huevos con vino

The year was 1967. Venerable winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff became a consultant to the American Wine Growers company, helping them launch a new, premium red wine label. The label was called “Ste. Michelle Vintners,” quite catchy if you ask me.

To give you a sense of how important this move was in Washington State, one of the biggest changes that Tchelistcheff helped bring about was to work with Howard Somers, the AWG winemaker at the time, and use vitis vinifera grapes to make their wine. This happened only 40 years ago. Think about that for a minute: AWG made some of the first vintage-dated, vinifera-based wines in Washington State…40 years ago! Only Associated Vintners (now known as Columbia Winery) seems to have been making similar wines way back then; other famous Washington wineries, such as Quilceda Creek (1978 - first vintage), came later.

Flash forward to 2007. I’m at Ray’s Boathouse with my wife and one of her friends from college. I’m looking over the wine list and chatting with the new sommelier at Ray’s. Out of the blue, she says, “Hey, you want to try something interesting? I’ve been looking for a reason to open this one wine and I won’t charge you for it if it doesn’t taste good.” Hey, I’m always up for something exciting!

So she comes back with a bottle of 1971 Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon. Except, this wine is too old to be a Chateau Ste. Michelle wine. It’s actually a Ste. Michelle Vineyards release from Ste. Michelle Vintners, Seattle, Washington.

Whoa. Check out the bottle!

Crazy, huh?  Looks like Bon-Vin, Inc. of Houston, Texas is the place to get more of this wine.  If I lived in 1972.  At the bottom the label says this wine has 12% alcohol and was “Produced from Cabernet Sauvignon Grapes grown in the Yakima Valley.”  The back of the bottle is equally interesting (and better photographed on my part):

I like the part about being aged in “small white oak barrels and in glass.”  Nice.  I also like the “Vintage-dated Varietal wine” statement up near the top.  Again, in 1971 Washington State wineries were mainly known nationally for their fortified jug wines.  Yuck.  At first I was almost surprised not to see a Web site address printed at the bottom.  Oh yeah, there was no Internet in 1971, not even in Al Gore’s house.

This wine was intriguing.  The fill level and, as it turned out, the cork were quite good on this bottle.  The wine smelled pretty good but didn’t quite stand the test of time: It never got off the ground and was mostly acidic and cranberry-tasting on the palate.  The bouquet was actually nice at first, though, which surprised us all.  In the end, we let the sommelier take the bottle away for her staff and bring us a 2004 Kestrel Syrah instead.  Still, it was an amazing experience just to see this bottle.  I was shocked that a single varietal Washington wine existed back in 1971.  I wonder if any of these bottles that still exist are good to drink…this one was close, but not quite there anymore.

After waiting a couple of extra months because of the warn weather in Oregon this summer, I finally received my Domaine Drouhin Direct club shipments.  DDO was nice enough to combine my 3 bottles of 2005 Willamette Valley (aka Classique) Pinot Noir with my 3 bottles of 2004 Laurène Pinot Noir into one shipment.  The 2005 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir was actually released months ago, but I only received my bottles yesterday. 

Production levels for the 2005 vintage are up from 2004, although the production of Laurène has steadily increased over the past few years.  Take a look at these comparative numbers for the various Pinot Noir releases:

• Willamette Valley Pinot Noir: 8,982 cases in 2005 compared to 7,454 in 2004 and 8,907 in 2003
• Laurène Pinot Noir: 2,550 cases in 2004 compared to 2,200 in 2003 and 2,000 in 2002
• Louise Pinot Noir: 189 cases in 2004 compared to 196 in 2003

The 2005 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir sounds like a seriously bad ass wine.  A good quote from the mailer is as follows: “In contrast to the more delicate 2004, the 2005 is built on larger shoulders, with a strong backbone that will certainly reward with extended aging.”  Nice.  Veronique recommends 7-10 years of aging or more, which is quite a while for the Classique-level release.  At $45/bottle, this wine should provide nice value over time; I know the 1999 and 2000 vintages are drinking really nicely right now.

If the 2004 Laurène is anything like the 2003, extended aging will be required here too.  I think it’s still way too early to touch the 2003, so I’m definitely putting my 2004 bottles away for a while.  Veronique recommends 8-12 years of aging for this wine, which seems right to me.  I doubt I will be able to wait that long, but we’ll see.  I love the fact that the 2004 Laurène is just being released to market after many other Oregon wineries have begun making their 2006 Pinot Noir releases available.  Now that’s simply too young yet, if you ask me.

My next DDO Direct shipment will arrive in February 2008 when the 2006 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir is released.  My next general shipment of wine may be the 2006 Privé futures I ordered earlier this year.  Now that ought to be interesting….

I thought WBW #38 was next week…I have the wine ready to go, but no time!  So, perhaps I’ll review this wine soon anyway.  It looks good.

Clearwater Creek is fictitious.  There is no Clearwater Creek winery.

Having said that, Clearwater Creek as a concept is very real.  North Berkeley Imports (NBI) is a small storefront wine shop in Berkeley, California.  NBI has its own label, “Clearwater Creek,” under which they bottle wines culled from the barrels of well-known American wineries.  I think.  It’s a bit hard to tell when you look at their Web site because the focus is on their importation of French and Italian wines.

Anyway, the concept of Clearwater Creek is terrific: If you are a famous Napa or Sonoma winemaker and you cannot bottle and sell all of your grapes yourself, you can sell those extra grapes to NBI who turns them into the next Clearwater Creek release.  Simple!  And very cost-effective for the consumer.  I like it.  I also assume that’s how it works.  I don’t know for sure.

Flashback time: In April 2007 I was at the LA Wine Co. store in Palm Desert, California.  The good people there told me about a really nice Cabernet Sauvignon for $12.95 per bottle from an unknown label.  They also hinted at the provenance of the wine inside the bottle with the unknown label.  I am sworn to secrecy, but if you search CellarTracker for this wine you can quickly see where the juice itself came from.  The NBI Web site mentions an Alexander Valley source, which of course matches the user comments at CellarTracker.  I purchased 6 bottles from LA Wine Co. and at this point I wish I had purchased 6 cases.

You see, this wine is good.  Damn good.  Really damn good.  You drink it and you think, “Wow, this wine is really damn good!”  And then you remember you paid $12.95 for it instead of, say, $60.  It is at this point that you really begin to like the Clearwater Creek label as a concept.

I decided to open a bottle despite the youth of this wine (it’s a 2004 after all, and this is still 2007); this was a good move on my part.  My wife and I had a friend over from The Netherlands who would normally join me in some wine, but she is pregnant so all of the wine consumption was up to me.  Here are my thoughts:

• Aroma: Initially potent blueberry and black fruit aromas with velvety backdrop; opened up after 30-45 minutes into a wonderfully complex bouquet of oak and cedar, vanilla, cherry, blackberry, leather, and smoke.  Exceptional aromatic balance for a young Cabernet.
• Flavor: Solid fresh blackberry and luscious raspberry straight away, with smoky, tannic mid-palate and lengthy, velvety aftertaste; fairly complex flavor profile that kept changing as the wine sat in my glass.
• General impression: Delicious, well-balanced (I would say “poised”) combination of rich fruit, smooth tannins, vigorous but controlled acidity…very nice indeed.

This wine was a dynamite bargain, a true steal in fact.  Except I didn’t steal it, I paid for it!  So I guess it isn’t a true steal.  More of a proverbial steal.  Never mind.  It’s awesome.  The only trick is there appears to be a Sonoma Cabernet and an Alexander Valley Cabernet from the 2004 Clearwater Creek stable.  Finding the Alexander Valley release seems almost impossible at this point; LA Wine Co. sold out of their small allotment as fast as they could tell people about the wine.  Perhaps the thing to do is keep an eye on NBI and Clearwater Creek for future developments.  If this wine is any indication, NBI is doing everything right.

Kent Fortner is a really approachable person. When I first corresponded with him, I was simply signing up for his mailing list. But I had read his blog entry on Burgundian cooperage, which I found fascinating, and he replied with a personal note of gratitude for finding his site and his winery! Nice start.

Kent’s Green Truck Cellars winery is quickly becoming well known. I have seen his wine for sale on at least one restaurant list so far, although more are sure to follow. Kent focuses on Pinot Noir, which I think is cool. I really like the idea of a winery focusing on a specific varietal, especially at the start of the winery’s career, so to speak. I ordered 6 bottles of the 2005 edition, which was the 5th vintage from Kent and Green Truck Cellars. He boldly predicts the 2005 will be “showing perfectly on Dec 25, 2007,” so today (October 1, 2007) seemed like a good time to open up a bottle of the 2005. Only 600 cases were made and Kent sold out briskly, so I’m happy to have this opportunity!

The 2005 was aged in an interesting combination of 80% French oak barrels and 20% Hungarian oak barrels, 30% of which were new. I assume, then, that 6% of the barrels used to make this wine were made of new oak. It’s a good thing I did the math before I began drinking; this wine clocks in at 13.9% alcohol, which isn’t terribly high but it’s no lightweight. Because of the wine’s relatively youthful status, I decided to decant this wine for about 1-2 hours first.  It’s a good thing, too: It took at least 90 minutes for this wine to relax and open up a little.  Even then, things were a little tight; perhaps now is a bad time to drink a 2005 Pinot Noir.  Bah, it’s never a bad time!

Here are my notes:

• Aroma: Straight from the bottle, this wine means business. Lots of dusty tannin and bright strawberry, red cherry, and black plum aroma plus some alcohol heat/acid that will clearly dissipate quickly; potent, rich, heady aromas dominate up front with some black pepper and smoked meat in there too. After nearly 2 hours, the aroma is characterized by A classic French-style Pinot Noir bouquet overall.
• Flavor: Decanting is definitely required for a wine this young and full-bodied. It takes a good 90 minutes for the real flavor of this wine to show through, and it’s worth the wait. Lush red and black berries, velvet mouthfeel, delayed tannic and acidic backbone…this wine is built right. Or should I say, built Ford tough? Probably not. But it’s good.
• General impression: A nice wine!  Clearly this Green Truck has a lot of miles ahead of it.

So, the big question: Will I buy more of this wine?  I think so, yeah.  I like the style of Pinot Noir that Kent expresses in this wine: restrained, with deeper sour cherry flavors rather than super-saturated black cherry.  But I also like the fact that this wine requires patience, time, and probably at least a few more years in the cellar…although I can see Kent’s point about 12/25/07 as a target drinking date.  Enjoy!