The 2008 Los Carneros Pinot will be released August 13th!

Glory Days…

and the Endless Quest for Elegant Pinot Noir.

“Why can’t Napa make wines like these anymore!” came the moan like one, big communal sigh. With one sip, we’d become a bunch of old farts reminiscing over the glory days.

Let me set the stage. In the room that night was a major grape grower, a vineyard manager who makes an acclaimed wine, a successful vintner/importer/negotiant, respective spouses, Maria and myself. Dinner was a wonderfully casual affair of mushroom strudel, steak, corn, salad, veggies etc. The bottles that stimulated the conversation, however, were not so casual.

The wines were twelve to fifteen years old … and they were beautiful! They had well developed fruit with herbal notes, good acidity and balance. No fruit bombs, no barrel show-offs, just elegant wines that instilled a desire to revisit the glass, paying attention to how the wine evolved and opened during dinner.

So the question: If these wines were so good, why was Napa and the New World in general (now I know this is a broad net and there are exceptions … like those sitting at the table) making wines that were stylistically too similar to each other with sweet jammy fruit, low acid, and too much wood, making them less than pleasurable at the table?

It seems as though we are suffering from group psychosis. As vintners enter the wine industry from other disciplines (my family included) they have one directive: Make world class wines! Most have little practical knowledge of how to achieve or measure that goal. The simplest route is to hire a top winemaking consultant and vineyard manager and let them work their “magic” – which means apply a proven formula that will result in measurable returns like high scores from the major publications. It does not matter if they like their own wine so long as it garners acclaim. As one property achieves “success” the neighbors want to emulate it by copying the formula and, before long, we have edited out the distinctive qualities that make a wine special and unique.

Pinot Noir, if anything, is about distinctiveness and distinctiveness doesn’t happen by formula. Producing a classically structured Pinot Noir requires diversity and a willingness to flirt with adversity. Diversity requires a nice mix of clones and heirloom selections that respond to the land and climate in different ways, layering subtle hints of herb and fruit notes into an elegant melange of flavors and textures. Adversity comes by way of finding the edge of a climate zone and fighting to maintain balance. If the grape’s sugar ripens too early in the season, it will be too fat and flabby by the time it develops flavor. However, if it develops slowly, inducing a little nail biting at the end of the season, then it will maintain structure, resulting in a wine that will tantalize and evolve.

So how do we get vintners to change course? We don’t. We just keep doing things the good “old-fashioned” way and hope the new community of opinion leaders and savvy consumers will initiate a paradigm shift with a new perception of what defines good wine.