Wine Bazar

One of my favorite punching bags in the world is the sorry state of California rosé. For some reason, winemakers just don’t seem to be able to produce the beautifully dry, crisp, tart rosés that I have come to expect from southern France, southern Italy, and northern Spain. These mediterranean wines are the benchmark for rosé, and most American wines fall quite short.

Which is why I’m so enthusiastic when I discover pink wines that are made well in this country. And when they′re made of exotic grape varieties, so much the better!

If you gave me three guesses as to which winery in northern California would be most likely to grow Touriga Nacional, I’d probably have ended up with York Creek Vineyards before I ran out of guesses.

The York Creek property is one of the largest and most beautiful parcels of land on the crest of Napa’s Spring Mountain. One hundred twenty-five acres of vineyards are surrounded by another 575 acres of woods and orchards, hosting 24 varieties of native trees whose silhouettes make an appearance on the York Creek wine label. The property mirrors the variety of trees in its vineyard plantings of over 14 different varietals including Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Blanc, Carignane, Alicante Bouschet, and Touriga Nacional.

York Creek has been owned since 1968 by Fritz Maytag who purchased the property around the same time he purchased the Anchor Steam Brewing Company here in San Francisco. He always meant to make his own wine there, it just took him a while to get around to it — about 32 years, to be exact.

Maytag is the prodigal son of the Maytag family who decided that he needed to do something instead of appliances or blue cheese with his life. Not that his family ever had any intention of just letting him run the family business. Maytag was encouraged to find his own way in the world without a sense of entitlement. That way included a stint at Stanford as well as a lot of hanging around in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, until the day in 1965 when he fell in love with the Anchor Brewing Company, and decided to save it from going out of business by buying a controlling interest “for the price of a used car.”

Maytag took to brewing like a fish to water, and in the subsequent decades, he has become the Midas of the beverage world. His beer is world-renown and best-selling; his experiments in whiskey and gin have become quick successes. Maytag is a dabbler, a beverage renaissance man if you like, that seems to get it right. From home grown olive oil, to home grown apple brandy, to grappa and port, and now his own wine, Maytag wouldn′t have seemed out of place in the turn of the century village market where farmers eked out an existence from every asset the land provided.

Maytag initially started his winemaking operations in the early Nineties for fun and with the encouragement of his neighbor and friend Cathy Corison, owner and proprietress of Corison Vineyards. In 2000 he moved his operations to a specially designed (by him, of course) winery building across the street from his brewery and made his first commercial vintages. There he continues to serve as winemaker, though now with some help from Tom Holmes, formerly one of the brewers at Anchor Steam who trained as an enologist.

York Creek Vineyards makes a number of excellent wines that I have tasted repeatedly over the years. They are distinctive, well made, unpretentious and often good values. Some of the wines also express what I take to be Maytag’s adventurous spirit for experimentation. I’m quite certain this pretty rosé falls into that camp. Who on earth would have thought of making a rosé in California out of Touriga Nacional, one of the primary red grape varieties that goes into Port and the dry red wines of Portugal?

I don’t know much about the winemaking for this wine, other than what I can guess from what is in the bottle. The grapes were probably harvested ripe-but-not-too-ripe on a cool morning, destemmed, crushed, and then a portion of the fermenting juice was probably bled off from the tank and put into a separate steel tank to finish fermentation on its own.

One of the first wines I fell in love with as a young wine lover was Mateus, a rosé from Portugal that had two important characteristics: it came in a cool shaped bottle, and it was just slightly sweet, not unlike contemporary White Zinfandels — perfect for a beginning wine lover. This wine is quite superior in quality and flavor, but it reminds me fondly of the beginnings of my wine adventures.

Tasting Notes:
Brilliant rose pink in the glass, this wine has a nose of crushed stones, hibiscus, and candied orange peel. In the mouth it is light and smooth with flavors of hibiscus, raspberry, watermelon, and a light bitter earthiness that emerges on the finish. Dry, but not tart, the wine has enough acidity to make it refreshing. A unique and pleasurable rose.

Food Pairing:
I had this wine with cornmeal crust goat cheese pizza with tomatoes and basil, as well as a salad of mixed greens with scallions. It was a particularly nice counterpoint to the scallions, which made the wine more floral in character.

Overall Score: between 8.5 and 9

How Much?: $15

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Levi Reiss)

In the Silicon Valley, business incubation is quite common — larger companies often provide financial, operations, and moral support to smaller companies that they themselves have started, or outside start-ups that they believe have a good potential for success. This practice has become so normal that some companies have established entire business models based on incubation.

Incubation has also become common in the wine industry, where the costs of all the equipment and supplies required to make wine can be an extreme barrier to entry, and a source of extremely high overhead for those who do take the plunge. Just like a larger company might rent out some cubes and offer guidance to a smaller company, so to do wineries offer the use of their equipment to smaller producers using the fees from such services to defray the costs of their capital investments.

But incubation in the wine industry does not only happen as a matter of economic convenience, it often happens simply because, frankly, most folks in the wine industry can’t help themselves — they love making wine.

Jeff Cohn comes to winemaking from the world of food and hospitality. He fell in love with eating and drinking in his twenties and decided that he was going to make them his career, heading off for a degree in culinary arts, which was followed by a degree in hospitality management.

His early career saw him as the food and beverage director for Windjammer Barefoot Cruises and then later the manager of a Washington, D.C gourmet store.

During the ten years of his hospitality career, Cohn fell deeper and deeper in love with wine, and by 1993 he couldn′t take it any longer. Enrolling in a masters program in agricultural chemistry, Cohn emerged with a degree emphasizing enology, and was promptly hired by Rosenblum Cellars as its staff enologist.

That same year, Kent Rosenblum allowed Cohn to make a little of his own wine on the side — around 70 cases of Zinfandel — and JC Cellars was born.

You’d think that winemakers would be pretty busy folks — lots to worry about as grapes come piling into the winery by the truckload, dozens of fermentation tanks, hundreds of barrels — and that they wouldn′t exactly have time for dabbling here and there. But I don′t know a single winemaker that doesn′t have some small side project going, whether it’s a little experiment with a new cooperage, a new source of grapes, a consulting project for a little extra cash, or their own private label.

Such activities make for a lot of late nights for winemakers around harvest time, but somehow they manage to pull it off, and Cohn was no exception. He gradually built up a small business on the side, thanks to Rosenblum’s help, and Rosenblum customers got used to shopping at J.C. Cellars after they arrived to pick up their wines at Rosenblum.

By 2000, Jeff was Rosenblum’s winemaker and he had convinced owner Kent Rosenblum to add Rhone style wines (Syrah, Viognier, and Marsanne) to the portfolio, and J.C. Cellars was a steadily growing success. In 2004 Cohn was named vice president of winemaking and production, but in 2006, the time had come to focus all his efforts on J.C. Cellars.

Managed by himself and his wife Alexandra, the winery now produces about 5000 cases of wine and is the poster child for “in-winery″ incubation of a new brand. The fledgling winery got its start in the protective shadow of Rosenblum but is now a completely independent entity, and one of America’s most highly regarded small wineries, with an unusual amount of critical acclaim for the wines.

The J.C. Cellars portfolio consists of mostly single vineyard wines, with an emphasis on the Rhone varietals — Syrah, Petite Sirah, and Viognier — plus some Zinfandel thrown in for good measure. Cohn sources grapes from small producers throughout Northern California with long term contracts that allow him to work closely with growers to tailor the fruit to his specific liking.

The wines are made in small batches that are carefully crafted to showcase each specific grape source, from the yeasts to the barrels, to the durations of time that the wines spend in contact with the skins.

Cohn’s wines have a reputation for power and brawn, richness and opulence. They have conjured the adjective “hedonistic” from many. These are accurate characterizations, but I find the wines somewhat more restrained on the whole than other producers that elicit similar descriptions. Cohn’s wines are nothing if not carefully and lovingly made, and this is easy to taste.

Full disclosure: I received these wines as press samples.

TASTING NOTES:

2007 JC Cellars Rockpile Vineyard Rose, Rockpile, Sonoma
Pale ruby in color, this rose of Syrah smells of alpine strawberries and rosehips. On the palate it is bright and silky with bouncy flavors of strawberry and cherry that remain firmly (thank god) in the territory of dryness, making this an excellent, refreshing wine of which to drink many glasses. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $18. Where to buy?

2005 JC Cellars “Rockpile Vineyard” Syrah, Rockpile, Sonoma
Nearly opaque garnet in the glass this wine has a rich sultry nose of earth and black cherry aromas. In the mouth it is silky and thick with flavors of black cherry, leather, earth, and black currant. Dusty tannins emerge as the wine heads to a long finish. Big and brawny, this wine will please lovers of big Syrahs to no end. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $45. Not yet released.

2005 JC Cellars “Ventana Vineyard” Syrah, Monterey
A cloudy medium ruby in the glass, this wine has a nose of white pepper, cassis, and black cherry. In the mouth it comes across as spicy, with continued flavors of white pepper, blackberry, and mixed spices. Lean and less bombastic than some of the other wines from this producer, but no less pleasant for it. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $45. Not yet released.

2006 J.C. Cellars “California Cuvee” Syrah, California
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine smells of homemade blackberry jam and rose petals. In the mouth it offers flavors of cassis, blackberry, cola, and caramel notes, that head towards a finish with some heat on it. Decent acid, and imperceptible tannins, but the wine doesn’t quite hold together as much as you might like. Feels a bit disjointed. Score: between 8 and 8.5. Cost: $25. Where to buy?

2005 J.C. Cellars “Caldwell Vineyards” Syrah, Napa
Inky garnet in the glass, this wine smells of well oiled leather, black cherry, and earth. In the mouth it offers black cherry, blackberry, and deeper woodier flavors. Good acidity and silky texture make for a very pleasant feeling in the mouth and a long finish. Score: around 9. Cost: $45. Where to buy?

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Andrea Cardelli)