Robert Sinskey Vineyards

Know Your Reserve, A History Lesson

Reserve means nothing unless you know the intent of the producer. Historically, a reserve was the wine the vintner kept to share with friends and family. This distinctive wine may have been culled from special barrels, selected from the most interesting vineyard blocks, or aged longer than other bottlings. When a vintner brought out his reserve wine, it was cause for celebration.

Before long, collectors sniffed out these special bottlings and sought to buy them. The wines commanded premium prices and often sold out quickly. Predictably, many lower priced mass-market wineries crashed the party, some making hundreds of thousands of cases of so-called “reserve” wines.

These mass-produced “reserve” wines confused the public so much that, almost twenty years ago, organizations such as the Wine Institute and the Napa Valley Vintners Association attempted to legally define the term “reserve.” They couldn’t do it. Every vintner had his or her own idea of what “reserve” meant. They argued over whether the wine should be aged in new oak barrels and for how long. Then they argued over the fact that oak couldn’t be used as a marker at all because some reserve level wines didn’t need oak - say a white wine from a select vineyard block where only the vintner could have the perspective to assess relative quality. This failure to define the term left the consumer to decipher the meaning of “reserve” on each bottle of wine.

Vineyard Reserve By The Bay

What do you call a wine that is not made every year, is a blend of three grapes whose ratio changes each vintage, is your best effort for the place where the grapes are grown, is usually aged longer in the cellar and has the potential to age, once bottled, longer than other wines in your portfolio? RSV simply calls it, Vineyard Reserve.

RSV has three vineyards in Carneros planted to Bordeaux varieties. They are all strategically placed on the Napa side of Carneros: one in the northern foothills, one in the southern flatlands just a stone’s throw from the bay, and one in between the other two in rolling hill country. All of the vineyards are influenced by their proximity to the San Pablo Bay, yet each individual vineyard has its own characteristics. While some of the wines of RSV are made from grapes from a single vineyard location and carry a vineyard designate, each vineyard is further divided up into many small lots and it is from these small lots that the selections are made for the Vineyard Reserve.

Every year, mother nature does what she wants to do. This means that certain vineyard blocks will, in any given year, perform better than others. RSV responds by selecting the individual lots that are particularly expressive and complimentary. The goal is to make an elegant age-worthy wine in the St. Emilion style that is unique to Carneros. RSV affectionately describes this wine as a St. Emilion with a suntan.

Cool Breezes, Warm Braises

I look forward to the warmth and comfort of a tender, aromatic braise whenever a cool breeze blows across Carneros. The delicate perfume of a bay leaf is an essential flavor element in beef, chicken and pork braises. Lucky for us, the Vineyard Reserve is a wonderful match for this amazing leaf and braises of all kinds, especially these succulent short ribs.

Until the next wine…
Maria

EAT: Red Wine Braised Short Ribs

A Balancing Act

Strengths and weaknesses, we all have them, and so do grapes. In Bordeaux, where their best red wines are blends, they balance the individual characteristics of each grape and how they respond to each vintage. Merlot is known for texture; yielding plump, lush wines. Cabernet Sauvignon has ample structure with a burly frame that Merlot fills in quite nicely. Add a judicious dollop of Cabernet Franc, with its front of the mouth appeal and complex dried herb perfume, and you have something where the sum is much more than its individual parts. Many of the world’s most sought after wines are crafted from this noble triumvirate and for good reason: the three combine to form complete, elegant, balanced and complex wines.

Growing grapes is all about balance. You must ensure the parity of root system, canopy and fruit. You must recognize the framework of checks and balances in which nature exists and attempt to integrate your farm into that system. Farmers often upset nature’s balance by attempting to kill everything on the farm but their crop. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, this type of farming forgoes nature’s genius solution found in diversity and neatly divides it into several problems. Nature perceives the resulting monoculture as an overly successful organism, and will work to restore balance by assaulting the offending crop with pestilence. The farmer responds with more chemicals and the unsustainable spiral continues, resulting in dead soil, unsound fruit and cookie-cutter wines.

RSV engages nature as a partner rather than an opponent in the vineyards by recognizing nature’s preference for balance and diversity. RSV’s vineyards follow the genius of nature, mimicking the oak grassland native to the land, leaving large stands of trees and native plants and encouraging growth in between and underneath the vines. Predatory insects like ladybugs and spiders help control the problem insects. The soil is alive with millions upon millions of micro-flora and –fauna hard at work creating food for the vines. Hawks and owls patrol the vineyards for troublesome rodents and scare off grape hungry birds. Sheep graze the cover crops and leave bonne merde behind, little compost machines, every one of them.

These efforts yield beautifully expressive, balanced fruit that allows a minimalist’s hand in the cellar. The finished wine is pure, with no need for enological tannins, reverse osmosis, spinning cones or micro-oxygenation. The grapes determine the character of the wine produced.

Each small block of vineyard was harvested and vinted separately, then cave aged for twenty months in 30% new French oak barrels. The wine was bottled in the winter of 2004 and further aged for two years in bottle before release.