The UnCorker

Washington State- In Search of Identity

Is it possible to love sculpture, but hate sculpture gardens?
Wandering around Seattle Art Museum’s new sculpture garden got The UnCorker musing about Washington State wine- maybe sculpture makes us thirsty, possibly the parallels were just to hard to ignore.

Richard Serra’s ‘Wake’ is an immersive experience- thoughtful and elegant- emerging from it, you spy Roy McMakin’s piece, ‘Love and Loss’- a piece of  lightweight pop-art with all the visual appeal of the golden arches on a stretch of interstate. Moving along, one bumps into Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Typewriter Eraser Scale X’ completely abstract to anyone under 30.

I was afraid that the juxtaposition of so many wildly divergent styles left me with more questions then answers-any one of these experienced on its own could in some way be definitive, together its a hot mess of conceptual misfires, the great diluted with the good and brought low by the very questionable. Moreover, its hard to figure out what, if any context the sculptures were made in, or to discern the artists intent.
This brings us to the grapes of Washington;
Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, Pinot Gris, Rousanne, Muller Thurgau, Viognier, Muscat Ottonel, Orange Muscat, Aligote, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet franc, Merlot, Syrah, Petit Sirah, Petit Verdot, Malbec, Sangiovese, Touriga, Tempranillo, Pinot Noir, Grenache, Lemberger (Blue Franc), Barbera, Nebbiolo, Mouvedre, Zinfandel…….

In 1970, Washington State had only two wineries, both based on single, small vineyards producing white wines. Since then, Washington has become the second biggest wine producer in the states.

Driving from Seattle to Eastern Washington on 90, you go through the hi-tech hi-wealth belt created by Microsoft and the tech boom, into the Cascades. Its a journey that takes you into the hinterland quickly. Driving through the mountains, maybe you’ll stop in Roslyn for breakfast- its where Northern Exposure was filmed, and feels properly desolate. East of the mountains, you arrive at a landscape uninviting and bleak- the topography the only features; no trees or landmarks- featureless but for the scrub-covered rolling hills and moraine. As you go on, the feeling of desolation grows stronger, jarring coming from the Puget Sound to this in a mornings drive.

More eerie then beautiful- Eastern Washington looks like the moon.

This feeling of separation from civilization is compounded at many of the wineries- in tasting room after tasting room, there is a detachment from the greater wine world, and it shows.

On a recent visit to Rattlesnake Hills, an AVA just southeast of Yakima, The UnCorker visited vineyards and tasting rooms on a stretch of Highway 82 between Yakima and Prosser, where   there are dozens of wineries-

In the scheme of things, wine in Washington State is as new as the internet, and like it, unpredictable. At times this is frustrating and disappointing. Like a sculpture garden, context was lacking- That goes a long way to explaining the surfeit of grapes; there are no natives, so what will work is a matter of trial and error. This experimentation hasn’t made Washington’s wines easy to understand-

Winemakers in Washington wonder why their wineries are unheard of outside of Washington while displaying their dozens of labels. They all make several cuvees, low end to high, often with no varietals listed, but often with names from the prosaic, i.e. “Bistro Red”, to the confusing, “Purple Haze” to the just plain out of touch bizarre “Bung Dog Red”. Bonnair, the producer of Bung Dog blends malbec, pinot noir, cabernet franc and petit verdot in this bottling- its light and appetizing, spicy and soft, and if you drive to the winery, it will set you back about 8 bucks a bottle-
Bonnair also grows Touriga, and Tinta Çao and Tinta Madera, to make a port. At Portteus, another Rattlesnake Hills winery, the tasting room guy was trying to play himself a solo game of ping pong when we arrived, the only visitors of the day.
A look at the vineyards showed blocks of malbec next to pinot noir next to sangiovese next to zinfandel. Portteus makes some solid wines- a beautiful cabernet sauvignon, more Bordelaise then Napa, as well as a seemingly endless offering of varietal bottlings and blends- an overblown, soggy chardonnay, a cloying orange muscat-within one winery and to the next, grapes and styles vary crazily. We wondered, is this a region in creative ferment? Are they blindly groping forward? Is it too soon to tell?

This got us thinking of all of the world’s emerging wine regions; if not tied to a tradition, indigenous cuisine or part of a diverse body of crops, what do these regions and their wines have to offer? The UnCorker doesn’t advocate for a narrow Old-World only approach to drinking, quite the contrary, but  the wine world is abuzz with natural, bio-dynamic, small-producer, slow food, organic, locavorism. Do these words have meaning for most wine drinkers? Are they significant as more then just advertising and marketing? Are they simply more walls put up between producer and consumer? Hip geeksterisms? Is wine an object invested with meaning and tradition, i.e. context, or something to be manipulated?  Would the French blend pinot noir with malbec? Quel Horror, no- would the Italians? Well, maybe- one of the oldest wine producing lands in the world is always mixing the old and new, experimenting and playing, breaking rules and bringing inspired new things into the world. Of course for the Italians its all tempered with the knowledge and experience of thousands of years. Forty years ago there were predictions of the death of Italian wine, based simply on the introduction of the barrique by Gaja-more or less universally accepted today. Now the Italians are growing tannat in Trentino and muller thurgau in Basilicata, and no one freaks out.

Eastern Washington is and always has been a land of mono-cropping; apples, pears, and hops- the lion’s share of the worlds hops are produced here- these are commodity crops into which grapes fit neatly. The winery most associated with Washington State is Columbia Crest, with a production of 1.7 million cases of wine a year, it could hardly be otherwise- yet this huge industrial producer also took Wine Spectators Wine of the Year Award with their 2005 Columbia Valley Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. This is good and bad news for a wine region still trying to find itself. Will wineries try to emulate the success by making critic-pleasing muscular wines in an international style, or try to be different.

There seems to be a divide in wines and styles in Washington State, between those in Western Washington that buy their fruit from eastern growers and make their wine around Seattle and the town of Woodinville- many of these are the more well known wineries; Chaleur Estates, Owen Sullivan, and Andrew Will to name a few. These wines tend to be more in touch with the industry, making a handful of wines, mostly from Bordeaux grapes, and mostly red, these are big polished wines that get press and critical acclaim. The other side of this coin is wineries you’ve probably never heard of, scraping for the market and attention, but often seeming unawares of the greater wine world. Is that unawareness a bad thing though? Bonnair makes a lovely cabernet franc that is a dead-ringer for a perfect, modest Bourgeil or Chinon, all tomato leaf and tobacco, for 3 times the price, Owen Sullivan makes a Champoux Vineyard Cabernet Franc that is rich, muscular, and almost completely devoid of character, and is a lousy dinner companion besides.

Will they be defined by cabernet sauvignon, as the wine press seems to want them to be, or will it be a combination of things? Merlot and syrah are exceptional, semillion as well- So how to understand Washington State? Other regions are easy because we identify them with what they mostly do; when you think Argentina, malbec comes to mind, Oregon, easy,  pinots noir and gris, New Zealand is sauvignon blanc and pinot noir, Chile is the land of cheap cabernet sauvignon.

Washington State will, for sure, be a powerhouse in the wine world in the coming decades, what they produce, and how we think of them are yet to be determined.

Weird Wine of The Week: Eric Chevalier’s Fie Gris

Can a wine made with the heirloom savignon blanc ancestor “Fie Gris” take on a world class Sancerre?  What would happen if you took one of uber-importer Kermit Lynch’s more off-the-wall discoveries and faced it off against a classic, famous appellation wine in the same price range?   Does it hold up?  Is there any compelling evidence that a wine-drinker – when given the choice – should choose to go weird?

Well, in general we think so.  That’s why we spend so much time flirting around the edges of what’s available in the US wine market – partly out of boredom, but also because there is a lot of value lurking off in the shadows.

Fie Gris vines were discovered in Tourraine and eslewhere in the southern Loire and are believed to be the ancestors – the pre-Phylloxera ancestors! – of savignon blanc.  This sounds so promising right from the get-go.   After all, it was Phylloxera that wiped out so many strains of heirloom grapes throughout Europe and forced growers onto mostly the same rootstocks and clone varieties.

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Weird Wine of the Week: Dan Ackroyd 2007 Pinot Noir, Ontario

When you’re drinking the weird stuff and it happens to be of a classic varietal, it’s important to have benchmark bottles on which to rest your comparisons – ideally, consumed at the same time. But when it comes to Canadian Pinot Noir, it feels unfair to compare it to Old World (Burgundy, Loire, Germany), Warm Weather New World (California, Australia, Chile), or evenCool Weather New World (other parts of California, New Zealand, & Oregon). I mean, c’mon… it’s Canada. I guess we could have opened a bottle of something from New York State’s Finger Lakes region- the closest semi-major producing region of Pinot Noir – but, hey, why start now? So we didn’t compare it with anything. We just popped this sucker – which, yes, is produced at the eponymous winery of that Dan Ackroyd – and took a big, great white sniff and taste. Fresh delicous smelling fruit, loamy soft tannins, and decent extraction. On the palate, we’re missing some acidity which would have livened things up but overall this isn’t bad at all! And guess what – it’s $14 Canadian at the duty-free shop. For a varietal that we’ve almost completely sworn off if we encounter a bottle under $20 any more.

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A Contrast in Fiano- De Conciliis Goes Both Ways

The Gambero Rosso says Bruno De Conciliis is a “sort of modern samuri”- to be honest, we have no idea what they’re talking about, though his wines do kill.

In the remote Campanian region of  Cilento, it is sun-baked mountains and hills, ancient rock and soil, scrub and herbs grow wild and the ancient grapes, aglianico and fiano thrive. De Conciliis vineyards run down toward the Mediterrean- this rugged beauty is reflected in the wines.

Viticoltori De Conciliis is not afraid to take chances, and sometimes they fall short- their passito Ra!, first made of barbera, now mostly aglianico, was a very difficult wine to like or understand when they first started making it- tart and cooked, it hammered the palate and the senses into a strange sort of defeat. Mostly though, their risks pay dividends- producing fiano in two radically different ways showcases not just the beauty of Fiano in the right hands, the skills of the De Conciliis’s, but also provides us with a bit of a history lesson.

The Romans knew Fiano as Vitis Apiana, meaning the bees were all over it, prized for its pinenut hazelnut nuttiness, its fresh herbacousness, an intriguing smokiness, and its ability to retain a fresh, acidic profile in the heat of southern Italy.

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Weird Wine of the Week: 2004 Anima Negra ‘An’ Mallorca

Here we have a wine that has been so successful at clawing it’s way out of weirdness status, that it’s tempting to think of it as normal. We refer, of course, to the stellar reputation, wide (ish) distribution, abundant good press, and all around Parker-y goodness that rains down on the folks at Anima Negra. But people, let’s do a reality check here! First of all, the wine is from Mallorca – a now swank and touristy island off the coast of Spain where it’s easier to catch a glimpse of Catherine Zeta Jones than it is to find yourself a glass of truly great vino (at least that’s exported). Second of all, the wine is made almost exclusively from an heirloom, indigenous grape varietal that grows only on this surprisingly fertile rock out in the Balearic chain of islands -Callet – which is in itself, a pretty weird product of Mother Nature’s imagination. Thirdly, the winemaker manages to capture the one-off, outsized personality of this place in the bottle in a way that his Catalan neighbors on the mainland – even those in Priorat – are rightly jealous of. Oh, and did we mention that this stuff’s made by a trio of young bucks with a real commitment to naturalistic minimalism – something that is still rare in Spanish winemaking?

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Weird Wine(s) of the Week- 2007 Coenobium & Coenobium Rusticum Monastero Suoro Cistercensi

Coenobium is latin; in this sense it refers to communal monasticism, or cenobitic living. This blend of malvasia, grecchetto, verdicchio and trebbiano is an organically produced beauty from the Lazio hills, north of Rome, and qualifies as WWOW for a bunch of reasons.

The first and most obvious being the producers themselves; nuns- that’s right, sisters. Living cenobitically, as it were. Lives given over to prayer, worship and communal labor. Living modestly on the produce they can grow, or in this case, vinify.

If we UnCorker’s had a time machine(and what we wouldn’t give for that) we could go back to a time long ago when religious orders kept viticulture alive. As you’ve read in these pages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the dark ages, it was the church that kept all that the Roman’s had learned about viticulture alive. Today, we don’t think twice about drinking beer made by Belgian Trappists, but wine made by nuns- weird.

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Sokol Blosser Evolution No. 9 Oregon

Just where does lie the history of the mondo-blend? Evolution No. 9 uses nine different grapes. Of course, by building their wine’s brand around this fact it makes it feel like a gimmick. But is this sort of profligate blending an advantage or disadvantage? Is there any logic in it? And as a new breed of wine snob that fetishizes minimalism and naturalism, should we reward such blatant busy-dom with our precious wine-bucks?

First of all, before you go off thinking single varietal wines are somehow more restrained and artistically valid efforts, it should be stated up front that blending is indisputably a part of the winemakers craft. Even within a varietal, winemakers will vinify the cuvees from various vineyards or lots within a vineyard separately then blend these together to achieve a house style or preferred style. And this just touches the surface of the blender’s art. Free run juices are blended with pressed juices. Champagnes are bascially assemblages of all sorts of complicated blending. Even in scientific winemaking where de-alcoholization techniques are used, they will actually remove alcohol from just part of the original wine. Within that isolated part they will remove varying degrees of alcohol in separate batches, and then, based on pure sensory preference, will blend these back together until the desired tasting result is achieved. And blending has never been associated with a lack of quality. Penfold’s Grange, one of the world’s most expensive wines, is a multi-regional blend with grapes sourced as far as 300 miles apart. Let’s face it. Winemaking is a subjective art, and blending is the most expressive, personality driven bit of the whole process.

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P.S. I’m Not Sure What To Think of You

Petite Sirah is a wine, that at least in California, is particularly difficult to make generalizations about – and that’s not only because folks can’t agree how to spell it. Part of this confusion is due to the immense variety within the vineyards themselves. A lot of California Petite Sirah bottlings are a “field blend” (aka a crap shoot of mixed grape varieties growing together). This mostly has to do with the history of this grape in the state. It’s been there a long time, planted in the 18th century by Italian immigrants, who didn’t always know exactly what they were planting. Compounding the confusion is the fact that the term was thrown around loosely to describe a variety of Syrah-like grapes in the region until 1997, when DNA testing proved that most of it really was the unloved (in France anyways) grape called Durif. But since many Petite Sirah plantings in California pre-date this knowledge, the wines carrying this grape’s name on the label can be a bit of a hodgepodge.

(Photo of Petite Syrah grapes in veraison by pixelish)

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A Manly Rosé: Parés Baltà Ros De Pacs

One of the tiredest arguments in all of winedom is that drinking rosé is nothing to be embarrassed about anymore.   But let’s face it – unless you’re standing on a petanque court with a bunch of Provencal pensioners- it’s not really something dudes order when they are out amongst themselves.  After all, the stuff’s pink.  And that’s all we need to say.  Therefore, those of us who lack total confidence in our ability to project manliness are drawn towards the dark and cranberry-tinted- the more extracted, medium weight entries of the genre.   These look a little less effete in the glass to the casual observer.  And if it tastes strong and bites back a little on the finish so much the better.  Nothing wrong with a little burn going down to compensate for the summery breeziness of the whole thing.

The king of manly Rosés in our opinion is Tavel AOC.   King Philip IV drank the stuff on horseback and declared it the only wine worth drinking – and this from a somber Spaniard who is on record for only laughing in public three times in his entire life.  Tavel can be a full-bodied monster that stands up to aging.  Known for candied aromas but often having surprising gravitas, Tavel’s masculinity is evident in it’s color and intensity of flavor.   But unlike a lot of ham-fisted new world attempts at big rosé – a contradiction in terms that denies what is nice about pink wine in the first place – it maintains it’s lightness, it’s minerality, and it’s refreshing acidity.  For the most part we agree with BTYH that the best rose’s come from France, but if we have a soft spot for dark, macerated asskickers it’s because it appeals to the dude in us (at least, those of us at the UnCorker who are dudes.)

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Failla Syrah Que

Under cute, festive titles sometimes lurk ambitious wines. Look at the Australians, for chrissakes, who have made a culture out of serious wine people competing for the dorkiest name possible to slap onto a label. The Que Syrah vineyard is in the northerly reaches of the Sonoma coast area – and is one of the cooler climate Syrah vineyards in all of California. Intrigued by top Syrah maker Failla’s success with this vineyard in the past, and noticing that they were no longer releasing wines made from this particular source of fruit, we decided to seek out where it was available now – which turns out to be Boheme Wines, who currently has a 2005 Que Syrah Vineyard Syrah in release.

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