In the world of winemakers, Heidi Peterson Barrett is a household name, and not just because she shares a last name with her husband, who founded the only winery that can rightfully claim to be a full-fledged movie star.

That Heidi Barrett is a household name, a winemaker’s winemaker, can be attributed to two words: Screaming Eagle – Napa’s Cult Cab among Cult Cabs, manifest in concentrated style, produced in small quantities and regularly fetching over $1000 per bottle.

Those slugging back bottles of SE in the comfort of the temperature-controlled cellars inside their custom yachts probably don’t know that Heidi Barrett landed her first head winemaking job back in 1983, when at the young age of 25 (now that I’m nearly forty, I can call 25-year-olds “young”) she was hired by St Helena’s Buehler Vineyards (for more on Buehler, check out my interview with owner John Buehler’s daughter Helen, who now looks after their Social Media and Sales).

So when I was invited to talk shop over lunch by long-time wine biz veteran (and very nice guy) Bob Trimble, I was intrigued by the selection he picked to help us wash down our meal – Buehler’s Napa Cabernet Sauvignon from 1985 – since it was not only a glimpse into Napa Cab’s past, and into Buehler’s past, but also an opportunity to turn back the clock on Barrett’s (now storied, but then just promising) career…

Given the opportunity to taste that wine (which most of you know by now is not one I’d be likely to turn down), I hope you’ll forgive the hastily-taken and relatively low-res image of the bottle from lunch!

Anyway… what does this bottled blast from a cult winemaker’s past have to tell us?

Quite a bit, actually.

The first thing you should know about this wine is that it was Bretty (by which I mean, it had the funky, Band-Aid whiff characteristic of some Brettanomyces, and while I didn’t send it to the lab for chemical analysis, I’m confident enough in ID-ing that smell to say that if it’s not actually Bretty, I’ll eat my senakers). Which makes it the umpteenth Napa Cab I’ve had from the 80s that was at least a little bit Bretty – enough of a volume that I’m now borderline frightened by Napa Cab bottles vintage-dated from the decade that brought us rolled-up jeans pant legs, the skinny tie, and oddly cubist-style haircuts; because it also brought us the Napa-Brett-that-blooms-late-in-bottle.

The second thing that you should know about this wine – and the most important thing, at that – is that it was a far, far cry from being undrinkable; it possessed an impressive amount of tangy red fruit, and after an hour and half or so opened up with secondary aromas of earth and cloves. It struck me as a wine that, while showing its age in the wrinkles near the corner of its eyes, was still full of vigor and a zest for life – or, more accurately, a zest for food.

At less than 14% alcohol, that tangy fruit stood up to fairly spicy beef chili (try that one with a 15.5% abv fruit bomb…). And that opened bottle of Buehler juice went a few hours worth of laps with food and air at the lunch table, and seemed to hardly break a sweat in the process – as time passed, it got more interesting and compelling, and showed only small touches of oxidation. In other words, it was looking pretty hot for a wine that by most measures would be considered as entering retirement age.

For those keeping score at home, that’s damn-near thirty years on, still fruity, still friendly, now also compelling, and all while probably being handicapped by a bit too much Brett. I’d call that a success story – and a finely crafted one at that. A cult wine it’s not, but after tasting it, the fact that it’s winemaker eventually went on to make coveted cult juice doesn’t seem at all far-fetched.

But then, I suppose that I can’t really tell you that for sure, since I’ve yet to try Screaming Eagle – a fact for which my daughter’s college fund has already thanked me a few times over…

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Blast From A Cult Winemaker’s Past: Buehler Vineyards 1985 Cabernet Sauvignon from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

In the latest installment of 1WD TV, I go backstage in D.C. to talk to rocker Les Claypool about his Claypool Cellars wines, eat the butterscotch cookies in his Green Room, and generally geek out about great Sonoma Pinot Noir.  Les has just kicked off a tour with Primus in support of their new (excellent, dark & funky) album Green Naugahyde, a jaunt that will take them across a wide swath of the U.S., with stops in South America later this year and a stint at London’s famed Royal Albert Hall next April.

This is my second interview with Les (you can check out the first one here), and he’s still clearly very into the CC endeavor, and is quite the CA-boy homer when it comes to Pinot Noir.  Words can not accurately describe the coolness of this interview for me, so just watch the friggin’ video already because it’s Pudding Time, children!!!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Claypool Cellars wine
• Purple Pachyderm Pinot Noir
• Awesome, face-meltingly-good Pinot from the West Sonoma Coast

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at 1WineDude TV Episode 39: Backstage With Rocker Les Claypool Talking Claypool Cellars Wine from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Burt Williams might speak softly and have a relatively unassuming appearance, but when it comes to age-worthy, elegant Pinot Noir he is one hundred percent deadly Jedi Knight.

That much was clear during the recent West Of West festival in Occidental, CA (I attended as a media guest), where Littorai’s Ted Lemon interviewed Williams to kick things off.  It was tough for me to pay attention, because a) there were Sonoma Coast Pinots sitting in front of me ranging from `96 to `01, and I was ready to geek out, and b) I found the entire event confusing, because I’m an anal Right Coast guy who requires exposition and purpose stated clearly up-front, and the WoW Fest proceedings launched without much detail on either.

Fortunately, possessing a formal plan is not a prerequisite for making great wine.  In fact, to hear Williams tell it, very little about Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir was planned in the early days when he first starting making Williams Selyem wine in his ‘spare’ time. “We got a call from an ATFA agent,” he mentioned, “who basically told us that we should get bonded before we got arrested; so, we got bonded.”

Williams also told us that “if the wine is balanced… if you pick the fruit before it’s really ripe… I know Sonoma Coast [Pinot Noir] can age!”  Proof is in the vinous pudding: the 1996 Williams Selyem Riverblock Pinot Noir (about $100 if you can find it, and an ‘A’ rated wine if I’ve ever had one) is delicate, earthy and svelte, with cherries, plums, spices and hints of game meat. The finish could accurately be described as gorgeous; it’s a wine that doesn’t smack you over the head, but seduces you.

And it’s in drinking wines like that 1996 Pinot – wines which seem to be made at a more-than-expected frequency in the West Sonoma Coast area – that you say to yourself (if you’re me, anyway): “F*ck Napa Valley Pinot – this is where it’s AT!”…

The idea of the West Sonoma Coast is a bit of a rebellion against the large, amorphous and probably useless Sonoma Coast AVA, which spans over 500,000 acres and so many micro-climates that any consumer can pretty much treat seeing it on the label as a bit of a crap shoot in terms of what you’re getting when it comes to Pinot Noir (come to think of it, it sounds like Burgundy…) – it includes Dry Creek, Russian River Valley, and Carneros, for example.

The ‘true’ Western part of Sonoma Coast, according to the vintners who took part in WoW Fest, stretches over a much smaller area from the Northern Sonoma AVA and Russian River AVA borders to the Pacific.  Five areas within the Western Sonoma Coast are under study, but only one (Green Valley) is an AVA with one other (Fort Ross-Seaview) being proposed as a future AVA.  Generally, no one at Wow Fest seemed all that interested in seeking a Western Sonoma Coast AVA, though that didn’t keep them from getting into details about the sub-regions under study (from North-West to South-East: Annapolis, Freestone, Occidental, Sebastopol Hills, Fort Ross and Green Valley), waxing about the terroirs of each, and comparing the whole thing to the Cote d’Or in France.

Color me confused on the intent, but not on the result: some stellar wines are being made there by some very, very talented people. As in, tear-inducing, soul-achingly good wines in some cases.

Generally, they’re onto something near the coast when it comes to Pinot Noir, a grape that likes things chilly but not too chilly.  Some parts of WSC are actually cooler (in Degree Days) than Beaune.  “The ocean is our refrigerator,” Andy Peay told us during a run-through of the WSC sub-regions and its wines, “thanks to the wind and Petaluma Gap pulling in the fog and the ocean’s cooling influences.”  There’s quite a bit of soil diversity there as well, thanks mostly to ancient (and probably brutally violent) action by the San Andreas Fault and Sonoma mountain volcanoes.

But I’m not sure I’m bought entirely into the WSC-as-de-facto-spiritual-Pinot-home quite yet – and neither are some of the area’s producers, from what I could discern during Wow Fest.  It’s not that they doubt the potential, it’s just that they see much of that potential as still being untapped.  As Ted Lemon mentioned “we’re still on a learning curve here.”

That sentiment was echoed by Hirsch Vineyards‘s irrepressible David Hirsch when he jokingly admonished SF Chron’s Jon Bonne (who was in attendance, and had recently took a public crack at Russian River Valley Pinot): “I know the media needs stories – sorry Jon! – but we have to be careful about making too many pronouncements.”  Best we give Sonoma Coast more time, I think, to sort out the tastiest wheat from the Pinot chaff.

By the way, Jon – along with Rajat Parr and Ehren Jordan of Failla – led us through a blind tasting exercise with Pinots from RRV, WSC, and Willamette Valley (in OR), of which I got about 1/3 correct, which is a terrible performance (or actually a fantastic one, if you’re looking at it from a batting average standpoint…).

Anyway… WSC producers might actually be at a crossroads of sorts, but many of the wines I tasted show the roads ahead to be fairly smooth. A grand tasting of WSC producers was held after the event, and between that and the seminar tastings (and producer visits I managed to squeeze in afterward) here are the three wines that just about knocked my tube socks off:

2009 Flowers Camp Meeting Ridge Pinot Noir (Sonoma Coast)
Price: $55
Rating: A-

Makes a strong case for a Fort Ross AVA.  Vibrant red berries all over your face, spices, a touch of herbs and all complimented by some earthiness, a little savory quality on the (rather long) finish, and just a hint of leather and smoke. This wine has a ways to go, but the horse has legs (courtesy of all that acidic lift) and isn’t at all horsey, if you get my drift. Just friggin’ awesome.

2010 Littorai Hirsh Vineyard Pinot Noir (Sonoma Coast)
Price: $65
Rating: A-

Tasted from barrel sample at the winery. Littorai might not yet fully understand how good this wine really is.  It won’t need a whole lot more time in barrel to achieve its full fantastic-ness.  The red berries on this wine have a great purity about them, which along with the oak spices balance out the structure which is not insubstantial.  Most impressive for me was in how this wine “presented” itself, as almost fully-formed and totally comfortable in its coolish-climate skin. Gorgeous.

2009 Cobb Joy Road Vineyard Chardonnay (Sonoma Coast)
Price: N/A
Rating: A-

And you thought I’d forgotten all about Sonoma Coast Chardonnay with all that Pinot talk, didn’t you?  Shame on you.  Ross Cobb has worked for just about everybody in WSC, or a least that the way it seems when you talk with him and the vintners and grapegrowers in the area. So it shouldn’t be surprising that his wines have a high degree of Kick-Ass potential, though they are pricey and very difficult to attain.  But… I had to include this, because you should be on the lookout for Cobb wines if they’re not already on your wine geek radar.  Svelte but also built a little fleshy in all the right places, this Chard is a bit of an enigma in all of its contrasts, but that just means that those who like ‘em big and those who like ‘em lean might both find something to love here.  Citric lift and coconut playing nice together? Sign me up.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Best Of The West: Has Pinot Noir Found A New Spiritual Home In West Sonoma Coast? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Imagine a a narrow, unevenly lit, and thoroughly cramped comic book shop near the Delaware / Pennsylvania state borders, inside of which we find a short, lanky kid in a blue-and-white 3/4-sleeve t-shirt fresh from rummaging through the bargain-bin boxes.  He’s holding up two “B-grade” comic books – one in each hand, suspended like some kind of very odd but colorfully shrink-wrapped leaves suspended from opposite branches of a geek tree.

“Excuse me… I have a question… which of these comics will be worth more in a few years?”

The (ok, admittedly bearded, large, and in appearance at least completely-fitting-the-cliché) comic shop owner stops what he’s doing, gives the kid a sideways glance, then slides his chair closer and leans over the shop counter. He looks the kid squarely in the eye in a rather… serious way, and answers him.

“A better question,” he says in a voice filled with much more kindness and understanding than would be belied in his stare, “would be ‘which one of these comics would give me more enjoyment.’”

The name of the comic shop and its owner are lost somewhere in my memory (or more likely were stored in brain cells long-since destroyed by alcohol consumption). The kid, of course, was me – many, many (many) moons ago.  And that comic shop visit was just about the last time I can remember finding myself in the throes of what I like to call “blind collection mode” - a mode of “appreciation” in which far too many wine aficionados would likely find themselves today, if only they’d take the personal blinders off long enough to realize it.

BCM isn’t caused by wine scores, but it is enabled by them. Because once you put a numerical value on a product or experience, you’re inviting a comparison of worth – and people will define the “worth” part in various ways, even to the point of absurdity…

The point here is not to “bash” wine scores themselves (though I don’t personally care for them), but to underscore that BCM-style thinking can easily use scores as a convenient enabler, a crutch.  What you get with BCM run amok is often higher prices for higher-scoring wines and (somewhat ironically) less availability of those wines for the people to whom they might give the most pleasure.

It’s why small-production, high-scoring wines can sell out quickly – many (not all!) of the purchasers are collecting them simply because the wines have high scores and/or might be “worth more” in the future, often with no intention of ever actually opening those wines for themselves.  I see that kind of thinking as (very) odd, because it’s fundamentally disconnected from pleasure (at least, the pleasure that is truly experiencing a wine).  And if anything, wine is meant to give pleasure – at its highest, artistic, levels it’s meant to give aesthetic and mental and emotional pleasure.

All of this was top-of-mind for me because nothing stokes the BCM muscles quite like wines that garner perfect 100 point scores, and I’d recently decided to (finally) go head-to-head with my media samples of Chris Carpenter’s “perfect” wine – the 2006 Cardinale Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

I’ve had varying experiences with his wines in the past, finding some way too Bretty, others stunning, but all of them well-made.  [ Editor's note: WRONG, Jack! See comments for clarification, none of the wines I've sampled made by Chris were Brettty! ]  None of the samples of Chris’ previous wines that I’d ever tasted were given a 100-point score, essentially calling it perfection (at least in terms of Napa Cab winemaking) – which is what my friend Steve Heimoff did last year in Wine Enthusiast.  A lot of potential wine-scoring baggage there, and so I decided to wait out the maelstrom of “100 points!” coverage and taste the wine after it had a bit more time under its developmental belt.

I asked Steve specifically about this rarely-awarded score over a year ago, and his answer was quite matter-of-fact; the Cardinale stood out at a tasting that featured the best-of-the-best of Napa Cabs, so arriving at a perfect score was as much a matter of logical deduction as it was artistic appreciation and assessment:

“The Cardinale [2006] was one of approx. 60 Cabs/Bordeaux blends the Napa Vintners set me up with. I took more than 3 hours to really contemplate this tasting. It was pretty clear from the beginning that the Cardinale was ‘the wine of the flight.’ I went through a series of eliminations. At the end the Cardinale was so superior that it had to merit a perfect score.”

Here’s something to keep in mind when we find ourselves entering BCM mode – if the the guy or gal giving the perfect score review isn’t making too big a deal out of it, then maybe neither should we.

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, because when you get to that level of potential score/rating/whatever, one agonizes over hairs of assessment split so fine that you’d need an electron microscope to log the details.  Did I find the Cardinale to be “perfect.”  No, I didn’t.

Did Steve get it wrong?  No, he didn’t.  To his palate, the wine was perfect.  To mine, which is a different palate, and not nearly as focused on CA wines as his, the Cardinale lacked (by the thinnest of margins, I should add) a certain level of finesse that would have put it over the top for me into “perfection” territory; which is a minor cavil really, because the wine for sure has balance and more finesse than the vast majority of high-end Napa Reds that I’ve sampled.  And we’re talking microns of measurement between “A” or “A+” here. But I did find it “goose-bump-inducing” – it’s a fantastic wine, and one of the few that could, I think, rightly make a claim at being a real artistic expression, a seamless melding of expression of place and deft winemaking talent.

The more important thing, I suppose, is that at over $200, a wine ought to knock your f-cking socks off.  And this one does.  But after is all is done and said, I’d advise “collecting” the 2006 Cardinale Cab only so long as to age it to the point where you can serve it up with a roast.  In other words, don’t “collect” it – enjoy it!

2006 Cardinale Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley)
Price: $215
Rating: A

This is a big, bold, luscious and delicious wine. Despite the size, it’s totally comfortable in its own skin, and it should be – all of the elements are dialed up in fantastic balance: body, vibrancy, fruitiness, spiciness. It’s dark fruits and sweet oak are so silky and approachable now that you might be fooled into thinking that this wine might not age well, but leaving it open in the bottle for a few days reveals additional layers of complexity, particularly a spicy chocolate component that is nothing short of beguiling – all of which bodes well for its future in bottle. All the while, the acidity and tannin structure are there supporting the whole show, and it’s a grand display – the kind of stellar, kick-ass Napa red that gets people hooked on stellar, kick-ass Napa reds.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Joe Vs. The 100-Point Wine (Thoughts On The 2006 Cardinale Cab And The Yoke Of “Blind Collection Mode”) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

While that title of the report doesn’t sound particularly fascinating, the report’s conclusions are – if you’re a wine geek, that is, and if you’re a fan of California fine wine and have ever wondered why alcohol levels seem to be kind of high in the premium vino coming out of that state.  According to the report, it’s not just your imagination – wine grapes in CA have indeed been getting riper over the last twenty years, which translates into higher booze levels, with white grapes bearing the brunt of the increase:

“The data show that the average alcohol percentage increased by 0.30 percent, with a larger increase for white wine (0.38 percent) than for red wine (0.25 percent).  This increase in alcohol percentage is consistent with an increase in the sugar content of the grapes used to make that wine of 0.55 degrees Brix, on average.”

That sugar measurement might look small, but according to the report it’s a “substantial” increase, and it’s that rise in sugar levels that is making CA wines a bit more… busty than they’ve been in the past (I imagine if you were used to drinking CA wine from 20 years ago, drank too much, passed out and pulled a Rip Van Winkle, upon waking up in 2011 you’d be forgiven for thinking that during your extended slumber your fave CA Cab had undergone the vinous equivalent of a boob job).  What this study does that is so fascinating is this: it puts data and critical thinking behind something that many CA wine drinkers may have already suspected… CA fine wines are getting boozier, and it might be the result of the fine wine market…

Now, we’ve all heard of global warming, right (if not, please remove the large boulder from over your head and read the news)?  Well, it must be getting warmer in CA winegrowing regions, raising the sugar in the grapes due to the higher temperatures, and thus increasing the alcohol content in the final wine, right?

Not necessarily.  According to the CWE study, the weather patterns have had a minimal impact on grape sugars during the last twenty years:

“…an increase in heat during the growing season would contribute to an increase in the sugar content of grapes.  However, the heat index did not exhibit any statistically significant growth during the growing season..”

So what is causing the increased sugar = increased booze?  Probably the CA wine biz reaction to consumer demand. According to the study, it seems that premium wine varieties (especially reds) have seen some of the most dramatic sugar level increases – and they propose that this could be due to critics like Robert Parker giving higher scores to riper, more concentrated wines. This in turn causes consumers to demand those wines with higher scores, which causes winemakers to try to get higher scores, which causes grape growers to leave grapes hanging on the vines longer in an attempt to achieve more ripeness (and therefore raising the sugar levels in the grapes). To the study:

“In all of the models… the analysis shows a higher propensity for growth in sugar content for premium varieties, compared with non-premium varieties, even though premium varieties had higher sugar content to begin with.  This feature and the patterns of the level of sugar content among regions and varieties could be consistent with a “Parker effect” where higher sugar content is an unintended consequence of wineries responding to market demand and seeking riper flavoured more intense wines through longer hang times.”

The study doesn’t conclusively prove a link between a “Parker Effect” and rising CA wine booze levels – it merely concludes that is one logical interpretation of their results, since global warming / weather effects alone don’t account for the measured increase in CA grape sugar levels.

Still… it would explain quite a bit, wouldn’t it? And we don’t exactly have data coming out of ears disproving the link, or attributing the sugar/booze increase to something else, now do we?

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Want Some Wine With That Booze? (The “Parker Effect” And Rising CA Wine Alcohol Levels) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!