Wine & Spirits - October 2013 - (Page 24)

Rariﬁed Crus California’s Mountain-Grown Chardonnay From the pioneering work of Paul Masson and Martin Ray in the Santa Cruz Mountains to J.D. Zellerbach’s 1953 planting on a hill above the Sonoma Valley, many of California’s storied chardonnays have come from hills and mountains. Mountain chardonnay isn’t common, but there’s a spine of hilltop chardonnay sites that runs up California’s coast. By Andrew Braithwaite and Luke Sykora THOMAS FOGARTY VINEYARD In our Wine & Spirits tastings over the last few years, these mountain chardonnays have again and again struck us, sometimes for their precisely balanced power, sometimes because of their bracing acidity and coastal cool, but the overarching theme has been one of transparency—the sense that the wines are speaking about the places where they grow, above and beyond the nuances of winemaking. Why does chardonnay seem to have an affinity for the mountains? We asked winemakers and viticulturists working with chardonnay at high altitudes why these wines might tend to show such character and clarity. 40-year-old vines for his estate chardonnay— the berries and clusters still compact, with a high skin-to-juice ratio. The resulting intense skin phenolics can, if treated carefully, provide a lot of structure and complexity. “We think of our chardonnay as the sort of white that a red wine drinker will enjoy,” says Cook. (Not far away, Josh Jensen of Calera also grows powerful mountain chardonnay on the limestonelaced Mt. Harlan.) Further north, the Santa Cruz Mountains has a particularly large concentration of high-altitude chardonnay plantings. Jeff Brinkman of Rhys, who works with the Horseshoe Ranch and Alpine vineyards at 1,400 feet, thinks that the CENTRAL COAST character of mountain soils is crucial in forming The oldest chardonnay block in California mountain chardonnay. “On mountain soils that grows at Chalone’s estate near the Pinnacles are shallow and drain well, the vine moves out National Park, on volcanic material inter- of its vegetative state and the fruit moves into spersed with marine limestone. That 1919 its ripening state sooner,” he says. “It gets the planting, at 1,700 feet, is so stressed that its signal that there’s no water, there are no nutrigrapes are impractical for commercial wine. ents, but there’s bright hot sun, so it’s time to “The fruit we get off that old chardonnay is ripen the berries.” Tellingly, a number of propretty much a skin shrink-wrapped around a ducers of compelling Santa Cruz Mountains seed,” says winemaker Robert Cook. “So we chardonnay choose to dry farm their vines— leave it for the birds.” Instead, Cook works with Mount Eden’s particularly age-worthy chardon24 WINE & SPIRITS OCTOBER 2013 nay is dry farmed, as are most of Thomas Fogarty’s chardonnay blocks. Earlier this year, Ridge vineyard manager David Gates planted a new block of chardonnay alongside the Monte Bello winery at the top of their cabernet-dominated estate. At 2,660 feet, the new planting is the vineyard’s highest. “We’re playing the long game with chardonnay, and it will be fun to see how long those vines take to settle down and show us what kind of fruit they’re going to give,” says Gates. “There’s certainly something magical about chardonnay up here.” The vines that produced Ridge’s 2010 Santa Cruz Mountains Estate Chardonnay (93 points, W&S 8/12) were planted between 1976 and 1996 on clay loam soils above a substrate of greenstone and—notably—veins of limestone. Paul Draper and his team fermented the wine without added yeast and aged it mostly in old American oak, producing a cool coastal wine with complex lemon and herb aromas. In some years, Ridge also makes a more limited bottling of Monte Bello Chardonnay from select blocks. Another wine that impressed us in our most recent tastings is from Thomas Fogarty, a heart

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - October 2013

Wine & Spirits - October 2013
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered
Books
Spirits
The Heights of Terroir
Best New Sommeliers 2013
New & Noteworthy Bay Area Restaurants
Finger Lakes Road Trip
Extreme Values
Overview
US Chardonnay
Red Burgundy
Australian Shiraz
Bierzo & Galician Reds
Sherry
US New Releases
Imported New Releases
Somm Gaffs

Wine & Spirits - October 2013