I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format.
They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read them), and are presented links to help you find them, so that you can try them out for yourself. Cheers!
- 2016 Quady North Grenache Blanc (Applegate Valley): Flowers, honey, and liveliness… this is basically like an amazing Spring day in a bottle. $23 B+
- 2017 Quady North Rose (Rogue Valley): Wait, you’re not from Provence? Damn, could have fooled me! $18 B+
- 2012 Schmidt Family Vineyards Pinot Noir (Applegate Valley): Leather, pith, and grit; AV is bringing the thunder in this earthy, plummy case. $40 A-
- 2016 Misty Oaks Vineyard Friendswood Gewürztraminer (Umpqua Valley): Textbook levels of roses, stone fruits, lychee, and grip; ok, maybe even more than textbook levels. $14 B+
- 2014 Rex Hill Pinot Noir (Willamette Valley): If you like ’em with tea-like spices and biting structure, you’ll feel like you’re in spitting distance of heaven. $31 A-
- 2017 Wrath EX Unoaked Chardonnay (Monterrey): A delightful, positive example of wine’s core objective – to bring pleasure. $19 B+
- 2014 Eponymous Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): What’s in a name? Apparently a penchant for blackcurrant and a desire to give chocolate-flavored cigars to everyone. $60 A-
- 2015 Mt. Brave Merlot (Mount Veeder): This is soooo f*cking young. And soooo f*cking good. $80 A
- 2014 Chateau Trillol Cucugnan Corbieres Grenache – Syrah- Carignan (Languedoc-Roussillon): Rustic, for sure, in all the good ways, like a gorgeous, distressed piece of antique furniture. $16 B
- 2015 Eva Fricke Kiedrich Riesling Trocken (Rheingau): Toasty and stoney, and rocking its seriousness in very effective ways. $29 B+
Merlot: “Stop picking on me, beeeeaaaatches!”
It’s been nearly fifteen years since a flippant diatribe that disparagingly mentions Merlot came from the mouth of Miles, the main protagonist in the film Sideways (based on the book of the same title by Rex Pickett).
That off-hand and NSFW comment had the unfortunate – and lasting – side-effect of sending U.S. Merlot sales into the toilet; so much so that I had been told over the years by many PR, marketing, and winemaking professionals that they either stopped putting the word Merlot on their labels (or at least considered it).
But a funny thing happened roughly ten years after Sideways was released in theaters: consumers seemed to stop caring, and instead started to enjoy the fact that Merlot represented one of the best red wine bargains available. Of course, that didn’t stop the media at large from being late to the reporting party when it came to the “Sideways effect.” But whatever.
I mention this brief Merlot sales history lesson because for the past few years October has been declared the #MerlotMe month, in an attempt to bring renewed interest in the much maligned Merlot, and my friend Michael Cervin has quoted me in an article he recently penned for IntoWine.com that takes a closer look as all of the above, and whether or not f–king Merlot even needs its own f–king month. In that article, I basically state that “The Sideways effect has never been as outdated as it is at this moment.”
Look, here’s the scenario with Merlot, people: You can find better (i.e., cleaner, fault-free, varietally-correct, tasty) Merlot at every price point now, and in some cases (particularly in South America) at prices that have better quality-to-price ratios than ever before. While you have to pay larger bucks for the transcendent stuff (Michael rightly suggests La Jota Vineyard Co.’s Merlot as an example), you can still find excellent incarnations in the $30-ish range (another of Michael’s picks, L’Ecole No. 41 Estate Merlot, fits that bill, and makes a good argument for considering Merlot as Washington state’s second best red fine wine grape after Syrah). Even the last five years have seen better Merlot samples cross my critic-lips than ever before.
In other words, despite the temporary corrections afforded by the Sideways effect, Merlot is now exactly like every other f–king fine wine grape in the world.
Merlot is no longer an exception, and it’s high time we stopped acting like it is.
Cheers!
I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format.
They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read them), and are presented links to help you find them, so that you can try them out for yourself. Cheers!
- 2015 Scheid Vineyards Hames Valley Vineyard Petite Sirah (Monterey): Burly and beautiful, spicy and seductive; sorry Haters, but you totally lose this round. $38 A-
- 2016 Scheid Vineyards Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir (Santa Lucia Highlands): A spirited composition, ending on a minor key that won’t fully resolve for several more years. $75 A
- 2016 Scheid Vineyards Escolle Road Vineyard Chardonnay (Santa Lucia Highlands): Tropical, tasty, and un-apologetically bold about it at nearly every step. $45 A-
- 2016 Dutton Estate Winery Karmen Isabella – Dutton Ranch Pinot Noir (Russian River Valley): its richness will be divisive, but sometimes a good argument is well worth having. $46 A-
- 2016 Edna Valley Vineyard Winemaker Series Sauvignon Blanc (Edna Valley): Some decidedly, deliciously fanceé stuff is being strutted here. $30 B+
- 2013 RdV Vineyards Rendezvous (Virginia): A lot closer to Bordeaux than the map’s nearly 4000 miles would otherwise insinuate. $80 A-
- 2015 Reva Barbera d’Alba Superiore (Piedmont): Barbera brought to you by the letter ‘B’ – Big, Bold, and Bombastic, in this case. $NA B+
- 2015 Senda Verde Mencia (Bierzo): Rustic, peppery, and vivacious; the latter sometimes getting it in a little bit of trouble for the occasional acerbic outburst. $12 B-
- 2017 Dr. H. Thanisch Bernkasteller Badstube Riesling Kabinett (Mosel): Lemon-dropping the mic with its sick-tight citric tastiness. $25 B+
- 2015 Villa Maria Single Vineyard Taylors Pass Pinot Noir (Marlborough): The spices and red berries are great company; the wood might be overstaying its welcome a little bit. $45 B+
You know that your brand is in trouble when, instead of talking about your forty-plus-year history in a nascent wine region, or your long hours of sun, 1300-foot vineyard elevation, diurnal temperature shifts of over fifty degrees Fahrenheit, or any of the other factors that make your terroir an ideal place for ripening interesting grape varieties, all anyone can mention is how your family business heir apparent allegedly got blowies during a commercial airplane flight.
That Troon Vineyards is now, only five years removed from that controversy, viewed as an Applegate Valley pioneer and a purveyor of some of Southern Oregon’s most promising and interesting wines is a minor PR miracle, made possible through the yeoman’s work provided by a combination of team players: new owners Bryan and Denise White (a Texas couple who started with the acquisition of nearby O’Neill Vineyard, then purchasing Troon in 2017), pedigreed winemaker Steve Hall, and impossibly indefatigable general manager Craig Camp.
Take heed!
When Napa-area veteran Camp came on board at Troon to help get the entity into more attractive sale shape, he told me that he was immediately impressed with the potential, given how good the wines already were. He focused first on ensuring that the operational and marketing basics were on solid footing – “block and tackle, man, block and tackle.” The additions of foot-treading and Biodynamics to the mix helped to put the finishing touches on the approach, and Troon was, in a very real sense, thus reborn as a brand.
What hasn’t changed is that Troon’s small vineyard location is capable of some excellent winegrowing magic when the right varieties are planted. Troon is more or less surrounded by the Siskiyou Mountains, near a wider section of the Applegate River, with river bench soils that consist of pieces of ancient seabed, granite, and sediment. “We have a mostly Northern California climate here,” Craig noted, “with a shorter growing season. So we can produce wines with European ‘weights.'”
Put another way, as winemaker Steve Hall noted when summarizing Troon’s current approach, “you do what can to make something… beautiful…”
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