"What's happening now in California wines is as significant as what happened to California wines 40 years ago," said San Francisco Chronicle wine critic Jon Bonné at his May 9 panel discussion at SHED.
Forty years ago, Calistoga's Chateau Montelena won the 1976 Judgement of Paris and shocked the wine world. With the rise of the House of Mondavi, California wines were soon on the map. But they were of a certain type, often featuring a taste profile specifically created after harvest.
Joining Bonné onstage that evening were vintners Ted Lemon (Littorai), David Hirsch (Hirsch), and Duncan Arnot Meyers with winemaking partner Nathan Lee Roberts (Arnot-Roberts). Bonné hails them and others in his debut book, The New California Wine.
Hirsch proved to be the straight man on the panel, referring to wine critic Robert Parker's point system as the work of "one or two people who can count to 100 really well."
What's different 40 years on, Bonné said, is that the winemaking is really done in the field. These vintners' wines are expressions of their place, not articulations of a winemaker's overarching vision.
"California is making its case once again in a global context," Bonné stressed. "We're witnessing the true maturity of the California wine culture, resurrected after Prohibition destroyed wine in America — not just in California. There is a true curiousity and a true interest in the sense of place."
Sense of place dominated the conversation as each winemaker, led by questions from Bonné, discussed their "strange" grapes, often purposefully grown in stressed conditions, and the wine that results from them.
"When I bought an old sheep ranch near Ft. Ross," Hirsch said, "it was a gift, because it's a Pinot paradise. The only wine I knew was from Burgundy, so I had no interest in making the big wines of the time."
Meyers and Roberts are childhood friends who grew up together in Napa. Meyers became a cellar rat; Roberts' father was a cooper. Eventually they began making their own wine. The pair don't own any land, but buy grapes from all over. The Clary Ranch vineyard they patronize, they say, "pushes Syrah to the limit," resulting in a "hallmark" wine that's not actually liked by everyone. That's OK, they said.
Ted Lemon also evoked the "sense of place" phrase, saying that even though Cabernet Sauvignon had defined California wines internationally, it didn't make a fit for his Sebastopol property and, when he and his wife Heidi bought the land, "a path based on the site just wasn't done." Not that that stopped them.
"It was evident to me that site was everything," Lemon said. "We found it crazy that, in 1990, we knew a lot more about the Pinot region of the Willamette coast then we did the area right around us."
Hirsch added, "'Big Flavor' was a marketing fad, but it wasn't connected to anything. The Big Flavor [of the ’90s] really created distance from the sense of place. Returning to the land allowed us to go back in time to when most of the wine consumed was made within 10 miles of home."
The rise of the Internet has had a satisfactory impact, each said in his own way. Lemon remembered that there used to only be two critics who mattered and wineries that went unreviewed had no "portal to entry" in the consumer's consciousness. Bonné hailed the wine bloggers and internet writers who have championed the lesser-known California vintages. Hirsch talked about the consumer almost as a painter would, saying, "the consumer is part of the circle of production because without the consumer, there is no end to the circle," just as painter might bemoan that without someone to view her work, the work remains unfulfilled.
Also on hand that night were five other wineries that Bonné profiles in New California Wines: Lioco, Anthill Farms, Copain, Limerick Lane, and Radio-Coteau. After the panel concluded, attendees had a chance to taste various Pinot and Chardonnays from these newer houses. None of them tasted like the other, regardless of vintage. Each tasted exactly, well, like itself.
It's a tight-knit group, Littorai buying some of its Pinot grapes from Hirsch. Ted Lemon said at the panel's conclusion, "The highest compliment we can receive is that the Hirsch grapes we got from Hirsch taste like Hirsch."
Sense of place, the land's expression, new California wines.