Archive for the 'Varietals' Category

Ten years ago the only Rieslings being poured at an extravagant tasting of international wines would have been from Germany. Maybe Alsace, too.

Nobody would have been looking for those, though, except some elderly Army veterans who discovered Riesling while occupying Germany after Dubya Dubya 2. People would have been shoving through to get to the latest, oakiest, thickest, malolacticest Chardonnay from Burgundy, Australia, California, Piedmont or even Tuscany.

But now Riesling is hot, and it should be.

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What do you think the hottest wine type in America is? Pinot Noir? Riesling? Malbec?

Yeah, those are all fast-growing. But their growth rates pale in comparison to premium rosé. Just as the color of White Zinfandel pales in comparison to the kind of dry, sophisticated rosé I’m talking about here.

Sales of rosé priced at $8 and above per bottle grew at a rate of 53 percent in dollars at retail stores during a recent 52-week period, as measured by Nielsen, the leading authority on beverage sales at major food and drug stores and major liquor stores.

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Enviable collection of Barolo at Belvedere restaurant in La Morra, Italy.

IS NEBBIOLO THE MOST SITE-SPECIFIC wine-grape variety in the world? It just might be. What other varietal wine is as hard to duplicate in other parts of its home country, let alone other parts of the world?

The challenge occurred to me last weekend when we hosted nine friends for a dinner party. I pulled together a mix of newly released northern Italian wines plus Italian-style wines made in California. How did they compare?

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A vanity plate that might say Gruner was a calling card at the Von Strasser barrel. Photo by Jason Tinacci.

AT LEAST FOR ONE DAY the weirdest wines of Napa Valley were Gruner Veltliner, Nero d’Avola and, weirdest of all, a Vin Santo of Sangiovese. A few brave vintners put these strange wines up for sale at the annual Premiere Napa Valley barrel auction over the weekend.

While their more sensible peers went with Cabernet Sauvignon (138 lots out of 200), proprietary red blends (32 out of 200) and Merlot (8 lots out of 200), a small minority rebelled.

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Today is a great day to pop open a bottle of Schramsberg in memory of the co-founder of the pioneering sparkling wine cellar in Napa Valley, Jamie Davies, who died Tuesday at the age of 73 after living with Parkinson’s disease for many years.

I had known her and her husband Jack Davies (who died in 1998), since the early 1980s when I was the cub reporter- photographer- editor at the St. Helena Star newspaper. I counted her as an especially friendly face in the crowd at wine events in Napa, San Francisco and New York over the years. As did many other journalists, restaurateurs, chefs and wine sales people.

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My post defending California Pinot Noir on Monday stirred up quite a bit of discussion. Good comments about Burgundy vs. US wines got me thinking about aging. It’s accepted that well-balanced wines, not blockbusters, are the wines that are supposed to age well.

So how does this apply to Pinot Noir?

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A significant rain soaked the Bay Area last night, and I’ve got to believe that the .75 to 1.5 inches that fell have at least a few winemakers worried. They always say that Cabernet Sauvignon is practically impervious to rain, and since much of what’s left to harvest around Napa and Sonoma counties is Cabernet there’s no reason to panic about the vintage.

But other grapes are still hanging out there on the vines, including some Merlot and Pinot Noir, which are pervious to water-borne problems including the bad form of Botrytis and various types of mildew that could move into the vines, especially if the weather remains lukewarm and humid. Rain at harvest time also can get drawn up by the roots and into the grapes, slowing the ripening process and potentially diluting flavors.

We got lucky and picked our Merlot for home consumption over the weekend when it was warm and dry. Forgive me for getting a little smug on Monday, bragging about finding free grapes to make wine with in some years. This year the story was a little different.

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It’s easy to lapse into an all-Cabernet diet here in Napa Valley, so it’s refreshing to try something different whenever possible. I had a great time drinking three out-of-the-box bottles recently.

A thirst-quenching and slightly off-beat white is a Semillon from the new Fortitude brand of Etude Wines, based in Napa. You could spend a lot of time in wine shops and not encounter any varietal Semillon from this state.

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Once upon a time, in the 1960s, Pinot Noir was practically nonexistent in America. But then a young winemaker named David Lett, educated in California, moved to the Willamette Valley, founded The Eyrie Vineyard and with many years of hard work put Pinot Noir on the map.

Jump to the 1970s and practically no one had heard of Syrah either. A young winemaker named Gary Eberle began working with this Rhone grape variety at the Estrella River Winery in Paso Robles, and pretty soon founded his own winery to make Syrah as well as other wines. Paso Robles became synonymous with Syrah as the varietal became a staple on wine lists and in home cellars.

Similar trend-setters are laboring today to perfect the next unique varietals. In the early stages of a grape’s introduction to North America we don’t always know who the eventual masters of it are, though. Take Tempranillo, the Spanish grape that forms the backbone of Rioja’s elegant, and Ribera del Duero’s powerful, wines.

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It’s been down so long, bottom looked like up, as the old blues refrain goes. But now California Petite Sirah, of all varieties, is hot. The responsive people at Nielsen Scantrack answered a Wines & Vines request this week with a report that showed Petite Sirah sales at the thousands of supermarkets, drug and major liquor stores whose sales they tally have gone up more than 25 percent in the last year!

It was good validation for the grape grower and winery members of the Petite Sirah support group, PS I Love You, who gathered in northern Sonoma this week for their annual meeting and the sixth annual Petite Sirah Noble Symposium at Foppiano Vineyards, which has been making the deep, dark, tannic and age-worthy red-wine varietal since the beginning of time.

For fans of big reds, the good news is that more and more wineries are making Petite Sirah, and they’ve modified their grape growing and winemaking practices to make a more velvety, approachable wine that still has lots of body and tannin to sink your teeth into. I tasted 21 current or recent releases there and they were eye-opening.

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