Marglin on Taste

Pinot noir is the premier varietal grown in Oregon, but it’s had a long and bumpy ride, and in many circles it is still a hard sell. I understand this, and I am here to help. That is, I am here to tell you that you must taste the recent releases of these wines to believe them. Because 1998 and 1999 were exceptional years for Oregon pinot noirs, and the 2000s in the barrel are tasting mighty good.

Oregon hasn’t yet had 30 years of making fine wines. Its first real vineyards of note were planted in 1972 and 1973, when Dick Erath of Erath Vineyards and David Lett of Eyrie left California and planted grapes near the town of Dundee. They decided, as young, impetuous, and educated winemakers, that Oregon could make great Burgundian wines (pinot noir and chardonnay). And they were right. Oregon now has 175 wineries “” two and a half times as many as it did in 1990.

But not everyone swoons over Oregon, and with good reason. First, the weather usually does not conduce to great winemaking: it’s not warm and sunny enough during flowering, and it tends to rain at harvest time. Moreover, the soil tends to be too rich in Oregon’s main wine region, the Willamette Valley, which runs from Eugene to Portland (the other regions are the Umpqua and Rogue Valleys). Wine grapes like thinner soils, so the vine can go deeper and experience more stress. So Oregon has had many mediocre vintages recently.

Even in decent years, you need ” game ” to make great wines. While ” game ” relies on talent, it also requires ample capital, which many Oregon wineries lack (unlike their Napa Valley competitors). So with less money than they need, and not such great weather “” and with Oregon already kind of a rogue state, off the beaten track “” when it comes time to sell the wines beyond the West Coast, it isn’t easy.

Another problem lies in the nature of pinot noir itself. A delicate and difficult grape, it can make the greatest wines, but it is very easy to make mistakes. Most pinot noirs have at least three lives after release. First, a young, fruity phase, when the wine is brash, tart, seductive, yet gangly “” like a Lolita, but legal to enjoy. In its second phase, the wine goes dumb. You smell the barnyard, and the fruit gets buried under the tea, resulting in fairly subdued and unapproachable wines. This awkward phase can set in anywhere from three to six years from its vintage year, and can last for four to eight years. Then, either the wine dies a not-so-graceful death, or it opens up and becomes a mature and elegant lady, seductive, with soft texture and ample complexity, plus some glints of the fruit of its youth. If you catch a wine in its dumb phase, it won’t do much for you.

The economics of wine have pretty much forced wineries to produce wines that taste great right out of the gate. The winery has to move the product, and you cannot sell wines that do not appeal to most consumers. In their young and fruity phase, pinot noirs can be unreliable whippersnappers; but when well-made and built for early consumption, they will rock your world. Mark these words: young, classy pinot noirs are the most versatile red wines made. Period.

Back to Oregon. The handful of California refugees who came north to try their hand at making fine wines succeeded for the most part. Oregon now has a bona fide wine industry, and when the renowned Drouhin family of Burgundy bought land in Oregon and began to produce wonderful pinot noirs, it was ” game on ” time. In 1994, good weather came together with winemaking expertise, and a lot of world-class wine was produced. But many of these have not aged well, or they have yet to come out of their ” dumb ” phase (and may never do so). Thin production marked 1995 and 1997; long-lasting but hard-to-approach-early wines arrived in 1996.

But in 1998, though the crop was small, the pinot noirs for the most part have been stupendous. You get strawberry and bright cherry, a little cola, and lots of funk. Mossy banks, barnyard odors, the fungus, the snap, crackle, all sorts of exciting descriptors: the wines come alive in your mouth. And the 1999s were darned good, maybe even better “” at least there’s more of them. It’s hard to say, because both vintages are so good, with so many of the wines brimming with flavor.

The 2000s should be special, too. So right now, you have the right conditions to find excellent values: two (maybe three) great years in a row, and no one raising prices. Industry insiders are uncertain about these wines, but many know that they are the real deal. A lot of the 1998s have already sold to folks who don’t care that Wine Spectator rarely gives any Oregon pinot noir more than 90 points. But you’ll find some, and loads of those great 1999s. Some wineries I like are Foris (from the south), Bridgeview, Domaine Drouhin, Willamette Valley Vineyards, Ken Wright, Panther Creek, Cristom, Erath, Rex Hill, Golden Valley, Adelsheim, Sokol Blosser, and King Estate. I could go on.

If you like velvet and cherries and strawberries, you’ll be blown away by the array of flavors in young Oregon pinots. If you’re eating tuna, sushi, a juicy steak, or barbecued chicken “” heck, even pork “” you’ll agree that a fruity Oregon pinot noir is the perfect match. You want to give these wines a chance.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet …

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

If you walk into a liquor store and buy yourself a bottle of wine labeled california, how sweet, so to speak, can you expect it to be? What does ” California ” mean as a designation? Before we get into the answers and their actual wine-drinking ramifications, let’s put some facts on the table: 90 percent of all wine made in this country comes from California, where producers crushed 2.6 million tons of grapes in 1999 (a rather light year). Many California wines rival the world’s best.

Labels are the key to decoding Golden State wines. When a label says only ” California, ” it means that the wine was made (or finished) in that state, and 100 percent of its grapes “” as required by California law “” were grown there. And under federal law, for a blended wine to carry the designation of one of the 145 American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) approved by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 85 percent of the grapes that went into the wine must have been grown within that area.

When it comes to ” single-vineyard ” designations, the standards are even stricter: 95 percent of the wine’s grapes must have grown in the named vineyard. With premium ($10 to $14) and ultra-premium (above $14) wines, the trend has been toward more of this single-vineyard labeling and marketing. These wines are also called ” estate-bottled, ” meaning the winemaker owns most of the fruit in the wine, and didn’t have to purchase it. Winemakers have found that they can sell such bottlings for a lot more money, and consumers love knowing just which vines produced the grapes that made their wine.

In the $10 range, however, it’s lately been possible to find a number of truly excellent bottles with the California ” appellation of origin ” label, and no AVA or other designation. Sometimes wineries choose to take single-vineyard wines and label them this way. Miner’s viognier offers an example: most of its fruit comes from the Simpson Vineyard, but the wine is simply labeled ” California ” “” perhaps because the vintner does not want to identify the wine’s originating region, Madera, which is not particularly known for producing great wines.

But another reason ” California ” wines can be so good is the return to the time-honored art of blending. Although I can devour those high-end, single-vineyard wines with the best of them, I am also a huge fan of blends, as they tend to highlight the winemaker’s skill. I have tasted more than a dozen excellent California wines over the past few weeks, all of them tremendous values. I don’t need to know which field my grapes were grown in, or the exact composition of the wines. I have come to trust that good wineries tend to make good wine, or they won’t put it on the shelves “” their brand name is too precious over the long haul.

I do remember a time when the ” California ” designation often indicated lower quality: the fruit grew in the hot, dry valley, rather than on the coastal side of the hills, and the wines were made from cheap, mass-produced grapes. This kind of fruit was low in acid, and you could taste that. At this stage, though, seeing ” California ” alone on a label is, if not an enticement, then at least not a disincentive to trying a wine. Some mediocre (or even jug-caliber) wines may carry that label, but if you know the winery, then the bottle will probably be pretty good. Indeed, since winemakers rarely use all the fruit from any one vineyard, the excess from these lots can be blended to make some darn good wine, even in less-than-stellar years.

One indication of the ” California ” label’s swing back to respectability is the highly political opposition by the Wine Institute, the public-policy advocacy association of California wineries, to the proposed ” California Coast ” AVA. Since such an AVA would be vast, stretching from Mexico to Mendocino, it would have little meaning, and could unduly benefit those major wineries that have access to lots of the grapes grown near the Pacific, at the expense of all the non-coastal areas of California. The Wine Institute has never before opposed a proposed AVA; it justifies its position in part by noting that the ” Coast ” AVA could dilute the meaning of the ” California ” appellation of origin.

At the end of the day (and drinking wine while watching a California sunset is one of life’s grander pleasures), ” California ” has largely come to mean ” quality. ” Some of my favorite California winemakers include Hess, Pepperwood Grove, Beaulieu Vineyard, Beringer, Bogle, Fetzer, and Baron Herzog. With help from your local wine store, you can find your own favorites when looking for those less expensive, high-quality wines.

California, here I come.

Chardonnay is the most sought-after and expensive dry white wine in the world. Period. In its Burgundian incarnations, it reaches sublime heights: Le Montrachet is the greatest dry white wine I’ve tasted, along with its noble cousins, Puligny-Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet, and Chassagne-Montrachet. Chardonnay is also the grape used to make the more buttery Meursaults and those flinty, un-oaked Chablis.

Most of us, of course, can’t afford white Burgundies. But just about every wine region in the world “” including California, Oregon, Washington, Long Island, Massachusetts, upstate New York, British Columbia, Lake Erie, southern France, Italy, Austria, Spain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Chile “” now makes some good chardonnay. The varietal leads US wine consumption by a huge margin. The bottom line: it’s the world’s dominant white grape.

Before 1930, however, very little chardonnay was planted in the Western Hemisphere. It’s difficult and costly to cultivate: unless the weather and growing conditions are perfect, the grapes are susceptible to early frost and late bunch rot. The moment of truth comes at harvest. Unless chardonnay is perfectly ripe “” or almost overripe “” it lacks the distinctive flavors that can make it such a fine wine. The Burgundians are masters of picking the grapes at perfect ripeness.

In 1962, there were about 150 acres of chardonnay planted in California. By 1982, that number had increased to 22,076. But that was just the beginning: by 1999, total acreage had reached 102,000 acres. That’s a whole lot of grapes, especially when you consider there are only 61,000 acres of cabernet sauvignon in California.

How did this come about? Until about 1971, nobody in the US really understood the chardonnay grape or how to handle it; people confused it with pinot blanc or a mutation of pinot noir, calling it ” pinot chardonnay. ” (Chardonnay is actually a French descendant of a cross between pinot noir and the obscure gouais blanc grape.) But in the 1970s, the American wine industry, mainly in California, started to see the genius behind Robert Mondavi’s varietal labeling “” that is, calling the wine ” chardonnay ” or ” cabernet sauvignon ” or ” merlot ” rather than ” hearty Burgundy ” or ” Chablis ” or whatever fanciful name the marketers came up with.

At about the same time, in 1976, California chardonnays began blowing away white Burgundies in Stephen Spurrier’s famous blind tastings in Paris. California’s winemakers had discovered that chardonnay was its own phenomenon, not just a white variant of pinot noir. The ” pinot ” was dropped from the name, wineries planted more, and they started targeting women drinkers.

Until the early 1970s, wine was thought of as a dinner accompaniment; it was not, as it is now, versatile enough to be a cocktail in this country. But with the health craze of the ’70s in full, er, swing, wine became seen as a healthy choice at a bar “” better for you than hard alcohol, but with just as much ” kick. ” Chardonnay was sophisticated (you had to know the name of the grape), relatively cheap (thanks to mass production in California), and fairly easy to say (and swallow). Voilà “” it became the pre-dinner drink of choice.

Sadly, this popularity resulted in a glut of mediocre chardonnays, and plenty that were downright poor. When the winemakers figured out that Americans like the taste of oak, many of them took the easy and less expensive way of attaining that taste: rather than aging the wine in oak barrels (especially the expensive French oak), they started throwing wood chips into the fermentation tanks. Today, only 20 percent of the grapes crushed in California are chardonnay, and 80 percent of the resulting wine is bland at best “” and undrinkable at worst.

Still, chardonnay remains a wonderful beverage, especially when it’s well chilled. And for between $10 and $20, you can get a bottle that will blow you away. So forget about its image, because chardonnay is not just for cocktail hour anymore. It’s the main grape in most sparkling wines, versatile enough to go with a range of foods, and when it works, its myriad flavors “” ranging from tropical fruit to pears and apples to nuts and honey, with hints of vanilla and even Queen Anne cherries “” are sublime.

A brief note on the wine notes for this column: not all these wines are available, or not at the quoted price. The point of these notes is not to provide a shopping list, but to give an idea of what you might find if you go looking for the type of wine I’ve discussed.

1999 Saint-Véran ” Les Deux Moulins ” Louis Latour ($9.99). A Goldilocks chardonnay, not too tart yet not too sweet, with Granny Smith apples and a plush finish. Lively, proper depth “” a wonderful wine, year in and year out. Worth looking for.

1998 Geoff Weaver Lenswood Chardonnay South Australia ($10.99). Crisp and green, not fully ripe, but lean and mean. A fine accompaniment to light pastas, Oriental chicken salads, egg or spring rolls, or even a well-sauced Dover sole.

2000 Tenimenti Angelini ” Renaio ” Chardonnay Montepulciano ($11.99). Smoky, deep, succulent. Like many Italian chards, it’s lighter in style, but has plenty of wood, earth, and the usual fruit suspects. Great with smoky meats or tomato-based sauces with plenty of garlic.

2000 Chardonnay Edna Valley Vineyard Paragon San Luis Obispo ($12.99). Quite crisp and mineral-y. Not overly oaked, but most engaging on the palate. A racy wine, fine with fish (shell or otherwise) or tomato sauces. A true value.

1998 Chardonnay Long Vineyard Estate Napa Valley ($55). Steep, super-elegant, with pear, honey, and vanilla. A prime exemplar, competitive with great white Burgundies. More like a Puligny-Montrachet than a Meursault (and about as expensive).