Winemaking as biography

I'm sitting in the Jet Blue terminal at JFK airport after an excellent first trip to New York City on the wine schlep. Meaning, I have a distributor selling my wine in Manhattan and I enjoyed the opportunity to work the local market for the first time. More on that soon enough.

While I wait, and undoubtedly for the hours of my long flight back to Portland, I'm reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, highly recommended to me by my brother-in-law. So far I've only managed to read the introduction, but I was struck by Isaacson's recounting of how and apparently why Jobs chose him to write the book.

Jobs apparently thought Isaacson was good at getting people to talk, to open up. And despite occasional misgivings, Jobs professed he had nothing to hide. He wasn't always proud of what he'd done but said there weren't any skeletons in the closet. Jobs wanted Isaacson to tell the whole story.

That's what I want to do with grapes. I want to get them to talk, to open up, to listen to them. I want to tell their story, not mine. It's not a new thought for a winemaker to resist making his or her own stamp on thing, and of course any winemaker or biographer still has a fundamental impact on the final product. Our names go on it after all. I've just never thought of winemaking as biography until now. I want to think more about that, but I like it for now.

Time to board. More on the NYC trip in a few installments. Trips to wine shops around town, a pouring at Chambers Street Wines, and the most ridiculous dinner at Picholine last night that I won't soon forget. I love New York.

2010 Vincent wines sold out

I'm happy to say that I've sold out of all four of my 2010 Vincent Wine Company wines. It took more than 12 months to sell 200 cases of the 2009s and only six months to sell all 300 cases of pinot noir from 2010. I'm excited that things seem to be starting pretty well.

As one of my growers suggested magnanimously, I should make more wine, presumably from his grapes. I will this year, with chardonnay coming online and maybe another bump in pinot production. It's not easy. I have a full time job outside of wine, so I think it's smart to grow slowly. Plus, it takes money to grow more quickly.

All of this I say apropos of nothing, only that I've learned it's right to celebrate things like this. And celebrate we will. Then next week it's off to New York to help promote the wine we're selling there. I'm looking forward to that trip. More on all that soon.

Requiem

When people ask what's the oldest wine I have, right now I'd say those nebbioli from  the 1960s that I got from Chambers Street last fall.

The real answer is this single bottle of 1943 Dom Perignon, one of the oldest wines of the most famous labels in the world, a Champagne grown and made in what must have been one of the darkest years of the second world war.

The year 1943 seems like a long time ago, and it is, though you're still in your 60s if that's your birth year. Not young by any means, but not old. Not quite yet.

It's an eternity for Champagne, especially this one.

I don't usually mention the Dom though. It's not wine you can have dinner with anymore. It's gone. The wine that once existed is now a memory, the bottle an urn on the shelf. Something I'll always keep because it makes me smile.

This bottle came with a few others from my great uncle, a gourmand in the old school sense who's long deceased. I house sat once and in the old wine cabinet were some legends, including a few of these. I opened one and it was dead then, maderized, cooked.

The others showed the same signs of seepage, usually from heat expanding the wine, forcing is out around the seal of the cork, ruining the wine. I kept one and have had it ever since, like a pipe from my grandfather, nothing I'll ever use but something from them both, something of them.

It's just not really wine anymore. It's become something different, its life unwound until it's a pile of thread on the table, an unraveled spool, sweeter still because it makes you smile anyway. Even if it can't come for dinner anymore.

2006 Qupe Marsanne

I used to buy Qupe Marsanne every year back in the 1990s. It was among the cheapest wines Qupe produced and I remember liking it a lot. Over time, I've found that some things I liked a lot back then aren't things I still like. Many other things still ring true, and Qupe Marsanne is one of them.

I haven't stayed up with Qupe as a producer. I remember them back in the day as a maker of less intense, more balanced Rhone vareity wines, mostly of the red variety. Their basic Central Coast Syrah was an easy go-to wine at home and out in my San Francisco days. Their other bottlings usually seemed like interesting wines at reasonable prices, even at the high end.

A while back I found some stray bottles of 2006 and 2007 Qupe Marsanne. This wine is known to age well, with five or six years still on the young side. I thought I'd try the 2006 to see if that's still true. Oh my god, if you ever wonder what I like in white wine, here's an example. Stony, with melon and citrus flavors, beeswax to round things out, crisply acidic but so flavory and still thirst slaking. Truly a wine that compels another sip.

So apparently Qupe is still up to good things. This isn't typical, commercially common wine. Yet it is delicious, and honestly makes me want to find Marsanne to play around with. That's the trouble with making wine. You taste another grape and think...hmmm, I want to make some of that. For now, the Qupe will suffice.

Focused

Recently I heard a report that a well known wine writer had tried one of my Pinot Noirs and called it "focused." We'll see if the wine actually gets written about, but no matter. I love that descriptor and understand more than ever how much I look for focus in wines, mine as well as others.

Thinking about focus, I'm reminded of a sort of obscure book that I read a couple years back and recently reread. It's When I Whistle, by one of my favorite authors ever, Shusaku Endo, a Japanese novelist of the mid to late 20th century. I recommend him highly, though you may not find his writing as appealing as I do.

Endo writes simply, with a poetic focus that charms you while slowly revealing the heartbreaking depth of his characters and plot. Even in translation, and surely something is lost from the original Japanese, each word is precise, intentional, mise en place. He writes fiction but everything is non-fiction with Endo. He writes what is real and true.

That's how I want my wine. Focused. Non-fictional. Precise with an ease about it. Specific to a place and time. Enduring, I hope. And perhaps a bit haunting, so you don't forget it very easily. Like Endo.

Vincent wine tasting this Sunday

Elevage readers, please come a tasting of my Vincent Wine Company wines this Sunday in Portland. Our friends and Guild partners Helioterra Wines are leading the event, with some new releases to pour and the launch of the Helioterra Club.

I'll be there pouring my 2010 Pinot Noirs and perhaps a barrel sample of 2011 if people are interested. We'll have wines for sale, including some discounts on my 2010 magnums. I went a little crazy with mags last year after not doing enough the year before, so check that out.

There will be food from Cheese Bar. Best of all, there is no charge. Come taste, nosh, hang out...and if the spirit moves you, buy some wine.

Details:

What: Vincent Wine Company and Helioterra Wines tasting
Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012
Time: 1-5pm
Location: The Slate, a mixed use space at 2001 NW 19th Avenue in Portland, Oregon

Paper chromatography

Even though this year's paper chromatography has an unfortunate streak on it, I still love the pattern. I won't bore you with too much science, but essentially we use the chromatography process to see if there's still malic acid in the new 2011 wines. Malic acid is sharp tasting and in red wines we generally want it all converted to softer lactic acidity through the process of malolactic fermentation.

To test for malic acid, I dab a bit of wine from each barrel of pinot noir at the bottom of the chromatography paper. Using a developing solution, we see yellow marks appear to show the presence of various acids in the wine. On the right, midway up the paper, you can see a dark yellow spot. That's a sample of pure malic acidity, and it shows where malic acid appears on the paper. Moving to the left, you can see how there are no similar yellow spots in the same zone, meaning there's no malic acid in these samples. The exception is near the white streak, a touch of yellow from barrel 9 that presumably has some malic acid left.

I did this test a couple weeks back before a spring break trip, so I expect barrel 9 is done by now. I'll take a sample of that barrel to the lab to see for sure, then add a bit of sulfur to all the barrels and allow them to continue aging before bottling later this year.

I'm excited about how 2011 these wines are developing. They show nice acidic freshness, something I want to see more of in my wines. I'm particularly excited that this year I finally appear to have allowed the malolactic to happen successfully on its own. I've added a bit of malolactic bacteria to my wines in past years, after having a little trouble getting it to happen on its own. For whatever reason - art? perhaps. science? no. luck? definitely - this year it worked. These wines are truly nothing added, nothing taken away, pure. Just how I want them.

Midnight in Paris

So I finally saw Midnight in Paris, after far too much delay. I have a special fondness for Woody Allen movies, as I suppose many people do. My fondness feels different though, special to me anyway.

However, you must know this. If you go to the movies with me, you'll find me momentarily distracted by anything wine-related. So please excuse me if the scene where Owen Wilson and company taste wines overlooking beautiful Paris caught my eye. I believe they were allegedly tasting old things like Haut Brion, obvious for its distinctive bottle shape and iconic label.

But what was this? Rausan-Segla, a second growth from Margaux, on the table with several old legends? Sure, it's an historic property and would fit in the line up, but the label was all wrong. The bottle pictured - assuming I'm correct and I've tried without success to find a photo on the interwebs - showed a contemporary Rausan-Segla label, the exact same as a bottle I have in the cellar, one that already happened to be on the same shelf as many others waiting to be opened. One I've meant to get to for a while.

This bottle is different from the many strays I've collected. I suppose it shows my patience. I bought a pair of the 1994 Rausan-Segla Margaux in the late '90s at the Ashbury Market, the lovely little market across the street from my San Francisco apartment of many years, long known for its excellent wine shop. Last summer on a visit to the old neighborhood, I sadly found the market shuttered. Yet I clearly remember picking out this wine, the Wong family cashier remarking on my bold purchase of two not inexpensive bottles. My rationale at the time? Bordeaux prices were skyrocketing, I'd spent a good deal of time in France in 1994 and had an irrational fondness for the vintage there, and I wanted some wine that I could and should age, patiently, with the hope that some day I'd open them and be rewarded.

I never opened either bottle. They sat for a year or two in the interior closet of the apartment, honeycomb stacked with several other bottles. I packed them up in boxes and moved to Portland in 2000, where they rested for a year in the basement of a rental house, then for more than a decade in the basement of our bungalow in NE. Untouched, or at least unopened.

I thought many times about what would be inside. 1994 is a sentimental vintage for me, but not necessarily a great year anywhere in France. It was a warm year overall, but rains in many areas, including Bordeaux, cause the year to be overlooked by more obvious vintages. Overall, there's a hardness, a lean quality to the wines of this year, something I enjoy for the lack of plump, even fat ripe flavors that increasingly afflict even the classics of old France.

Seeing Midnight in Paris and being momentarily distracted by the apparently off-period label told me something - it's time to open this wine. So tonight was the night, for the first bottle at least. Again, you can see the dark, youthful color of a wine that smells no more than seven or eight years old. It's amazing how wines can persevere. The aromas are classic old school Bordeaux. Lean but rich at once, currants, gravel, toast and slight bell pepper notes that scream left bank cabernet sauvignon. The flavors are medium bodied, delicate if you're a fan of lightness, dilute if you're looking for power and richness. This is elegant Bordeaux, piquant but not lacking flavor and length. Young, but the tannin I've read about in early tasting notes of this wine seem resolved, or resolving. It was delicious with grilled flat iron steak, fresh asparagus and rice. And afterwards, as I lingered over a glass to sniff and taste, thinking of Paris, of Fitzgerald and Cole Porter, dreaming for a moment of a late night wander through Parisian streets, searching.

I should remain patient. I have one more of these, and while it's not the world's greatest wine, it's more special to me still. And given what I tasted, I'm sure this wine will last and perhaps improve over another decade. I'll wait and see.

2000 Montirius Vacqueyras Clos Montirius

Here's another stray bottle from the cellar that somehow never got opened. Until tonight. I originally bought two of the 2000 Montirius Vacqueyras Clos Montirius at a local supermarket that has a particularly rich bargain, where good wines end up at half off, sometimes from already marked down prices. Maybe this should have been $20, but I think I got this for $8 per.

The idea was...good commune in the southern Rhone Valley, good producer, biodynamically farmed grapes, older school winemaking, it should be great. And the first bottle was. In fact, I remember thinking it was better than I expected and I should hold that second bottle for some years to see how it aged. And I held it. And held it. Maybe seven years now. For a while I forgot about it, then found it again in a box of wine in the cellar and put it on the shelf to be opened. It waited some more.

Tonight, finally, I pulled the cork. Not that it necessarily matters, but the cork looked perfect. Stained dark on one end, otherwise brand new in appearance. There's something pleasing in the sight of a perfect cork. As you can see, the wine is dark garnet in color, lively despite 12 years. Initially the aroma was a touch old with raisiny fruit. Then gradually the wine revealed itself, concentrated and powerful, plummy, complex with pipe tobacco and warm stone aromas. The flavors followed, with a dried fruit strength, resolving tannin that still gave good grip, more than adequate acidity to convey freshness, and a long, bottle sweet finish that lingered well. This wine could be nothing but southern Rhone, full of stony, meaty, savory garrigue nuance, like walking in the hills of around Ventoux or, to bring it closer to my experience, Santa Monica. That warm, herbal, dusty scent of hiking in the hills.

At first I thought this might have been better a few years ago. With time it seems perfect now. I think it might last a while longer but probably lose freshness and turn more raisined. Then again, considering the '69 Sizzano we had last weekend, maybe it will go another 30 years and amaze someone for it goodness despite a second tier appellation and modest price. Wine's like that, full of delicious surprises.

1969 Berteletti Sizzano

Last November, Chambers Street Wine in New York City emailed a unique offer of Nebbiolo Vecchio, or old Nebbiolo from mostly lesser known regions of northern Italy. There were a few things from Barolo and Barbaresco, or maybe they just had some old bottles in stock. The real show was a broad assortment of vintages from the 1950s through 1970s from DOCs like Carema, Ghemme, Spanna and Sizzano, mostly from producers I'd never heard of.

Oddly, the internets seemed to lack much detail on the producers or vintages. The Italian wine bible, Wasserman's Noble Wines of Italy, predictably had more to offer. There was a good deal of information on these otherwise obscure growing regions, certainly some nice detail on the old vintages, occasionally a note on the producers involved and even a specific bottling or two in the offer. But everything I saw suggested nothing from these regions was really made to last for decades. And the producers involved were largely not the few notable ones that serious Italian wine geeks would know.

Nevertheless, I couldn't resist putting together a collection of bottles, all from the 1960s with the exception of a single bottle from the year 1970. Chambers is as good as wine shops come, the prices were surprisingly reasonable for wines of this age, and though many of my initial selections had quickly sold out, I felt confident that anything I purchased would at least be interesting, certainly educational, and perhaps wonderful.

 I followed Chambers' instructions to let the wines rest after their journey to Oregon. These were fragile wines, they said, that, whenever one opened them, might need some patience and coaxing to reveal themselves. I have no problem with that. I'm patient. But I couldn't help noticing the color of the wines through the green glass bottles (most are darker brown). Ruby, quite translucent and certainly not brown, promising.

Already these wines have fallen into the "when do I open them?" trap. They've been here for three months, and only now did I take one out to the Oregon coast for a bit of a retreat with my partners in Guild Winemakers. Surely were would cook nice food and pull corks on some variety of bottles. What better time than to see about the 1969 Berteletti Sizzano? If it was dead, and the vintage by all accounts was awful, we'd have other things to take its place. If it was even remotely drinkable, who isn't interested in trying a wine as old or older than oneself?

I needn't have worries. Out came a stubby, plain cork and into the glass went the wine. One sniff and I knew it was marvelous nebbiolo vecchio from the commune of Sizzano. Look at that color above. Not young, but far younger looking than most 43-year-old wines have any business being. One partner, who makes nebbiolo locally, simply said, "it's nebbiolo." If there's an Italian red grape that should stand up to the decades, it's nebbiolo.

This wine was astonishing. Much better than I expected, more youthful but so mature, full of bottle sweetness and meaty, earthy notes of age. There was some nice cherry fruit in there, a bit any way, and the texture was so good. Tannin resolved but still present, the finish pretty long, soft and yet focused at once. More than just holding up, this was excellent wine.

Alas, we didn't quite finish the bottle, what with many other things to try and, admittedly, lots of seafood on the table. I was determined to try this wine in this company, so I opened it anyway, food match be damned. I was also determined to save the rest for tonight, to see if it survived.

The picture above shows how the color browned overnight. Still, the wine resisted oxidation and held together fantastically, the meaty boullion character from last night showing a bit more pronounced, the texture and length intact so that I couldn't let that last glass go to waste.

Drink a wine like this and one is transported somewhere else, some time else, in a way nothing but wine can do. Back when wine was made more simply (even if Berteletti wasn't a tiny producer - numbers on the bottle suggest there were are least a few thousand cases of this wine - I can only imagine their grape growing and wine making techniques were quite simple compared to norms today). Back when walking on the moon was something new and one's life had hardly begun.

Needless to say, my expectations for the rest of my purchases has risen considerably. I know, I know, there are not great wines, just great bottles. This one may not have been great exactly, whatever that means, but it was very, very good and incredibly memorable and thought provoking. Almost perfect if you ask me.

Chehalem Mountains Winegrowers trade tasting

I'm remiss in reporting on a nice trade tasting put on last week by the Chehalem Mountains Winegrowers. (Let me be clear in saying that I was a guest of the association, driven there and back to Portland with other industry types. I also make wine from the Ribbon Ridge AVA, a unique lobe of land tucked into the southwestern corner of the area and represented by this group.) As you can see in the adjacent photo, the event took place at Raptor Ridge Winery, which on the northern slope of the AVA in the lighter colored portion of the map.

The Chehalem Mountains run northwest to southeast and feature three distinct soil types. I love how the association's logo map shows by color the general limits of each soil. The green area represents the sandy soils of ancient ocean floor sediments, lifted over time by tectonic action. This area includes Ribbon Ridge and to my taste delivers a darker fruit expression of Pinot Noir. The red areas represent, naturally, the red volcanic basalt soils most typical in our Dundee Hills, but common here in the steep southern slope of the Chehalem Mountain and the entire Parret Mountain region on the lower right. I find the basalt soils give a redder character to Pinot Noit. Finally, the younger windblown Loess soils on the northern flank, where Raptor Ridge is located. I honestly don't have a good sense of this soil type, in terms of Pinot Noir anyway. Windblown soils are meager nutritionally, which is great for vines. I need to do more research to speak with any more knowledge though.

Obviously this diverse soil range might make terroir oriented wine lovers wonder...why not three AVAs, or growing areas? The association admits on their website that over time it would seem likely that a few subregions will emerge. For now, this broad area of the northern Willamette Valley, that happens to be the closest of our AVAs to the city of Portland, is one big region full of several top quality producers.

On the whole, the wines were delicious. I have made a point here previously that it's simply impossible for me, a local wine producer, to write critically of other local producers. That said, I was delighted in the range of wines, white and red, particularly in the delicacy of style that many are going for. I didn't even get to half of what was being poured, but a few that stood out for various reasons...

Adelsheim's crisp 2010 Pinot Blanc Bryan Creek Vineyard. Wished they were pouring the Auxerrois, which I've loved in the past.

Anam Cara's range of Pinots, particularly the 2008 Pinot Noir Nicolas Vineyard (by the way, I also enjoyed the '08 Et Fille Nicolas Vineyard a few nights later at a dinner in Portland).

Anne Amie's range of wines, including crisp 2010 Pinot Blanc and 2009 Pinots with a soft touch. I'm loving what Thomas Houseman is doing at this property.

Beckham Vineyard's 2011 Rose of Pinot Noir, a beautiful, juicy and dry pink wine from a producer I'd never heard of.

Bergstrom's 2010 Old Stones Chardonnay, really good Oregon chard and fairly priced in the low $20s. The Pinots were also more restrained than I remember from past years.

Dion's delicate Pinots from their 1970s era vines on the far northern end of the AVA.

JK Carriere's 2011 Glass White Pinot Noir, really a very pale rose that I usually enjoy.


Utopia Vineyard Pinot Noirs in general, with nice whole cluster aromatics, toasty but graceful.

The tasting featured an unexpected aspect, which I loved but I can imagine might be difficult for the non winemakers to appreciate - Pinot Noir barrel samples of 2011s from a few unnamed producers. The samples were arranged by the three soil types, but at this stage with many wines still going through their malolactic fermentation, all I felt you could really get was a general sense of the vintage, at least from this specific growing region.

The view from Raptor Ridge on a beautiful late February afternoon.

So how were the 2011s? Dark in color, bursting with flavors even with the sharp malic acidity in some samples still to be converted to the softer lactic acid you're used to in finished red wine. In short, they reminded me of the great 2008. How can that be? 2011 was our coldest season in 20 years, much colder than the cool, late 2008 harvest. The answer I think is in the late and dry harvest, where grapes ended up getting the time to get ripe even at remarkably low sugars. Yes, most producers had some grape lots with pretty low brix (sugar levels), but from my own production experience, my experience tasting other producers barrels (mostly friends), and now tasting a bunch of samples here, all I can say is wow. 2011 has produced some powerful, but not powerfully alcoholic, wines. The best wines will live a long time in the cellar, and like the 2008s they may seem a bit dense at first.

The press better not make any judgements before tasting these new wines. All summer we heard about the cold season and how disaster could be upon us. Then we had a perfect autumn, most unexpectedly but still. Taste the wines when they come out later this year and all through the next. Yes, there will be lots of delicious rose from some of that lower brix fruit. Some people inevitably will produce some red wines that lack sufficient ripeness. When isn't that true? But from what I'm tasting, and believe me I don't have much 2011 wine to sell so this is no sales pitch, I cannot wait to see the 2011s hit the market. And we'll see which critics actually taste wines before making pronouncements.

Little Bird

Today saw a day trip to eastern Washington with the Guild Winemakers crew to research sources for our future bottlings. Leaving Portland before dawn, through the Columbia River Gorge and then north through the Yakima Valley to the Wahluke Slope, pictured left. Sagebrush and scrub, tumbleweeds rolling in the wind, the sky and landforms as big as I remember New Mexico many years back. Clouds hanging over it all, but no rain, just dust. A haboob.

This land makes me think of Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, a southwestern classic I read in grad school in San Francisco, about the perseverance of living, surviving, in a landscape where water leaves you lonely, but not the wind.

We found what we were looking for today, plans for our future, clarity I suppose. Things we can live within, like this landscape, indifferent to us but patiently giving what we need most if we can see it.

Then back again to our home, the sky turning grey near the Dalles, the rocks by the roadside turning mossy at Cascade Locks, then the rain, only drops, then hail, then sun, the pattern of spring. Then Portland at sunset, clouds reflecting the day's dying in a way I wish I could capture and give on demand. It seems that important.

Tonight it was back to the city, a beautiful dinner at Little Bird downtown with a partner and barrel people, discussing forests and grains, toast levels and aging protocols. My mind wandered a bit though, late, to the music. The district sleeps tonight from the postal service, old for being new enough to hear in a modern restaurant. And Rome right after it. The coliseum.

We drank 2009 Four Cairn Syrah from Napa Valley.

October 7, 2001

Many things were happening on October 7, 2001. As usual, summer had become fall in the Willamette Valley. The grape harvest was on, and St. Innocent winery was apparently finishing two days of harvesting Anden vineyard, what was then the upper part of what had been and is again the great Seven Springs vineyard, split briefly due to family issues. My beloved San Francisco Giants were finishing up a disappointing season. The war in Afghanistan began. And I took my first and only drive to Mollala, OR, to pick grapes to make my first wine.

When I'm out pouring my wine for the public, one of the most common questions I get is, "how long have you been making wine?" The answer is not necessarily so simple, though it's not as complicated as the other main question I get, "how did you get into wine?" With that one, I can cite any number of epiphanies, a sequence with which readers may be familiar. Being maybe five years old and going on a day trip to Napa during a big family reunion in San Francisco back in the 1970s, the scent of wine soaked wood from the cellar at Inglenook a memory that's never left me and never will. Or studying in Europe during college and traveling to the remarkably picturesque village of St. Emilion in the Bordeaux region. Or later that year living with in Austria and getting schooled in the dry white wines of the Wachau and Weinviertel by my Austrian hosts. Or the bottle of '86 Steltzner Cabernet that my brother poured for me on my first night of a cross-country road trip after leaving college. Or, or...there simply wasn't one epiphany. It's complicated I suppose.

But how long have I been making wine? I usually answer "since 1999," when I first volunteered in the cellar of a California zinfandel and syrah producer then just transitioning from home wine making to the professional ranks. As I've written, that experience provided the model for my own garage wine making before I joined the professional ranks in 2009.

Really, the first day I truly made wine, my own wine, was October 7, 2001, a dry and mild but cloudy Sunday that was otherwise unremarkable at the time, at least that morning, but became one of the most significant days of my life. And keeps on returning in ways I never expect.

I was a new homeowner then, with an unexpectedly large garage that seemed perfect for making wine. I had found a listing for pinot noir grapes outside of Mollala at a local wine making supply store and drove down the valley to pick some hundreds of pounds of grapes myself, the Giants game on the radio in the car on the drive and, later, on my boom box in the vineyard rows as I picked. Slowly. Very inexperienced.

I knew very little about making wine at that point. I was smart enough to ask the grower on the phone when the last sulfur spray had been but innocent enough to take the answer at face value, especially when I arrived to find the vines covered in sulfur dust. I knew that wasn't good but didn't know why, so I went for it anyway and found out the hard way why that was a huge mistake. Sure, the terroir of Mollala may be less than ideal for pinot noir, but the wine sucked because that sulfur reacted with yeast during fementation to create powerful (and powerfully bad) aromas called mercaptans. You know, what they put into natural gas so you can smell it. So you'll know something's wrong and call the gas company before an explosion. Unfortunately, wine is a nice proving ground for mercaptans. This wine succeeded on that level only.

I shouldn't be too hard on myself. The fermentation was otherwise fine. All the sugar converted to alcohol, the wine had good color and enough body to, in theory anyway, make a decent drink. It just smelled and tasted like boiled cabbage under a sewer grate on a summer day. Dank. Nasty.

Happily, I didn't give up. If wine making is about one's quest for new mistakes, for all the things that could possibly go wrong in the process with occasional genius along the way, I was off to a wonderful start. Still waiting for the genius of course, but it was a good start.

I kept bottles of that wine for years, occasionally getting the courage to open one to see if anything positive had happened to that horrible stench. No, it never did and the final bottle went down the drain maybe two years ago in a fit to rid the cellar of this and other failed experiments that had finally outlived any seeming usefulness.

I sort of wish I still had a bottle of that first wine, not because it would be any good. Rather just to see it, to know it was real, which of course it was but now is just memory. Instead, I have other things to remind me.

Take the 2001 St. Innocent Pinot Noir Anden Vineyard, a stray bottle I've held for many years waiting for the "right time" to open. As I've written, I'm clearing through many of these random bottles and the other night it was time for this wine to receive its due. And oh my god, if my first wine was that bad, this is incredibly good. A bit tannic but otherwise remarkable, astonishing even. Wine that tastes like nothing else but Oregon, with the masculinity of Seven Springs vineyard and a savor that only the best Oregon wines ever show. This bottle was too good for Friday pizza night at home.

Of course, I had none of this on my mind when I opened the bottle. It was just another wine I'd waited on too long, or thought I had anyway, that seemed to need opening. Now. I poured it and immediately the scent made me laugh. This is why I make Oregon wine. This smelled unlike anything else in the world, unlike any other place in the world. The words I use may not be so distinct, but the wine utterly is. Cherries, black tea, a sense of green moss on a forest floor otherwise covered in brown leaves and needles, dry and earthy the way hummus smells, ashy in a way that convinces me it's most or all Pommard clone, like Burgundy but nothing like the Cote de Nuits or Cote de Beaune, if that makes sense. This is simply Oregon, and lovely.

Then I turned the bottle to read the back label and found the pity stats winemaker Mark Vlossak likes to print. When it was picked, how long it was aged, when it was bottled, etc. And the pick dates here were October 5 and 7, 2001, bringing back that latter day in a flood of memory that I've been thinking about all weekend.

That crazy day when I heard on the radio about the start of war on my drive home, wondering for more than a moment if I wasn't a presumptuous fool for making wine in the face of such catastrophe. But it's what I do. And that's the day it really all began.

Dinner at Southpark

 

I had the opportunity a few nights ago to dine at Southpark restaurant in Portland. It's not the newest or flashiest restaurant in town but I love it just the same. I suppose I'm biased because they put my 2009 Vincent Eola-Amity Hills Pinot Noir on their list last year and did well with it. In truth this was a special place for me long before that, and not just for the crab cakes I seem to order on almost every visit.

This particular evening saw a collision between two of my worlds - my winery and my day job at a certain urban university in the heart of downtown Portland. This occasion was a visit from a new leader at the national organization that's affiliated with our faculty union, of which I'm treasurer. I thought it would be fiscally prudent to bring a bottle of one of my latest releases to share with dinner. Ok, I wanted everyone to try my wine, fine, I admit it. Happily, they loved it and, in all modesty, so did I. My 2010s are really rounding out and I couldn't be happier with them.

Of course, one bottle wasn't enough for the group, and I was asked to select another. Why not keep it in the family? So I ordered a bottle of the 2008 Grochau Cellars Pinot Noir Willamette Valley. Astute readers will remember that this wine, the 2004 vintage, struck me at a dinner at Higgins several years back. I'd heard of this John Grochau character. We had mutual friends but I'd never met him. That wine led me to contact him, taste a number of his 2005s then in barrel and write about them on this site. I thought John was doing really interesting work with grapes from the Willamette Valley and beyond, and before I knew it I was helping with harvest. Then he moved into Portland to make wine in the city and I kept helping him, then launched my own label on his bond, then became partners with two other friends in Guild Winemakers. And through it all we became friends.

That's a long way of saying...now you know why I don't write about his wines here anymore. Until now. The server pulled the cork and decanted the '08 GC and it was rocking good from the start. Good enough to tell you why I shouldn't write about it but am anyway. John's been barrel aging his wines longer in recent years, not to give any woodiness to the wine (that happens quickly in barrel aging anyway), but to allow for more evolution in the wine before bottling, more curing to use my own words.

The results are really nice. I love the deep fruitiness of the '08s in general, with good structure and savory qualities perhaps because alcohols were more moderate in this year. This wine has all that, with a scent of Douglas fir like you might find morel hunting in the coastal hills (oh my god, it's almost morel season). Plus there's a lovely mix of fresh fruit, cured meats and other interesting qualities from a bit more barrel aging. Overall, there's lovely balance and depth, richness and restraint, and as I'd hoped, everyone at the table loved it.

There you have it. A lovely evening at Southpark that I had to write about. I hope you'll understand.

Demanding wine

I'm pretty easy going and I appreciate how easy some wines are to understand, to satisfy in a way.

Still, the most compelling wines are demanding. They need something from you and, in the right case, I find myself happy to go where the wine leads. I'm not looking for wine to "perform," a word I hear too much. Wine isn't a show dog. I want the wine to compel me to act, to respond.

This 2004 Domaine Confuron-Cotetidot Vosne-Romanee is a good example of demanding wine. Powerfully complex aromatically, hard-edged texturally, there is no sign of any greenness that makes 2004 notorious in Burgundy.

Instead, this wine has an alluring perfume, wild to be sure and perhaps to the chagrin of the brett police. This isn't clean wine but it doesn't seem dirty to me either. Rather, it is full of iron and oaky spice to complement the red fruit flavors, floral like a syrah from the northern Rhone that you'd suggest was Burgundian.

The palate is tannic, there's no getting around it. But I find the tannin toothsome, not drying, the wine cleansing where overly soft, fruit-sweet wines finish syrupy and not refreshing.

With food, the tannin immediately seems a non-factor, though the pleasing edge to the wine remains. And I find myself holding the glass, smelling the perfume and setting the glass down without sipping. Exhaling, thinking of that fragrance, classic Burgundy like a Burberry scarf. Unmistakable.

Overthinking

The cellar clean out continues, with some hits and several misses. Some disappointments we should have seen coming. Others have been surprises. "Good" wines that simply weren't good, or didn't age well, or were overly brett infected or otherwise bitter. Sure, there have been good bottles but too many haven't turned out well. I find myself overthinking about why this is.

Then after a busy day for everyone today, we had a ziti and salad from the grocery store. Easy, pretty good, but better with a glass of red wine. Something simply fresh and delicious, perhaps more if one were lucky. So down to the cellar and I find the last bottle of 2005 Neudorf Pinot Noir "Tom's Block" Nelson, from the northern part of the southern island of New Zealand. No thinking was necessary. This was the wine.

The match was almost perfect. Baked pasta and red wine is about as good as it gets on a February night, no? And this wine delivered. Spicy black cherry flavors, a gravelly earth undertone coming out over time in the glass, good freshness at seven years old, this wine made me stop in the middle of dinner to remark to myself how good it was, how good it made the meal. Really, what more could you ask for in a wine?

A different kind of letting go

This bottle, the 2006 Domaine Meo Camuzet Bourgogne Hautes-Cotes de Nuits Clos Saint-Philibert, should have been wonderful. Again, wine from a top producer but not a top bottling. In this case, a simple Hautes-Cotes from a single vineyard, Clos Saint-Philibert, perched above the fanciest vineyard land in the world - Vosne Romanee. Meaning, this should be good. It is. I tried it a few years ago on release and bought a couple with the intent of aging them for a few years. So here we were, and here was a beautiful pair of Dungeness crab, ready for eating with a friend while watching the 49ers playoff game. A little bit of decadence on a Saturday afternoon.

Alas, the wine was corked. And so down the drain. Who cares. The crab was incredibly good and the game even better. So there.

Letting go

We are constantly letting go.

I'm reminded of this lately by my sister, who is writing a lovely blog called One Item a Day about her plan this year to get rid of one thing per day. It's a brilliant idea. The blog is sweet and poignant, extremely personal. It's all about letting go.

It's funny because in November I went through my wine cellar to do something similar. For one reason or another, I have many wines, mostly older ones, that need to be let go. Some are sure to be great, but they apparently need special occasions that never seem to come. Others are past their best, probably anyway, and that uncertainty is part of what makes letting go so much harder. Will it be a let down? I write that and I think, so what? It's just a bottle of wine. And yet here we are. Surely it's about more than just wine.

I bought the bottle to the right, the 2000 Henschke Keyneton Estate, almost four years ago. A single bottle from the best Australian producer (the one I would choose anyway), but not their top cuvee by a long shot and not something I should have held this long. Why did I? Maybe because I bid on it on my 39th birthday, in Manzanita, OR, from the kitchen table of a beachfront rental house shared with my parents. Readers may remember that birthday was particularly poignant for me. This bottle, only connected to that moment by chance, became part of that day, a foggy, misty memory now, Edenic.

Imagine a book that dissolves as you read it. That's how wine is. A memory. So this bottle sat, unopened, until November when I lined it up with many others and resolved to treat it differently than I had. To confront things, in a way. Then the other night I pulled the cork, a little nervous. Would I be disappointed? The wine tasted decent but was a little herbal and soft, the negatives compounded by enough age that the flavors simply lacked life. The wine wasn't dead at all, just gone. We often speak of a wine that sings. This wine was silent. I wanted it to be so good, better than it had any reason to be. It wasn't, and I should have known better.

A post from last weekend on my sister's blog brought all of this together for me. She wrote about finding long lost x-rays of her son's troubled esophagaus, from one point among others in his young life when she and her husband weren't sure he would survive the complications of Down's syndrome. About her tears finding something she forgot she even had, the old x-rays, and the feeling of how can something you forgot you had trigger such emotion and be so difficult to let go? Of course, we know the answer. We can all relate, no? It doesn't make it easier though.

That post in turn reminded me of a Lorrie Moore's devastating "People Like That Are The Only People Here." That story captures unlike any other how parenting must be about letting go. No matter what. The same with children I suppose. We are constantly letting go.

Christmas 2011 at home

Merry Christmas, dear reader. I'm home this year after several holidays at my childhood home in Los Angeles. Everything is focused on home, how good home feels, especially at Christmas.

For me, wine is always secondary at the holidays. Essential for the great holiday meals. Enjoyable for visiting with neighbors, family and friends. Just not the focus, and not necessarily the best match for my favorite holiday foods. One thing I'm missing this year in Portland are some good tamales, something I'd like to make fresh for Christmas one of these years, once I learn how to make them.

On Christmas night, it's just the family at home at the 1998 Laurel Glen Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma Mountain and flat iron steak, a onion and gruyere tart, Brussels sprouts (yes, named for the city) and the most essential of holiday foods, the mashed potato. Dinner will surely be delicious.

But the wine? It is mature, lovely and ready now but I'm sure has the staying power this producer is known for. This is aromatic cabernet, more in the Loire style than Bordeaux, more about tobacco and herbs and the caramelization of age than heavier, richer cabernet of the Medoc. If you're into that, and I am, this is a wine you will love, treasure even. Something you'll keep when others might not, sure you'll be rewarded. I'm sure you will.

This is how Christmas should be. Home. And for those who can't be home yet, a taste of what will be.

Harvest 2011 part 7: celebration

Harvest 2011 in Oregon's Willamette Valley is complete. The grapes picked, the new wines safely through fermentation and in barrel (unless you're Barnaby at Teutonic Wine Company, who told me last week that he was picking his last riesling on Saturday - December 3!).

All that remains is the harvest celebration. This year the Guild Winemakers bunch celebrated together, a low key gathering of partners to talk about the harvest and anything else that came to mind. Such get togethers never last long enough. Why can't meals with friends last for days instead of hours?

I thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with an older wine I recently found. So the 1987 Nozzole Chianti Classico Riserva, pale in candlelight, brilliantly translucent, more than alive, growing with airtime to show its Tuscan sangiovese roots and all the layers of time. Not a great wine, but certainly pleasurable, much more than just a novelty of the past, so beautiful.

This harvest, this whole year was incredible. Unusual. Something I don't want to go through again. But the results are incredibly exciting. The wines we have in barrel taste electric. Ripe with a burst of flavor and yet so full of energy, so lively. They need to settle down and complete the secondary malolactic fermentation, which softens the young wine. Then time in barrel and bottle. Time will be everything for these wines.

We won't really see what we have for ten years, though of course we will check in frequently along the way, in cask and bottle. Already barrels need topping up only a few weeks after being filled. Otherwise, there is little to do now that harvest is done. This time is the elevage, the education of the wine, requiring patience.

So we eat and drink and finish the year, glad to be through with harvest and ready now for everything else a year brings. Harvest will be back again soon enough. But let's drink a little more old Chianti before thinking about that.

Harvest 2011 part 6: barreling

At this point, the new wine from each fermenter settles for a few days in a separate container. Press wine is kept separate as well. Everything settles for a few days before the wine goes into barrel. All that's left to do now is fill barrels.

Filling barrels means washing barrels first, then smelling them to see if they're fit for wine. These two look beautiful and smell sweet and fresh despite a few years of prior use. Good French oak - all we use - is a wonderful thing for wine.

Each barrel gets filled and tagged with a note on what's inside. Barrels are paired side by side on racks, the racks then stacked three high and put away into the barrel storage area.

To wait. And wait.

Through the winter and spring, when the malolactic fermentation will happen, softening what are now young, raw wines. Then into the summer, before the wines will be drawn off the fine sediment that settles out in barrel and blended for bottling before the next harvest.

Once the last barrel is filled and the final tanks and hoses cleaned out, harvest is done. Now it's time for a harvest dinner to celebrate the vintage. Tomorrow night in fact, I can't wait.