incredible value that inaccurately suggests mimosa mixer. Drink this without juice, fruit, ice or anything else thrown in, and don’t be scared to have it with food. It’s structure and complexity will stand up to it. Tasting note:
Small, not quite fine mousse, wafting aromas of lime zest, slate, peach and pear. Medium body with round, fleshy acid and a flavor line up of white peach, strawberry, lime zest and spicy minerality. Very enjoyable, easy drinking and decently complex. 90 points. Value: A+
2019 Flora Springs Soliloquy sauvignon blanc (sample). The hyperlink offers results for multiple vintages, and though I can’t vouch for previous vintages, I suggest trying an earlier one as the 2019, while very good now, needs a few years of aging to really come into its own. The complexity is there, but right now it’s wound up tight within a robust and elegant structure. This is a serious sauvignon blanc. Tasting note:
A surprisingly full nose offers pretty aromas of lemon curd, white peach, tangerine peel and apricot. Full bodied with bright, round acid and a creamy mouthfeel, the structure is solid and mouth filling. The flavor profile includes lemon-lime citrus, white peach, tangerine, spicy stone minerality and white pepper. Although it’s good now, I’d love to see this again in five years as the flavors feel a bit tightly packed at the moment. 92 points. Value: C+.
2015 F.X. Pichler Loibner Loibenberg Smaragd Riesling. Pichler is a top-10 winery for me, though I’ve had far more of its grüner veltliner than rieslings and I prefer to age most of their vintages longer than five years. Nevertheless, this bottle was more than good enough it is youth to suggest drinking it now. Very few riesling producers know how to produce the grape with this level of depth, concentration and seriousness like Pichler does. It will only get better with time, but it’s damn good now and perfect when your summer sipping occasions a more serious wine. Tasting note:
Young, but surprisingly accessible. Aromas of white peach, tangerine, nectarine, slate and white tea leaf. Full bodied with round, thick and juicy acid that leaves a small tingling sensation. Seems to be a touch of residual sugar adding weight to the body as well. The structure is substantial, a just a bit weighty, suggesting a long life ahead. Flavors include yellow peach, nectarine, red plum, lime zest, orchid and lemon pith. This has a minerality deficit at the moment, though I imagine another five to ten years of aging will address this. Good now, good upside. 92 points. Value: B.
Rosés
NV Vermillion Valley En Plein Air méthode ancestrale (sample). I need to do a profile of Ohio’s Vermillion Valley Winery, it’s only a matter of time. They sent me half a case of samples, which I’m still working through, but this one bottle is enough motivation to state the need for a write up. I can’t say much about the winery or this wine, though I know it is a blend of pinot noir, mustcat ottonell, lemberger and müller thurgau, and made in the méthode ancestrale, one of the oldest methods for producing sparkling wine in which the wine is bottled after primary fermentation with some residual sugar, providing the fuel for secondary fermentation and its by-product, carbon dioxide (the bubbles). I think this one is best consumed without food, but I can see it working well with cured meats. Tasting note:
A cider-like nose of baked apple, baking spice, lime zest and neutral oak barrel. Medium bodied with a fizzy edge, the acid is on the milder side, which works in this case. Flavors hit on Gala apple, cherry juice and spiced plum with a lime finish. Really enjoyable, fun wine. 91 points. Value: N/A.
Enjoyed this on one of our extremely rare public outings this summer: 90 Miles Cuban Cafe
2019 CVNE (Cune) Rioja Rosado (sample). I’ve never had a disappointing wine from CVNE, one of Rioja’s legendary producers, and this one continues the streak. I’ve written about the winery previously, so if you’re curious to know more click here. At roughly $10, this has got to be the best rosé values I’ve come across. It’s a very substantive wine, which is made apparent in the wine’s dark complexion. If you prefer the weightlessness of a non-Bandol Provençal rosé, this may not be for you. But, if you love the weightier pales, go get you some. Tasting note:
Beautiful ruby red tone, with aromas of rose petal, muddled mountain strawberry, blood orange and black plum. Full-ish body with bright, juicy acid and fleshy light tannin, it has a great mouthfeel with a decent amount of substance. Flavors include strawberry, rose water, orange zest and loads of red plum. Super tasty and very food versatile. 91 points. Value: A+.
2019 Pasqua 11 Minutes Rosé (sample). Another killer wine and killer value from Pasqua. A bit lighter than the CVNE, it doesn’t sacrifice weight for flavor. Two pieces of advice on this one. First, my experience was that it needed 20+ minutes to come into its own, so give it some time with the cork popped before consuming. Second, if you’re like us and keep your wine in an ice bucket while outside, the shape of the bottle means it takes longer for this wine to chill, so factor that into your plans. Tasting note:
Pale red in the glass, it wafts aromas of sugar dusted strawberry, red currant, red plum, rose water and kiwi. Medium bodied with zippy acid that delivers tart strawberry, raspberry, cranberry, red plum and lime zest. Nicely balanced, it finishes on a surprisingly fungal note. 91 points. Value: A+.
Reds
2017 Martin Woods Gamay Noir. I’m partial to Martin Woods, a (very) small winery in Oregon that I visited and subsequently praised. It’s the work of Evan Martin, who among other things is making his own barrels from trees on his property in order to make fully Oregon terrior wines. Among the many great wines he produces, he has developed a real talent for gamay, a grape dominated in the market by France’s Beaujolais region. This one is all Oregon, though, and I’m thankful for that because it works. Similar to the Soliloquy, if you want to drink it now, get an earlier vintage if you can. If you’re unable to get an older vintage, pop the cork the night before you plan to drink it, give it an hour or two of air, and then re-cork it overnight. While very tasty now, it will be exceptional in a few years. Tasting note:
This was good the first night, but came together unbelievably well on the second night. I’d suggest aging these for 2-3 years before thinking about opening. The nose offers beautiful aromas of bruises cherry, raspberry, fungal underbrush and nutmeg. Full bodied but ethereal in feel, the tannins are silky and long, seamlessly coating the mouth. The acid is perfectly balanced. Flavors are driven by raspberry, red cherry and red plum, followed by tomato leaf and blood orange. A delicate, pretty wine with short term aging upside. 92 points. Value: A-.
Cider
NV Domaine Christian Drouin Poiré. I’m developing a growing love for cider, especially those from the Normandy region in France where apples and pears reign supreme. Between the distilled Calvados and the ciders, it’s become a top beverage destination for me. I’ve had fun grabbing nearly every Normandy cider I can find, and so far, this is the best I’ve had. I’m no cider expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s good. Tasting note:
Aromas of yeasty cellar floor, white wine poached pear, spiced apple tea, lemon curd and green apple. Medium bodied with big, dense mousse and good acid balanced nicely with sweet tannin. A kiss of sugar sets off cinnamon dusted Granny Smith apple dipped in honey, pear tartness, mandarin orange zest, slate minerality and white pepper. Very tasty, great paired with salmon and Niçoise salad. 93 points. Value: A+.
NV Mesh & Bone Cidre Pomme & Poire. Another from Normandy, this one blends apples and pears. What I’m really appreciating about cider is that it is a great alternative to wine: they can be significantly lower in alcohol (both listed here are under 7%) and significantly less expensive (both listed here are under $20). Further, they offer similar appeal as wine: terrior is real, fruit selection matters (not all apples and pears are equal, and blending works) and they have aromatic and tasting notes to dig into. As an example:
A lifted nose wafts fresh crushed red apple, juicy pear and cinnamon. It’s full bodied with a decent amount of residual sugar and bright, mouth filling acid that adds nice minerality and a little spice. The mouse is denser on the mouth than it appears in the glass, giving the cider a substantive feel. Flavors include red apple, pear tartness, blood orange and apple pie spice. A straightforward cider that delivers some really nice flavors. 91 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.
It took real persistence to get this piece written. Not by me, but by Jesse Inman, who is one half of the sibling pair behind Lucky Rock Wine Company. First, he sent me their sauvignon blanc in July 2019, then their pinot noir a few months later. Except, it didn’t arrive, so he had to send another bottle. Then he had to pester me for, like, three months to get the interview scheduled. Finally, nine months after making first contact, we spoke. And the thing is, it’s not like the wine sucked and I didn’t know how to say “no.” I wrote this because, as the title of the post suggests, I want people to try this wine. It’s really good.
I’m neither a true snob nor judgment-free when it comes to wine, but somewhere between depending on the day. I’ll admit to huffing and puffing every time I see someone on Bachelor hold their wine glass by the bulb, yelling “BY THE STEM” at the television while my wife, who for the record agrees, rolls her eyes. And I’m often guilty of talking more about a wine that we’re sharing with friends that they care to hear, sometimes going on diatribes laced with nitpicks of the obviously wrong decision to do malo or the overly-judicious use of new oak on such a delicate grape.
That said, I also get great joy out of making the case against top of the line Bordeaux because the value proposition is garbage. And for the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around the people who rave about some of the most lofted California cult wines, which from my experience offer underwhelming sophistication and are often wildly out of balance (which is okay because they’re built in a way that the balance only gets worse with time).
I’m skipping ahead a bit in the interview with Jesse, but he peppered it with a two lines that explain the above paragraphs:
“Take your ascot off and drink our wine.”
“We’re hoping that [our] quality is good enough that people [who usually pay more] are willing to drink down to it price-wise, but also [people who don’t normally pay our price] drink up to it because it’s so good that it justifies them spending a bit more than usual.”
If the suspense is killing you, here it is: Lucky Rock pinot noir retails for $22, but to my palate it’s better than a lot of $30 and $40 pinots I’ve had. More on the wine later.
Lucky Rock is not trying to be your typical winery. Their Instagram profile describes themselves as “Wine, Tattoo, Food Truck,” and is filled with pictures of tattoos, their pick-axe (say it fast and it sounds like “kick ass”) logo and dudes in beards and trucker hats having fun. One post, featuring a (relatively) close up of the chest of a heavily tattooed woman wearing a Lucky Rock tank top, uses the line “Look! We’re a lifestyle brand that actually knows how to make wine?”
“Our whole model is no pretension and good wine at a good price,” Jesse told me. I’m in the middle of a book on the history of Ralph Lauren, the man and the company. Lauren has been very clear that he is not a fashion designer nor is he selling fashion. Rather, he explains, his clothes are about style within the context of a lifestyle that he wants the people who wear his clothes to experience. I had asked Jesse about their lifestyle approach because in the same way that Ralph Lauren ads are as much about the non-clothing elements of the visuals and language used, Lucky Rock seemed to be about a lifestyle package that includes wine as one of the many elements.
“You can’t just rely on brand [to make it in wine],” Jesse said. “Obviously we make wine, but the tattoo part [of the brand ID] is a parallel for modernizing the wine business. We cuss a lot, we’re covered in tattoos, we joke around, and that’s unusual for quality wine. My brother and I figured that if we’re going to put this amount of effort into it then we have to have fun and be authentic about who we are.”
“The food truck,” he continued, referencing the Instagram profile description, “is that great wine and food go together. But just because you’re eating great food doesn’t mean that you need a white table cloth. [There is a] correlation between food truck and Lucky Rock – French Laundry and Bond are synonymous the same way. We’re not trying to kid ourselves, we’re not Bond, not trying to be that, nor do you want to be. But we know that our wine goes with great food regardless of where the food comes from. There is really fantastic food coming out of trucks, just like we’re trying to make really fantastic wine that comes to you in an unpretentious way.”
I’ll be completely open about my own experience with Lucky Rock. I’d never heard of it until Jesse contacted me, and after looking at the website and Instagram I set myself up for disappointment. The sauvignon blanc was solid, maybe even good, but the pinot noir blew me away. The reality is that Lucky Rock is a legitimate winery that punches above its price point.
They’re able to do that because they take advantage of economies of scale built into their business model. They make a lot of wine for other brands, much of which comes from really good vineyards that are strategically chosen based on their ability to deliver high quality grapes at less than high-end Napa prices. Of the annual haul, a small amount is taken to produce Lucky Rock. By pooling the collective tonnage needs, they’re able to get grapes that a stand-alone winery could not afford to sell at $22 per bottle. Put another way, if they were buying these grapes just for Lucky Rock, the price point would be significantly higher.
Starting from the goal of making a very reasonably priced wine, a few other elements of the business plan are critical to success. They are about 60% wholesale having made the conscious choice to prioritize that over being direct-to-consumer, which lowers overhead. They have to be high volume, as well, because they are low margin. “We want to be different,” Jesse explained, “if we ever opened a traditional tasting room we’d be letting ourselves down. If anything, we might open a tap room featuring different wines and beers to pour alongside our stuff.”
It is also critical to making a high quality $22 pinot that they actually know what they’re doing. Jesse cut his teeth making high quality, more expensive wine at August Briggs Winery, where he got his start thanks to a close family connection and where he continues to make the wine today. While the Lucky Rock lifestyle is more warehouse than Napa Valley, the winemaking is as advanced as those who sell the high society lifestyle. Jesse has been making pinot noir “for my entire winemaking life. We’re taking the high end mentality and finding vineyards where we can apply that approach without going as expensive.”
Jesse and I talked tannins for a solid ten minutes because one of the more impressive aspects of the 2018 pinot was the quality and elegance of the structure. Often times, pinot under $30 falls flat and thin, but not Lucky Rock. He takes tannin structure seriously and has been trying various trade craft over the last several vintages to build a consistent profile. Close relationships with fruit growers, careful use of highly selective tannin additives and lots of experimentation with various barrel cooperages and treatments has led to three consecutive vintages now of positive refinement of the tannin structure. It sounds like he’s getting to a place where achieving consistency will keep the wine at a great place.
Here’s the thing: Lucky Rock’s lifestyle isn’t for everyone, though I do imagine that it is a major factor behind the label’s success thus far. What is for a wider audience, though, is the wine. Lucky Rock’s desire to capture customers based on the quality, whether it’s more or less expensive than you normally pay, delivers in the glass. Even if you aren’t into tattoos, food trucks or trucker hats, even if the label is a bit too aggressive for you, you need to try the wine because, and I feel confident saying this, you won’t find a better pinot noir for the price. And if you dig their vibe, all the better. Dive right in.
Here’s the tasting note on the 2018, which is currently for sale: The nose-filling aromas are dominated by bright cherry and raspberry, but also include subtle tar, rose petal and baking spice. The body is medium plus in weight with fine grained tannin and modest but well-integrated acid. This could age for another 1-2 years and do nicely, but it’s gulpable at the moment. Cherry and raspberry pop on the palate as well, and are bolstered by blood orange, lilac and something spicy. This punches well above its price point. 92 points. Value: A+.
Where to purchase:
Right now, help the brothers out and order direct. They’re offering a temporary COVID-inspired discount: 15% off 6 bottles with $6 shipping and 20% off 12 bottles with $12 shipping. Discount codes can be found here. They ship to a good chunk of the country.
If you’d rather find it locally, they have a retail finder here.
Welcome to 2020! Our first Try this Wine piece, posted back on July 1, 2018, featured one of our favorite white wines here at Good Vitis, Smith-Madrone’s Napa Valley riesling, which is produced entirely from the winery’s estate vineyards on Spring Mountain. Today, we’re writing about the winery’s 2015 estate cabernet sauvignon. Clearly, we have a bit of a fixation with the winery, and we think it’s for good reason; the wine is excellent and excellently priced.
Stu Smith, one of the three Smith family men working the property and making the wine, has many opinions. One of them is that riesling is a great grape for making wine. Another is that what he and other like-minded producers call “mountain wine” is superior to other wine. By “mountain wine,” Stu means wine made from grapes grown on mountain slopes.
The steeper slopes, elevation and orientation of mountain side vineyards offer particular perks that vineyards planted on flatter ground do not. I’ve written about this before in a piece on merlot. In brief, you get better drainage and more radiant energy than flat land vineyards, which drives flavor concentration and skin development while aiding ripening. While that’s too brief to do the argument justice, it’s not really the point of this post, and, plus, the proof is in the bottle. It’s one reason why you should try this wine; tasting is believing.
Smith-Madrone estate vines and the incredible views of Napa Valley from Spring Mountain
Smith-Madrone cabernet sauvignon is priced around $45-65 depending on where you find it, which means for the quality it’s an absolute steal in the Napa cabernet category. I’ve not had another Napa cabernet as good for less than $75, while many of the $100+ bottles don’t match its complexity or elegance.
I’ve been a fan of the 2014 vintage of the cabernet, which is still available on shelves. I tasted the 2015 for the first time about two weeks ago and was blown away. I reached out to Stu to talk about it briefly, and he described the 2015 as “a clean, pure expression of mountain cabernet.” I found it to be a substantive wine layered with complexity, but far from heavy or thick. The tannins are ever-present but refined and encourage the flavors rather than extinguish them, a productive feature not found in abundance in Napa. It offers immediate appeal with several hours of decanting and is really impressive on the second night.
This experience with the 2015 is a bit different from the 2014, which as Stu wanted to point out highlights the purpose of Smith-Madrone’s approach to making wine. “2014 was a relatively big vintage. 2015 was on the smaller side. Alcohol is on the low end, and it has good acidity and bright cabernet fruit. 2014 is a bit more lush, fuller, richer. They’re two different styles of wine, and in some ways they show together what we’re trying to do, which is to get the vintage into the glass of wine and not pound a round peg into a square hole. The reason we vintage date [our wines] is to celebrate the diversity of the vintage. It’s a real value to the consumer.”
I gave the 2014 vintage 92 points, which ain’t bad. The 2015, though, well:
Decanted this for an hour and as it revealed itself, it became the best vintage of this wine that I’ve had. The nose is a mountain slope of dark sweet cherry and strawberry, wet barky soil, Herbes de Provence, licorice, molasses, black olive and smoke. It is medium plus in weight with elegant and refined tannin and acute acid that combine to form a traditional Old World style structure. The flavors are layered and extended aging will reveal them all. Right now they include salty cherry, strawberry, plum and rhubarb fruit that cohabitate nicely with olive tapenade, black pepper, rose water and graphite. I’d sit on this for at least another five years and then enjoy through 2030. 94 points. Value: A.
This is a wine to try because of the quality, value and intrigue it offers as an elegant, Old World-style wine with a mountain slope twist that drinks well now and will drink well into the future.
Where to purchase:
You can buy direct from Smith-Madrone, where it is being sold for $52, and also from:
Pairing wine and food can be daunting, even for the well-trained. The most famous guidance, to match red wine with meat and white wine with seafood, actually turns out to be relatively true in theory but also misguided in reality. It’s too unscientific to be universal, and misses the critical factor that how something is seasoned and cooked is as, if not more, important than what it is before it’s cooked.
One of my favorite pairings is steak au poivre with a really well-aged dry or semi-dry riesling, which is a perfect example of why that famous guidance is misleading. In general, wine should be more acidic than the food. This is especially true when the food is fatty, like this steak example, because the acid helps our taste buds and digestion process the fat, allowing more flavors to be detectable while making the meal go down a bit easier. Also, white wine tends to provide more contrast to the food, any food, than does red wine, so if you want the wine to stand up to, and stand out from, the heavy steak, a white is better suited to do that.
This last point on contrasting versus complementary wine and food pairings is really the main point of this post. When people think about pairing food and wine, they often default to finding the complementary pairing. Not only is it easier, but it’s more natural – we tend to look for compatibility in nearly every aspect of life – and can be very satisfying if achieved.
However, what I want to suggest in this post is that successful contrasting wine and food pairings can be both more fun and more satisfying. Here is another example: there’s nothing better than a fried fish sandwich with a good bottle of trousseau to wash it down.
Pre-planned pairings aside, sometimes you get lucky and stumble on a good pairing. One of my wife’s favorite games to play is getting through dinner and a glass of wine, and then asking if she can have (insert random snack) with another glass. It can drive me crazy, especially when it’s a special bottle of wine and she asks about a poorly fitting snack.
Earlier this week, I opened a bottle of 2015 Wind Gap Gap’s Crown chardonnay, a nice bottle from a now non-operational winery using grapes from a phenomenal vineyard. I had made a big salad topped with sautéed radishes, roasted acorn squash, tomatoes, apples and shrimp. The wine was a bit too acidic and lean for the salad, so the plan became to enjoy the wine after the meal was over.
When we finished the salad, Kayce began her game. She asked if the wine would go with Goldfish crackers. My instincts kicked in and I nearly defaulted to “no,” but I hesitated as I thought about it. “You know what, that might actually work.” She grabbed the Goldfish, and oh man, it was awesome. We had stumbled on to brilliance.
Let me show you what I mean by comparing the tasting notes of the wine pre and post Goldfish. Here’s a note on the aromas, which don’t change with the food, just to get it out of the way: a high-toned and slightly austere bouquet combining sharp lemon and lime zests, slate and crushed gravel, spring flower petals and honeysuckle.
Pre-Goldfish palate: barely medium-bodied with very crisp, slightly juicy acid that is quite long and precisely linear. Flavors include Meyer lemon, tangerine juice, slate minerality, Kaffir lime leaf and starfruit.
Now, here is the post-Goldfish palate: medium-plus in body with rounder, softer and buoyant acid that cuts through the cheese flavor nicely. The palate broadens, adding just a bit of sweetness and more acidic grip to the texture. It’s a more pleasant version of itself with the Goldfish pairing, and more enjoyable to drink.
I had so much fun with the pairing that I posted the above picture of the bottle with the Goldfish on Instagram and had a back-and-forth with friend and fellow wine blogger Isaac Baker of Terroirist.com. Isaac has done this kind of pairing before, and added that Goldfish go particularly well with Champagne. I’m curious to try that combination, and experiment with other cheesy crackers and bright white wines.
These unexpected wine-food combos that work because they contrast each other, rather than complement each other, are really satisfying because they are surprising and don’t hew to normal comfort zones. Try some contrasting wine-food pairings because no one should live their culinary lives according to what they already know. To provide some motivation, here are a few good places to start:
A sharp chardonnay with a cheesy cracker – look for wines that are lightly oaked or made in stainless or concrete. Quality producers in go-to regions make this easy. You can find these wines really anywhere in the world, but for short cuts check out Chablis, Oregon and the following spots in California: Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Sonoma.
Fried fish sandwich with trousseau – there isn’t a lot of trousseau out there, but from my experience those who make it do it in the traditional fashion (i.e. light to medium bodied with good acid and fine tannin), which is what you want for this. We had a 2017 Arnot-Roberts trousseau from the North Coast of California with our fried fish sandwiches last weekend, and the duo brought the house down with my in-laws. Traditionally most trousseau comes from the Jura region in France, but there are good producers of it elsewhere. For the record, we make our fried fish sandwiches with lightly breaded and pan-fried white fish (catfish, porgy and cod all work well), processed cheese, Portuguese rolls and a sauce made in equal parts of ketchup, whole grain mustard and mayonnaise. Don’t dare use real cheese, I promise you it isn’t nearly as good.
Fried chicken and Champagne (or other acidic sparkling wine) – this is one of those under-the-radar classic food pairings. The acid and bubbles cut through the fattiness and crispiness of the chicken beautifully and can help you put down that last drumstick you wouldn’t otherwise consider a smart move. The beauty of this pairing is you can be flexible with the chicken and the wine. For the chicken, even the KFCs and Bojangles deliver in very real ways. For the wine, you need good acid and bubbles. You can’t go wrong with Champagne, but Cremants from Burgundy, Loire and Jura work beautifully as well, as do some of the better sparkling wines made elsewhere.
Steak au Poivre and an aged dry or semi-dry riesling – this isn’t easy to pull off, but if done right the fattiness and pepper of the steak goes just perfectly with the acid and nuttiness of an aged riesling. For this, quality matters because cheap beef tastes bad and cheap riesling can’t reach the point of maturation needed. The cut of beef matters less than the quality and preparation, but for my money I go with hanger steak. On the wine side, go for trusted producers with at least ten years of age (15 or more is preferable) that have been properly stored the entire time. Don’t go sweeter than German’s Kabinett classification (maximum 188 grams of sugar per liter).
Potato chips and Champagne (optional: and caviar) – late night snack craving meets fine wine meets decadence. In an ideal world, I’d start every dinner party with a plate of potato chips topped with caviar and glasses of Champagne.
Dry sparkling wine with mac and cheese – this works best if the cheese is a soft and creamy variety.
Full bodied chardonnay and bacon – I’ve not tried this yet, but a friend of mine swears by it. I’m told it’s critical that the chardonnay be rich enough to stand up to the saltiness and smokiness of the bacon, which makes good sense. Just make sure not to lose chardonnay’s acid as it is key to handling the bacon’s fat.
Here are two things most people don’t buy: merlot, and rosé that costs $34. I’m going to try to convince you to do both, at the same time, with the 2018 Rosé of Merlot from Napa’s Rutherford Hill. Rutherford is one of the most respected merlot houses in the United States, and they graciously sent me six different merlots for my research on the variety and the upcoming merlot article I’m writing. Tucked among this half case was the rosé, like an oasis amongst the sand. I opened it with some friends and after polishing off the bottle in no time, knew it deserved a stand-alone piece.
Part of the reason I’ve been focused on merlot recently is that the variety has gotten a terribly unfair shake, and though its reputation has improved among aficionados, it hasn’t recovered in the mainstream consciousness despite the ratio of good and bad merlot in the market having flipped, in a positive sense, over the last decade or so. People are missing out on terribly good wine.
The problem, to certain extent, starts with the polarizing reaction to the word “merlot.” This knee jerk reflex often comes from one or both of two factors: what we associate mentally when we hear the word, and what we expect to taste when it is poured for us. If the mental association is off, it’s hard to get the taste right, and so it begins with what we say and think.
Terminology gives us words and creates thoughts, and in the wine business terminology is confusing and complicated, which is unfortunate because it is crucially important to connecting customers with wines that meet their preferences and standards. Americans have never been great about this, a great example being that in America in the early 1900s to even as late as the 1980s, “Chablis” meant white wine and “Burgundy” meant red wine for many people. Though wholly inaccurate and also illegal given the French laws governing the use of those names, it wasn’t baseless in the sense that Chablis, France, produced white wine and Burgundy, France produced red wine.
Though our wine parlance has come a long way since then, becoming substantially more specific and accurate, in the interim period merlot was commonly used as a generic reference to red wine as much as it was intended to refer to the specific variety, leading people to associate merlot with generic red wine. Merlot’s market saturation in the 1980s and 1990s, a conscious industry choice because it was cheap to mass produce, led to copious amounts of generic-tasting red wine made from the grape, which didn’t do many positive things for the variety’s reputation.
Now, though, thankfully and finally, it’s because of high quality, diligent and passionate producers like Rutherford Hill (and Duckhorn, and Mt. Brave, and Leonetti, and others) that merlot has a reputation specific to itself (at least among those paying attention), affording it a greater opportunity to shape what people think about it rather than the other way around.
Rutherford Hill
Merlot not only makes a complete and complex wine on its own, but it fulfills two really critical additional roles: a blending work horse and a savior for many a cabernet sauvignon. Many of the best red wines, whether labeled as a single variety or a blend, significantly and uniquely benefit from merlot’s participation. Even if you don’t buy wines labeled as merlot, you likely get your fair share of it if you’re drinking other reds. Where it doesn’t show up very often, though, is on the label of rosé. And if the 2018 Rosé of Merlot from Rutherford Hill is any indication, that’s a real shame.
In the same way that merlot can be a complete and complex red wine, it can be a complete and complex rosé as well. Rutherford’s winemaker, Marisa Taylor, walked me through the winemaking process, which begins by a goal of making an intentional rosé. It’s unsurprising that the start of any good rosé’s story begins with the winemaker’s intent to make rosé. Many wineries produce their rosé with the leftover wine from their red wine production, which is the first step in making bad rosé. The reason for this comes down to acid and sugar. Red wine is served best by less acid and more sugar in its grapes that rosé, so the point of grape maturation is important for both. Ideally, a rosé comes from grapes harvested earlier than grapes harvested for red wine, when acid is higher and sugar is lower.
Marisa Taylor (second from the left)
Like they do in the rosé mecca of Provence, a region known for pale-colored rosé with bright acid, juicy red fruit flavors and floral aromas, Marisa harvests the grapes for this wine on the early side, at night when the temperature is cool, and puts them straight into the press where they receive a very gentle pressing (on par with Champagne-level pressure) so as not to extract too much color or tannin. This is the ideal genesis story for many who love rosé wine.
The block where the grapes come from was specifically chosen to make a special rosé because of Marisa’s association of drinking rosé by the water while relaxing with family and friends on vacation. She honed in on this specific block because it is boarded on two-and-a-half sides by a pond and blankets a rise in the terrain, a setting that she described as very peaceful. The grapes from it are known to produce wonderful aromatics as well, a key component of a compelling rosé.
The concept and execution pays off. The wine manages to offer both a substantive and complex profile and the refreshing brightness and juiciness of a stellar rosé. This is likely every bit as rewarding and compelling as your favorite $34 white or red wine. Try this wine because substantive rosés are rare in availability and especially good, and because it’s a great way to experience an unfairly stereotyped grape.
Tasting note: This has a wonderful nose that combines the richness of merlot with the spryness of a rosé. Aromas of strawberry, cherry concentrate, candied fennel, sweet vanilla and Sprite lemon-lime. It’s on the fuller side of the rosé spectrum in terms of body, but is balanced brilliantly with bright acid that adds welcomed tension to the mouthfeel. The flavors hit on strawberry nectar, lime mint sorbet, chalk minerality and celery seed, and form a wonderfully layered palate. Among the most complex and complete rosés I’ve had, it’s a stunner equipped to handle a heavy meal if you can wait long enough for the meal to be made. I’d love this with mushroom risotto. 92 points. Value: A.
Where to buy:
Simple: direct from the winery. It’s available in-person and online.
Note: Several of these pictures were lifted straight from Captûre winemaker Sam Teakle’s Instagram, which is a great IG follow.
It happens to the best of us: you think you don’t like X, and then you have an X, and it’s really good, and you kick yourself for being close minded. I didn’t like mushrooms growing up, but something happened in college (not what you’re thinking) and I turned the corner. I’m sure everyone has a story like that. For years, I hated sauvignon blanc unless it was blended with semillon and aged in oak for a bit. Then, in 2017, I got to try Ehlers Estate’s sauvignon blanc from Napa and, poof, epiphany moment. Eat crow, Menenberg.
Since then, I’ve been more open to sauvignon blanc, which is to say, I’ve tried many more, and been disappointed a great many times. I’ve had a few compelling ones from Sancerre, but the next great sauvignon blanc came by way of the New Zealand project Loveblock by Erica and Kim Crawford. This was the sauvignon blanc that captured (no pun intended) me intellectually: it was tremendously interesting and very tasty. It represents a new, exciting and wholly welcomed rendition of New Zealand sauvignon blanc after an overwhelming wave of green and lean stuff from the Kiwis. Eat crow, Menenberg.
A Captûre vineyard
That said, the best sauvignon blanc I’ve had to date is an even more recent revelation to me: the 2017 Captûre Wines Sauvignon Blanc Tradition. Captûre was founded in 2008 in California’s Mayacamus Mountains, and includes some of the most remote and high-elevation vineyards in California. In 2015, Australian Sam Teakle took over winemaking responsibilities. Earlier this year, Kayce and I had the chance to have dinner with Sam and taste his wines along with our friend Ryan O’Hara of The Fermented Fruit.
Sam came in to dinner star struck over a recent chance encounter with the Australian womens hockey team. Though it took a glass or two of wine, and many laughs, to move on from this airport run-in to politics to a good number of other entertaining conversations, we eventually and reluctantly got down to wine business. We talked tannins, Napa viniculture, oak programs and a good number of other items.
We tasted one of his sauvignon blancs, but quickly moved on to the stellar red blends and cabernets, which use fruit from high elevation and often steep vineyards and are made with traditional winemaking methods and a light touch. I found them to be elegant and refined and are wines I’d be happy to have in my cellar for a decade or two. Sam had a good deal to say about them, but when he asked me at the end if I wanted to revisit any of them, I found myself wanting to go back to the sauvignon blanc. Eat crow, Menenberg.
Captûre’s Tradition sauvignon blanc, like the Loveblock I had tasted a few months earlier, offered more substance, weight and depth than I had been accustomed to finding in the variety. I had always thought of sauvignon blanc as a lean, citrusy and acidicly- sharp wine that was simple and even sometimes unpleasantly bitter. The Captûre Tradition proves all this wrong – it proves the haters wrong – at an incredibly reasonable price of $25. It will over-deliver as a pop-and-pour summer white wine, and sufficient seriousness and complexity to be decanted for an hour and enjoyed over the course of an evening. Try this wine for an incredibly refreshing AND substantive white wine.
Tasting note: This has a wonderful, rich nose of pineapple, green apples, flint shavings, green mango and green pepper corns. It’s full bodied for a sauvignon blanc, with precise and slightly gritty acid that plumps up the juiciness of the fruit, which comes by way of apricot, lemon curd, sweet mango and just a slight kick of blood orange. It maintains great salinity to balance the sweet fruit, and finishes with wet slate, marjoram and white pepper. The mouthfeel on this is spectacular, with a round plumpness and lean, slightly twitchy acid finding harmony with each other. A very impressive wine. 94 points. Value: A+.
Where to buy
The most obvious place to get this wine is direct from the winery itself, which ships. The current vintage available on the website is the 2018. The 2017 can still be found at a few places courtesy of wine-searcher.com.
