SPRING 2010
Spring 2010 The controversy over high alcohol levels in wine continues unabated. The subject seems to arouse strong feelings because it obliquely questions one’s taste, and no one likes to be accused of having poor taste! Unquestionably, California produces too many wines that are impressively massive, but as undrinkable as cough syrup. While the underlying issue is that people have different ideas of what is good—I like oranges, you like apples—insecurity and pride get in the way, and the argument degrades into, “I’m right, and you’re wrong.” For me, every wine style has its place; I drink light, crisp, minerally rieslings with lower alcohol levels in the summertime and hearty reds like Châteauneuf du Pape and Amarone in the winter. One of the great joys of wine is that it is so varied—you can always find the right match for the meal and your mood.
However, after 30 years of winemaking, I have clear opinions of how wine needs to be structured in order to taste delicious and age gracefully. So much potential greatness is lost by waiting for more heft rather than picking grapes at just the right moment. In contrast to the general drift to pick riper and riper grapes, in the last five or six years we have redoubled our efforts to harvest ours in that two-to-three day period when one can capture every ounce of nuance and individuality that a special vineyard can produce. And I’m thrilled that the results of our efforts are finally coming in.
Yet, the quest for better-balanced wines is not only about alcohol and ripeness. New wood barrels are often used in the production of the finest wines, and many people confuse quality with the characteristic toastiness of a fine French oak barrel. I see oak as a potential destroyer of individuality, masking terroir, and since 2000 have scaled back its use dramatically. Our wines are still raised in wood; however, we now use mostly older, more neutral barrels to allow the personality of the vineyard to dominate.
We have also fundamentally changed the way we extract the flavors from red grapes. Grape skins contain a lot of character, and this is extracted by the juice during fermentation. The yeast convert the natural sugars to alcohol—which is a powerful solvent of harsh constituents in grapes—so we have modified our winemaking to capture more of the soft fruit and spice flavors earlier in the process, and avoid extraction later when the alcohol has reached higher levels. This has allowed us to make wines that are still fabulously intense in flavor but less heavy and tannic, with the added bonus that the wines that are both age-worthy and pretty tasty right now. This newsletter describes some of our latest successes with these refinements to our craft.
Adam Tolmach