A full century before Byan Adams got his first real six string, Croatian immigrants were planting 10 acres of Zinfandel in Amador County. That history lives on in liquid form as the 1869 Zinfandel from Scott Harvey Wines.

“Old Vines” — or Vieilles Vignes in French — is published on wine labels quite often, but there exists no legal definition in either country as to how old the vines have to be to use the term. The older the vineyard gets, the smaller the yield, the deeper the roots, and (hypothetically), the better the wine. So while there’s no legal cutoff for the term, I’d say the 143-year-old vines in Vineyard 1869 qualify.

Even more impressive than the fact that the vines are still healthy and producing beautiful Zinfandel clusters after so long is what the vines had to survive to make it this far. They not only survived the outbreak of phylloxera, a destructive root-feeding louse, which reached the west coast in the late 1800′s, but have continued to thrive even with its prevalence in the region since. The vines probably owe thanks to the unusually sandy soils of the site, which phylloxera  struggles to survive in.

After phylloxera, the biggest man-made obstacle arrived in 1920 as alcohol prohibition was enacted throughout the United States. During the 13 years that alcohol was effectively illegal, a handful of vineyards in California managed to survive either by producing wine for religious regions or shipping the grapes to the east coast for home winemaking, which was not banned under the amendment. According to the back of the 1869 label “moonlit nights of unregulated distillation” helped the vineyard survive. I supposed there was a third reason some vineyards survived. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, I encounter a bottle that provides a particularly special experience. Usually, these wines are older — fully mature or close-to-mature wines from highly regarded vintages and producers – and are utterly thrilling and compelling to drink, with flavors harmonizing seamlessly and conveyed with a remarkable sense of delicacy and grace.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to experience something particularly unique; a bottle that was not just remarkable and memorable for its flavors, grace, and maturity, but for its historical significance and what it represented.

At dinner with a small group of very generous friends, a bottle of the 1945 Huet Vouvray Le Haut Lieu Moelleux was produced and poured around the table. Huet’s reputation is legendary for producing stunningly balanced, long-aging wines. Through the generosity of others, I’ve been able to experience stunning bottles of Huet from other old, heralded vintages, such as the ’47 Le Haut Lieu Moelleux.

The ’45, however, was more than a great wine or a great vintage. Sublime flavors and fragrance with the harmony, seamlessness and polish I usually find in old Huet; but with the added historical context of a wine made at the end of the second World War, by a man who not long before harvest had been imprisoned in a POW camp. Gaston Huet returned to vineyards that had been challenged by an early frost and heat later, and the wine he produced that we enjoyed, as one of our group put it, was nothing less than a monument to the human spirit.

Elke's Donnelly Creek Vineyard.

If you have any interest in wine, by now you have heard of “Grower Champagne,” a relatively recent trend of independent grape growers in the Champagne region of France producing their own wine from grapes they cultivate rather than selling them off to the large houses. “Farmer Fizz,” as it also is known, accounts for less than 3% of the Champagne market, but is revered by wine geeks for the artisanal, terroir-driven nature of the product.

Here in the States, most sparkling wine is made by large corporate producers – you see them on the bottom shelf of your local grocery store or pharmacy: Cook’s, Andre, Tott’s, Korbel, etc. There are a few better regarded large producers, like Gruet in New Mexico and Gloria Ferrer in California, and a slew of Franco-American partnerships, like Domaine Carneros by Taittinger. While some of these producers grow almost all of their own grapes, most need to purchase some from other sources.

Enter the American grower.

Mary Elke has been farming vineyards and selling grapes for 30 years in both the Napa and Anderson Valleys. Her clients include a who’s who list of sparkling wine producers, such as Roederer Estate and Mumm Napa. But, until a few years ago, she had never produced her own sparkling wine. (Elke Vineyards has made a still Pinot Noir since 1997 under various guest winemakers.)

“[We’re] a very small winery,” Elke explained to me over email. “I neither have the space nor winemaking equipment required to produce sparkling wine in the méthode champenoise.” So when a custom crush facility called Rack & Riddle opened up nearby in Mendocino County employing the winemaking team from J Vineyards, Elke sampled their Brut cuvée and got inspired. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife says Le Rêve tastes “almost French,” and you could say the same for the château building.

There are only a few places in California wine country where you can completely forget that you are in the United States.

Turning off Route 121, the highway that connects the Sonoma and Napa Valleys at their southern tips in Carneros, you encounter one of those places. Sitting atop a hill surrounded by rows and rows of vines is the château of Domaine Carneros, a 25-year-old American estate, straight out of 18^th century France.

The elegant manor is a fitting home for Domaine Carneros, founded by France’s Champagne Taittinger to produce new world sparkling wine in the traditional old world method. Taittinger plucked Eileen Crane from nearby Gloria Ferrer to oversee the planting of the estate and establish the sparkling wine program, and she remains to this day.

Taittinger conducted a lengthy search for the proper site before settling on Carneros, a region with average temperatures 10-15 degrees cooler than Napa, although still warmer than Champagne. Domaine Carneros owns four estate vineyards (all certified organic), planted only to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, for which the area’s long, cool growing season is close to ideal. Theoretically, the soil and climate should combine to allow Crane and her team to achieve a balance of ripeness and acidity – essential for any good sparkling wine, no matter where it is from.

As a fan of Taittinger, and its rich, toasty style, I was excited to visit Domaine Carneros on a trip to California a few years ago, and I was not disappointed. While the architecture of the château is more French-styled than the wines, on their own merits the sparkling wines of Domaine Carneros are consistently good, and my favorite of the trans-Atlantic bubbly partnerships (such as Roederer Estate, Mumm Napa, and Domaine Chandon, to name a few). I was equally excited to check in on the lineup thanks to a sampler pack that recently arrived at Terroirist HQ.

Tasting notes follow below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This is a guest post from Robert Dwyer of The Wellesley Wine Press.

The author, Robert Dwyer, with Kosta Browne executive winemaker Michael Browne.

Kosta Browne is a Sonoma-based producer of mostly Pinot Noir made in a ripe, fruit-forward style. The winery is named after founders Dan Kosta and Michael Browne, who started the winery while working together at the John Ash & Co. restaurant in Santa Rosa.

As the story goes, they pooled a portion of their tips each night with the idea of one day starting a winery. They eventually scraped together enough money to produce a barrel or two of wine — and they’ve since grown the brand into one of the most desirable in California.

These are interesting times at Kosta Browne. In 2009, the winery was acquired by Vincraft for almost $40 million. In 2011, one of its wines was named Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year. And in 2012, one of its winemakers left the firm. But through it all, Kosta Browne’s Pinot Noirs remain the standard for bold domestic Pinot Noir.

Kosta Browne’s appellation Pinot Noirs sell for $58 and its single vineyard wines go for $72. Professional ratings for the wines have been impressive over the years. After a string of scores in the upper 90s, Wine Spectator crowned the 2009 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir (96 WS/$58) its wine of the year. Although production levels are around 11,000 cases, there still isn’t enough to satisfy demand, making the mailing list particularly hard to crack.

It’s my one “no brainer” allocation I buy each year without hesitation.

But not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Kosta Browne. Thanks to its unapologetically bold style, the winery has developed a reputation for producing wines that are over the top. Too ripe. Gloppy. On steroids. Spiked with Syrah. Wine enthusiasts can get really (surprisingly) cranked up about wines like Kosta Browne’s being regarded as some of the best around. Read the rest of this entry »

Philippe Pacalet

A couple of years ago, a friend introduced me to one of Philippe Pacalet’s wines, bringing his 2006 Pommard to a large wine dinner — one of those events with a dozen people and numerous bottles moving rapidly around the table.

In between some outstanding Rieslings from Austria and Germany, and various Bordeaux and Rhones, Pacalet’s ’06 Pommard stood out as one of the most thrilling young Burgundies I’d encountered in some time. I was struck by its wonderfully complex and perfumed fragrance, and the combination of pure red fruit and various savory, non-fruited flavors, all conveyed with a lightness of touch that I always look for in Burgundy but don’t find often enough.

A few months later, I encountered another of Pacalet’s wines at a dinner; the same vintage, a different village (the details escape me now), and a very different wine altogether. This time it had a cloudy, murky appearance and lacked balance, coming across thin and sour with raspy, unpleasant acidity. The wine was barely drinkable; the fruit sour and finishing bitter and the acidity giving it an awkward spritzy sensation on the tongue.

Pacalet’s wines can be incredibly frustrating. Occasionally, they can be downright undrinkable. I’ve come across other bottles that showed the same shrillness and sourness, and heard of a few instances where the wine refermented in bottle or oxidized remarkably quickly. I’d attribute some of these issues to his “natural” winemaking approach, which is largely hands-off, involving minimal use of sulfur and that too, added only at bottling.

There’s a distinctive house style consistent across all the wines, yet there can be tremendous variance from one bottle to the next of a particular wine. It’s become something of a cliché to talk about how Burgundy can be a gamble to explore, but there are times when each wine from Pacalet can seem like a roll of the dice. The wines are usually light bodied, pale in color and often slightly cloudy from a lack of fining and filtering. They can be challenging and frustrating occasionally, but good bottles are incredibly fragrant with flavors that run more towards fresh red fruits and berries, occasionally showing some citrus-like elements with higher-toned herbal or floral accents.

And when the wines are “on,” they can be truly thrilling; constantly changing and developing with air, and conveying their flavors with a remarkable sense of purity and finesse. Below the fold are tasting notes from various bottles that I’ve encountered over the last few months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mélanie Pfister and her parents.

Note: This is the first in a new series, in which I’ll explore a different Riesling every week or so.

Thanks to legendary importer Terry Thiese, I’ve decided it’s time to learn about Riesling. My decision, though, has nothing to do with one of Thiese’s imports. Rather, I’ve decided it’s finally time to explore Riesling thanks to the wines of Domaine Pfister, a producer in Alsace.

Thiese doesn’t import the wines – his portfolio only includes wines from Germany, Austria, and Champagne – but if it weren’t for him, Domaine Pfister might not be in the United States today.

Domaine Pfister traces its roots to 1780. While that’s ancient by New World standards, the village of Dahlenheim, where Pfister is located, was noted for quality wine production as early as 884. And it’s always been Riesling country.

For most of its history, Domaine Pfister was little more than a local winery. The property was handed down from father to son, and virtually all sales were made at the cellar door, with just a small bit of the wine making it to local restaurants.

In 1972, when sixth-generation vintner Alfred Pfister handed the business over to his son André, the property entered the modern era. Together with wife Marie-Anne, André started treating the vineyard and winemaking more professionally, with a laser focus on making high-quality wines that would express his property’s terroir. So he modernized the property’s facilities and started taking great care of the vineyard.

As André’s daughter, Mélanie, recently explained to me, “Since my father took over, the vineyards have been sacrosanct. He recognizes that balanced, healthy vineyards lead to balanced, healthy wines.”

Mélanie should know. About ten years ago, she decided to join the family business — becoming the first woman in her family to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

To close out our trip to the Douro, we visited two other beautiful wineries. The first was Quinta do Vallado. The winery is just down the street from the hotel where we were staying, which is also part of the Vallado estate. As a side note, I highly recommend the hotel; the rooms were modern, luxurious, and very comfortable. Each has its own balcony, free wifi, and includes a nice Portuguese breakfast of breads, fruits (usually fresh cherries, melon, and pineapple), and coffee.

Quinta do Vallado winery is one of the oldest in the Douro Valley, founded in 1716 and having once belonged to the legendary Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreirra. I’d stumbled across her name in my Frommer’s:

From a modest beginning, with only a handful of vineyards, her company rose in power and influence, gobbling up wine estate after wine estate. At its apex, its holdings stretched all the way to the border of Spain, making its owner the richest woman in the nation. The fabled entrepreneur (known as Ferreirinha, or “Little Ferreira”) nearly drowned in the Douro in 1861, but her voluminous petticoats kept her buoyant. Her companion, an Englishman named Baron de Forrester, who did not wear petticoats, wasn’t as lucky.

Francisco Ferreira of Vallado

Anyway, generations later, Francisco Ferreira, her descendant & current co-owner of the Quinta, guided us through a tasting and the facilities, then treated us to an unrushed and lively lunch on the property.

The winery and its surprising modernity would have been just at home in Napa Valley as in the Douro. It’s more tourist-ready than the others and while still small, has a slightly more commercial feel. Vallado’s wines were pure and precise and Francisco and the team monitored their every direction. In the relatively spacious tasting lab, we sampled the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Our next stop in the Douro was Quinta do Vale D. Maria. After getting lost (again), we arrived at the winery and were greeted by an excited group of bouncy puppies and Joana, a winemaker on the property. Joana’s English was absolutely perfect and she is one of those people with whom you immediately feel comfortable joking around. She led us on an unrushed and friendly tour of Vale d. Maria, before going to her lab where we sampled several wines:

• Van Zellers Branco 2010: Stainless steel fermented, a mouthful of flavor – citrus, herbal, grapefruit. Both satisfying and refreshing. From Wine Advocate, “Clean, fresh, tight and focused, it combines steely minerality with bite on the lingering finish. It made me think Chablis…If you can track this down, it’s a no brainer.”
• VZ 2010:Barrel aged for nine months in 90% new barrel. Rabigato is the most predominant grape in this blend, which has great acidity, smoky oak, tropical and green apple notes.

  

  Lagares at Vale D. Maria

• Quinta do Vale Dona Maria Douro 2009: ~15 grape varieties; in the lagares through fermentation; 60% new oak. Hot tamale candies and balsamic vinegar on the nose (normal combination, right?). The palate had loads of deep black fruits and powerful tannins, that I think will give the wine amazing aging potential for 10+ years.
• CV 2009: Grown on the property’s north-facing vineyards and made of 20+ grape varieties. Violet flowers, granite, minerality, dark fruit. Only 6,000 bottles produced.

The perfect way to end Day 1 in the Douro was a dinner at DOC Restaurant. The food & service were excellent. If you go, sit on the deck, right on the water and order the Vinha Dos Deuses 2008 Quinta Dos Frades. It’s grandiosely served in a sleek, curvy decanter (which made me worry I’d ordered the wrong wine, i.e., one a lot more expensive). The profile of the wine is perfectly fitting for a warm evening at this restaurant: it’s spicy, dusty brimming with red cherry, and a slightly Pinot-like. Totally hit the spot and enlightened me to the diversity of Portuguese wines.

It’s not easy to find many Portuguese wines here in the U.S., even in NYC. If you can find them, of course, snatch up the high-quality Douro reds, particularly the Reserva and old vines. They are incredible values for the money, especially in comparison to French or even Spanish equivalents. The whites are also very refreshing, simple good values. Let me know if you’ve discovered spots in your city where they serve or sell Portuguese wine. First on my list is Aldea Restaurant in NYC. Any to add?

This is part of a three-part series. You can see the first post here.

It’s funny. While the Portuguese have been out exploring the world, discovering pristine new lands and uncharted seas, the rest of the world (including the wine world) has largely not discovered the country of Portugal.

Indeed, when I asked many of my well traveled friends and business school peers for travel tips, many of them had not been to Portugal. And if they had, they’d visited the more touristy southern coastline, which has a European resort-like, Spring Break feel. I decided I wanted something more raw and authentic for my visit in as much as a tourist can have that experience. And, of course, I wanted to center the trip around wine as much as my liver and travel companion would allow.

I learned that Portuguese wines are endlessly discoverable – there are hundreds of indigenous grapes, “field blends,” that are still being understood, appreciated, and perfected for wine. Of course, the best known wines from the country, aside from Ports, are Vinho Verde and those made of Touriga Nacional. My over-generalized observations about Douro wines are below: Read the rest of this entry »