The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger

Author:Michael Steinberger [Steinberger, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cooking, Beverages, Wine
ISBN: 9780393349771
Google: V0UoAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0393082717
Barnesnoble: 0393082717
Goodreads: 17573659
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

For most of the past two decades, a lot of vines were planted in California not because they were necessarily compatible with the vineyards but simply because they were fashionable grapes. Pinot Noir is hot—let’s plant some Pinot here! Even at the highest end, proper site selection was often treated as a secondary concern. Fueled by the tech boom, a number of newly enriched tycoons started wineries in Napa in the 1990s. Their aim was to produce boutique wines that would garner high scores from Parker and the Wine Spectator and become trophies for other rich people, and they all seemed to think that hiring big-name consulting winemakers—Helen Turley, Michel Rolland, Heidi Barrett—ultimately mattered more than their choice of vineyards. For the purpose of achieving ecstatic reviews from Parker and the Spectator, that seems to have been true.

However, a lot of those wines have lost their cachet in recent years. Part of it is the economic downturn—consumers are no longer quite so willing to drop $150 or $200 (or more) on a bottle of Napa Cabernet—but I have to believe that part of it is also that many of these wines just weren’t very interesting. They all had the same basic taste profile: overripe fruit, lots of new oak, and little, if any, obvious site expression. These wines provoked a strong backlash in the geekier precincts of the wine world; indeed, California became every wine geek’s favorite punching bag. Denouncing California wines as overripe, overoaked, overwrought, and overpriced was commonplace in these circles. In fact, scorning California was considered a mark of sophistication, a measure of one’s wine savviness. The scorn wasn’t unjustified: many higher-end California wines were oafish confections.

But recent years have also seen the emergence of a group of winemakers who are fixated on the notion of terroir and who are determined to put a different face on California wines—to show that California can produce balanced, elegant, subtle wines. With Burgundy rather than Bordeaux as their beacon, they have been seeking out cool-climate sites in which to plant Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (as well as some other grape varieties, notably Syrah), and the results have been hugely impressive. These are some of the most exciting wines to emerge from California, and they suggest that after a two-decades-long detour, California is back on track to realizing the promise that the Judgment of Paris hinted at.

So who are the winemakers at the vanguard of this movement? They include a former Wall Streeter turned Pinot Noir specialist named Jamie Kutch, the San Francisco sommelier Rajat Parr, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Kevin Harvey. All three honed their palates on Burgundies and set out to make wines that showed the same finesse and site expression of Burgundies. Others followed a more twisted path. Take Wells Guthrie, a Los Angeles native in his early forties. In 2000, Guthrie launched a Sonoma-based winery called Copain. His lush, high-alcohol Pinot Noirs and Syrahs quickly earned stellar ratings from Parker and other critics and a loyal following among consumers.

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