Don’t Call it an “Appellation”

One of my pet peeves is the use of the term “appellation” in reference to American viticultural areas (AVA’s).

Whenever I’ve traveled in Europe, I’ve always been impressed by the way the connection between place and culture has been preserved; and the appellation system is the most formal expression of this conservatism. Take Italy as an example. You can get pesto in northern Italy, but in Rome, it’s as if it never existed. It’s simply not on the menu. You also won’t find anything but Italian restaurants. Even in as large and cosmopolitan of a city as Rome, you will struggle to find a hamburger or Chinese food (not that I’m saying I looked – in fact, the main thing I looked for was a pizza place called “Il Brillo Parlante”). The cuisine is a direct expression of the people who live there, and it’s not negotiable – not even so much as to include the only very slightly different dishes of a region a stone’s throw from your own.

The appellation system is the same way. It’s an emphatic statement that wine from a specific region is a certain thing and is made a certain way, period. If it’s not up to the standard of that region, it isn’t given the name associated with that region. The French are so adamant about this that if you don’t know the place names, you’re completely stumped as to what you’re drinking.

Nothing could be more at odds with the way we approach winemaking in the US. Here, we encourage innovation. People are constantly trying out new varietals and new blends. The same winery that produced only merlot and cabernet sauvignon last season might turn around and start producing mourvedre and grenache or a late harvest riesling the next season. A winery like Hedges that fancies itself to be so much like a French winery that it’s now housed in a faux chateau sits across the road from a winery like Blackwood Canyon, which goes crazy on experiments with vinegar and botrytis and can’t seem to be bothered to produce the same wine two years in a row. A high-end winery like JM Cellars can be just up the road from a mass-market powerhouse like Chateau Ste. Michelle. Where the wine is from says almost nothing about what’s in the bottle.

Really, this is the same attitude we have about everything in the US – cuisine, architecture, shopping, you name it. We’ll eat anything. Heck, we don’t like eating the same thing twice in the same week. It’s why we eat everything from steak and potatoes to pizza to Indian food to phad thai to tacos. When it comes to houses, we tear stuff down, we move around, we don’t like any centralized planning (there’s a good article in the Seattle P-I about this: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/304253_teardown19.html). Drive outside of most major US cities and you get a cookie-cutter set of options for shopping and dining: Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, etc. As a result of all this, where you grew up says almost nothing about who you are or what you might do on any given day. Our culture is up for grabs, all the time.

I’m not saying one system is better than the other. Strictly in relation to wine, the American approach is more accessible. It’s easier to try new things. But the two systems are totally different, and recognizing that is important not only to understanding wine, but to understanding the cultures that produce them.

Take It or Leave It

Before I write about a day spent tasting in Yakima Valley, I have to offer a disclaimer. With very few exceptions, all of the wineries in Yakima Valley are really good. If you haven’t done much tasting or you just want to enjoy a bottle of wine in wine country on a sunny day, the stretch of highway from Yakima to the Tri-Cities has a lot to offer and you should get out there. Just be sure to do it soon–like every wine region, Yakima Valley is getting to the point where you no longer get to meet the winemakers or the winery owners and you have to pay tasting fees. If I sound a little harsh in some of my comments below, it’s because I have really high standards and because I’ve been tasting wines in Yakima Valley for years already, not because the wineries are bad. Also, they’re selling their wines at ultra-premium prices, so I’m holding them to an ultra-premium standard.

If you’re looking for someplace to enjoy a bottle of wine surrounded by beautiful scenery, our first stop, Steppe Cellars, is perfect. The winery is down a long, winding dirt road next to some sort of private lakes estate or farm. It’s surrounded by orchards and has a great view of the valley. Sort of like Silver Lake in Zillah or Maryhill outside of Hood River, this would be a great place to hang out on a sunny day.

The wine was intriguing. Steppe’s a brand new winery, just now in their second season. Their winemaker is a German woman whose family has been in the business of making wine for 400 years. They were pouring a pinot noir made from grapes grown in Yakima Valley. That’s a rarity and will continue to be even rarer. 2005 was the only year the winemaker felt produced fruit good enough to make a pinot noir. Yakima Valley is simply too hot for this grape in any normal year. They were also pouring a syrah that was just about to go into the bottle. It showed great promise, and as with any new winery, the price was very reasonable. I’m planning on buying a bottle and will have more detailed tasting notes later.

Of all the wineries we visited (Kestrel, Alexandria Nicole, Desert Wind, Steppe, Teftt, and Yakima Cellars), Kestrel poured the best wine of the day – a 2003 Old Vine Merlot. “Old vine” in this context means 30 years old. I didn’t take the best of notes, but trust me–it’s really good. However, it’s also $50, which struck me as too expensive for this wine.

How to feel about Alexandria Nicole comes down to a single question: do you like barnyard? If you do, this is a great winery. We tasted a wide variety of wines here, including a grenache, lemberger, a couple of blends and a cab sauv. It’s the single Bourdeaux and Rhone varietals that have the strongest barnyard flavor. When we stopped here last summer, we experienced the same thing at C.R. Sandidge, Alexandria Nicole and Kestrel – both the syrah and the cab sauv tended to have a really strong barnyard flavor. My wife loved it. I’m not a fan. The other wines at Alexandria Nicole were inoffensive. The lemberger was exactly what you’d expect – very light, very fruity, somewhat peppery, extremely easy to drink. I was less impressed with their reserve Bordeaux blends, which were non-descript, especially in comparison to the 2002 Terra Blanca Onyx from the night before.

Desert Wind is a remarkable facility–a brand new (actually, still under construction), 30,000+ square foot wine and culinary complex. I hope they can keep it booked, because the fixed costs have to be astronomical. The wine here wasn’t bad, though, and it was certainly worth the price ($12-15 a bottle). I’m going to consider picking up a few bottles locally as everyday wine, but I don’t think they mean for their wines to be anything but part of the draw for the larger facility.

Teftt was a stop we probably shouldn’t have made. It is an old school Yakima winery. It’s run out of what looks and feels and in all probability is the winemakers’ house. The wines are so-so and all over the place–a zinfandel, a merlot, a blend and a vinsanto (vinsanto?) all shared the same counter. It was crowded, with two tour buses showing up while we were there. We had a hard time getting a pour, so we did one taste and headed out.

Yakima Cellars (not to be confused with Yakima River Winery) also proved to be a disappointment. They’re under new ownership, and even though the winemaker is supposedly the same as before, the wine was not nearly as good as I remembered it being before. They’re specializing in sangiovese, and I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that the varietal doesn’t stand on its own, neither in Tuscany nor in Washington State. I know a lot of people would disagree with me (including my own wife).

All in all, it was a bit of a disappointing day. We only bought one bottle of wine – the Steppe pinot noir (and that mostly for the novelty factor). All the prices seemed high. All the wine seemed merely OK or good. Maybe it was because it was “Wine and Chocolate” weekend out here and they figured big groups would be willing to part with their money.

Or maybe it was just because that’s how things are in Yakima Valley. I’ve remarked elsewhere on the paradox of Yakima Valley – the best grapes in the state are grown here, but the best wines are produced in Walla Walla and Woodinville. Call it the curse of the w’s. I can name several wineries in Walla Walla I would visit in a heartbeat (Abeja, Buty, Isenhower, Three Rivers and L’Ecole all spring to mind; and even Cougar Crest and Tamarack, both of which I wasn’t initially impressed with a couple of years ago, are producing really excellent wine). I can do the same for Woodinvile (JM, DeLille, Januik, Kennedy Shah). For Yakima Valley, there’s not necessarily any single winery I would automatically go back to (with the possible exception of Cote Bonneville, but they’re by appointment only). At the same time, I can easily name a handful of vineyards from Yakima Valley that I immediately relate to great wine: DuBrul (which produces fruit for the best wine I’ve ever had), Ciel du Cheval, Klipsun, Champoux and Tapteil.

Maybe it’s the proximity to Seattle and the Tri-Cities: maybe Yakima doesn’t have to try that hard to move bottles. Maybe it’s the proliferation of vineyard-wineries: maybe you can’t grow great fruit and make great wine at the same time. I don’t know, but I wish there were more I could get excited about after this trip. In the meantime, prices are going up, as are tasting fees. It’s definitely not the undiscovered paradise of wine it was prior to 2000.

Like a Bottle of Jam (2002 Onyx)

This weekend finds me in Yakima Valley for Terra Blanca Winery’s winemaker’s dinner. Last night was their release party for the 2002 Onyx, a Bordeaux-style blend.

I’ve always liked, but never loved, Terra Blanca. My wife signed us up for their wine club last year, and in addition to thinking the last thing we needed was more bottles of wine we had to chase down FedEx to get a hold of, I was a little surprised. Their main claim to fame in our household was serving as a source of very good merlot in the sub-$15 range back in 2003. There for a while, we drank a lot of their merlot, but we didn’t exactly develop a deep commitment to their wines. I don’t think I drank another Terra Blanca wine until last year, when my wife signed us up for the club. Maybe it’s the packaging. The baby blue foil and the flowery script don’t exactly make you think “world class winery.” Even when they get fancy and add a wax cap, the label looks low-budget. In fact, one of my wife’s friends recently remarked that she never bought Terra Blanca because she thought the label was cheesy. If the owners of Terra Blanca ever read this, consider this the start of a very small focus group–you might want to think about a re-design on your logo!

I do, however, respect them greatly for being one of the earliest wineries in the Red Mountain AVA. I seem to remember visiting them once in a small blue track house from the 70’s (unless I’m confusing them with Kiona, which is possible–that’s what happens when you visit eight wineries in a day, which we’ve been known to do). Well, they’ve grown up a lot since then and have a nice new facility with a commanding view of Red Mountain and the scenic beauty of I-82. The new facility is slightly less pretentious than Hedges’ faux-chateau just up the road, and it provides an excellent space for wine release parties.

Speaking of the release, here’s how the winery describes the Onyx:

“Raspberry and cherry with notes of violets lift from the glass and mingle with soft spice and toasted oak on the nose. Smooth, lush flavors of blackberry, black cherry, and cassis wrap around a core of full, yet soft, structured tannins. Cedar notes with light touches of spiece fold into lingering cherry and berry flavors surrounded by a sea of ruch chocolate on the long, silky finish.”

For the most part, I’d agree with that. However, I’d emphasize the raspberry a whole lot more. It’s a very jammy wine. It’s not obnoxiously fruity, though. I’d agree again that the tannins provide structure that isn’t overwhelming. It’s neither overly sweet nor overly harsh. All around, this is a really good wine. It’s a tad pricy ($45), but it’s one of the more interesting Bourdeaux blends I’ve tried lately. Maybe it’s the addition of petit verdot and malbec to the more conventional cab sauv, merlot and cabernet franc.

The 2002 Onyx was definitely the best thing they poured. The 1999 Onyx was, despite many years in the bottle, a little tight. The 2002 Estate Reserve Block 8 Syrah was also very tart. It had an almost effervescent quality that gripped the taste buds in the middle of my tongue in a way I can’t say I’ve ever experienced before.

Would you like some pinot noir with your pinot noir?

I recently made a trip down to the Wilammette Valley for some R&R and decided to visit some wineries. It had been 3-4 years since the last time I was down there, and it was interesting to see the changes. The biggest difference is that there are a lot more wineries than there were before. Last time around, I only remember visiting Sokol Blosser and Argyle. It was hard to find a lot of wineries with tasting rooms. This time, it seemed like there were a lot more wineries open to the public. My wife and I hit Erath Vineyards, Archery Summit, Domaine Drouhin, Penner Ashe, Bergstrom, Adelsheim, and Ponzi (which doubled as an excellent lunch stop). Of these, I think I’d give Domaine Drouhin the nod as favorite–the Laurene Pinot Noir was excellent.

The other big change was the prices. Archery Summit won the prize here, with a $15 tasting fee and an asking price of $150 for a bottle of pinot noir. Have people bought into the “Oregon has the same climate as Burgundy” argument this much? Or is it a lingering effect from “Sideways” that people are willing to pay that much for a bottle of pinot noir? The winery claimed that it was designed to be cellared for a minimum of 5-6 years. They’re probably right, but I don’t have that type of patience. It was exceptionally dark and tannic, and it could certainly use some time to open up and mellow out. If you’re a pinot drinker (I’m typically not), all of the delicate flavors you look for were overwhelmed by the tannins. Their $85 pinot was, in my opinion, a better option, though still sky-high in price.

In my book, if you’re charging more than $50 for your wine, it has to deliver a life-altering experience.  Right now, I have one wine that I’d say accomplishes that, and it cost less than $50. On this trip, I think almost everything we bought was over $50. It felt like Napa or Sonoma.

A couple of things about the Willamette Valley hadn’t changed. The really established wineries aren’t open to the public other than by appointment. Last time around, we were really excited to visit Sineann, which produces an incredible old vine zinfandel (if you don’t mind bombastic fruit and an almost syrupy consistency). This time, we were going to try to visit Dusky Goose, which allegedly produces the best pinot noir in Oregon. No dice!

The other thing that hasn’t changed is the single-minded focus on pinot noir. That’s no surprise — the Willamette Valley gets a lot of rain and cool weather, so it’s not like anyone’s going to start growing cab sauv there anytime soon. Still, by the time we’d hit Penner Ashe, I was done. We’d had plans to visit Willakenzie, but by that point, I was burned out on pinot noir for the day.