Glory Days

I ended last night in conversation with a friend about modern business classics such as Den of Thieves, Liar's Parker, The Smartest Guys in the Room and A Random Walk. We were discussing the efficiency and inefficiency of financial markets. It got me thinking again about wine prices and my most recent "random walk" down the aisles of a wine store.

As I perused the selections available, a few bottles of Calera Pinot Noir, the single-vineyard stuff, caught my eye. $55 a bottle. If you have been into wine for a while, you'll remember the following. If you're new to wine, the story is as meaningful as ever.

Calera is an outstanding producer of California Pinot Noir. For a while in the mid-1990's, Calera was fairly cultish, tough to find, expensive vis-a-vis its peers at the time, but certainly of high quality. I dug out my notes on a seven-year old Calera from a wine dinner on February 3rd, 2001:

1994 Calera Pinot Noir, Selleck
Very good concentration of raspberries and cassis. Structured by nice, ripe tannins. Nice wine...etc, etc.

A fine showing by a seven-year old California Pinot Noir being that most are made in a more fashionable, drink-me-know fashion.

It was right around this time give or take a year or maybe a few months, that Josh Jensen of Calera came out with his now (in)famous newsletter of new releases wherein he explained that the he was rasing the price of Calera's single vineyard offering from $55 to $80 per bottle in order to keep his prices even with other top Pinot Noirs from California. Everyone in the wine business walked around with the same type of buzz that many of us had Tuesday morning as we saw months of growth in our 401(k)'s vanish (okay, perhaps I'm being a bit melodramatic, but you get the point). Not long thereafter, although quality has never waned, Calera dropped off the radar quite a bit.

So, during my recent "random walk" it was fitting that I saw Calera Selleck vineyard waiting for me on the shelf. After a period of time where Calera Pinot Noir was overpriced, the Calera stable has experienced a "market correction" and has returned to $55 dollars a bottle, right back where it was about seven years ago. I had visions of Jim Cramer in my head ("Buy!Buy!Buy!") and picked up a bottle to enjoy with a steak that evening. Admittedly, I enjoyed every last sip.

[Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days plays in the background. Fade.]

Trust me...

A recent post by our CEO, William Bellomo gives further details on Silver Mountain owner Jerold O'Brien.

Selling wine is a tough job in some ways. My clients who have known me for five or ten years get used to trusting me and know that I will do my best to bring them the best wine for them. Those long-time customers, who I prefer to think of as friends, understand my sometimes simple and straightforward words. For those friends of mine, I tell them "listen buy Silver Mountain wine".

The pinots are great. The chard is great. These are wines that are priced well below what they are worth and deliver. Given the facts that William has presented in his blog, it is clear that Mr. O'Brien is an interesting an accomplished gentleman. But more than that, we have a great time in Santa Cruz when we visit him. He is extremely pleasant anmd very welcoming. When I can sell great wines, at great prices, made by great people, my job suddenly becomes easier.

I would love to have you visit Silver Mountain's product page. Our inboxes and phones are always waiting for you. If you have any questions, give us a call. These are great wines, at great prices, made by great people. Trust me.

It's all in the balance...

Last night, I decided to relax and catch some Jazz at the Backstage Bar at Theater Square in downtown Pittsburgh. I sipped a martini while I perused the small wine list, and immediately gravitated to the 2003 Bourgogne Pinot Noir from Joesph Faiveley. Just a standard, every day Red Burgundy, just what I wanted and at $7 a glass it wouldn't break the bank. The aromatic profile of the wine was just beautiful - a melange of red cherries and raisins. Real pretty. The problem came when I took the first sip as the tannins immediately parched my palate, prompting me to order a club soda just to scrape the wine from my tongue.

Wine has to be in balance. There's a lot of combinations that will make for a balanced wine, but what does that mean. Emile Peynaud's The Taste of Wine is a seminal book that is as influential now as it was when it was first written over thirty years ago. I do warn that this book is more than a bit technical from time to time, but there are important parts that will be understandable to all. Particularly interesting is his rather extensive treatment of how to write a tasting note. And for our purposes, the parts where he discusses balance.

In a nut shell a balanced wine follows the equation:

Acidity + Tannin => Sugar + Alcohol.

There are a few corollaries that result from this equation. Namely that if there is a lot of tannin in the wine, there shouldn't be a lot of acidity, and it certainly needs to be offset by either sugar or a good dose of alcohol. Why alcohol? I'm so glad you asked. :)

Alcohol has an apparent sweetness to the palate. Most people don't realize it but it's true. The easiest way to prove this (if you're either a real go-getter or the scientific type or both) is to set up this little experiment. Boil the alocohol out of glass of wine. Run it through glass tubing and into a beaker. When all the alcohol has boiled out replace the same amount of water into the wine as the amount of alcohol that came out. The result: the wine will be unbearably bitter, either too tannic or too acidic or both. That's because when the alcohol is in the wine, it's apparent sweetness balances the wine. Without it, the wine is plonk.

Many people criticise California wines for being too alcoholic, and it's true that some are. But in the best California wines, elevated alcohol can still make for a balanced wine - all you need is the appropriate level of tannin or acidity to work in concert with it. Conversely, if there's a lot of tannin in the wine (something that will happen naturally when it's warm out because the skins of the grapes thicken and that's where the tannin is), the wine requires high alcohol, or else it will become to tough to drink - a problem that occurred in the heat wave of 2003 in France - the very problem that tainted my experience with Faiveley's Bourgogne. It's all about the balance.

I think Miles was wrong...for some

The movie Sideways made Pinot Noir popular and Merlot passe. Everyone remembers Miles' now famous proclamation, "I am not drinking ******* Merlot! If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving!" As a Pinotphile myself, I understand where he's coming from. At the same time, the fact that sales of Pinot Noir are up 120% over the past two years gives me pause. As someone who has sold millions of dollars worth of Pinot Noir over the years, I can tell you this - I expect the sales to slow up in a hurry. If I were starting my own winery in California today, I wouldn't plant Pinot Noir. Let me tell you why.

First there are the basics - Pinot Noir is hard to grow. Pinot Noir is completeley different from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot or Shiraz. These wines derive their dense, purple hues from the thick skins of those grapes. The thick skins protect the wines from many harmful natural factors such as intense sunlight. The skin of Pinot Noir is usually quite thin. (A corollary of the thickness or lack thereof of the skin is that Pinot Noir is usually lighter in color.) Because the skin is not as thick as that of other red grapes, Pinot Noir is more likely to be damaged by natural elements and also highly susceptible to rot! Rot in your wine is bad! It tastes horrible. When Cabernet for instance is underripe, there is a vegetal green bean character that develops. I'd take a vegetal Cab over a rotten Pinot noir any day! If you don't believe me, try a bad 1983 Burgundy: then you'll understand why really quickly.

Because it's difficult to grow, and requires enormous attention, something of which I am largely incapable (I am mre the visionary-type than detail-oriented), Pinot Noir and I would be a bad mix. But that's not the real reason: the real reason is that, despite the current trendiness of Pinot Noir, I think most casual wine drinkers enjoy Merlot more than Pinot Noir, unless the Pinot Noir is made poorly (more on this below).

Because of the skin differential, the wines are fundamentally different. Cabernet, Merlot and Shiraz age because of tannins. That is because tannins come (largely) from the skins of the grapes. Since Pinot Noir has substantially thinner skin, Pinot Noir doesn't age due to tannic structure. Pinot Noir actually ages due to acidity, or rather the balance of acidity and fruit. Whereas Merlot and its kin age because of the mouth-puckering tannin, Pinot Noir titilates the palate with mouthwatering acidity, much like most (non-sweet) white wines. Pinot Noir is a white wine in red wine clothing. And I don't think that's what most casual wine drinkers want in their wine. It's what I want, but what I want won't necessarily bring you enjoyment.

So we have a problem, as W. Blake Gray's recent SF Chronicle article discusses. Instead of making Pinot Noir the way they should make it, many California winemakers just leave the grapes hang on the vine longer to thicken the skins. It doesn't matter to them that in the first place, Pinot Noir is a cooler-climate grape and shouldn't be planted in 80% of the California vineyards in which it is found.

So we are left with one of three possibilities:

1) Until the Pinot Noir craze dies down (something I instinctively feel is already happening), people will continue wines that they don't like to be trendy.

2) Many winemakers will continue to try as hard as they can to make Pinot Noir taste like Merlot, Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon to cater to the latest trends, thus deceiving consumers into thinking they have developed a taste for Pinot Noir, when, in reality, they haven't yet learned the beauty of real Pinot Noir, that is, Pinot Noir that is graceful, light in color, svelte and equilibriously acidic.

3) The Pinot Noir craze will die of necessity, when most people realize that they prefer supple, fruit-forward Merlot to the vibrant, levity of Pinot Noir.

I can only hope as a true Pinotphile that three is the case. It will allow wineries such as Hunter Hill Winery and Adastra Vineyards to continue making Pinot Noir the way it should be made, from cooler climate sites (the Sonoma Coast and Los Carneros respectively). Although our visits to these wineries convince me that in spite of any trends in any direction, niether winery would budge from their current modus opperandi. That's why AVA Wine is proud to bring them to you. The goal here is to find representative exmaples of each of California's many AVA's (American Viticultural Areas), and in Hunetr Hill Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and Adastra Los Carneros Pinot Noir, you have two fine examples of this. You can drink either one of these and say to yourself, "This is what Pinot Noir should taste like," and if you don't like it, by all means, drink Merlot and don't feel guilty. Drink what you like and forget the current trends.