lgsjr – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Old and New Wines

A new car is the pride and joy of your driveway. There’s a special feeling when you put on a new suit. But tasting new wines doesn’t always bring the same enjoyment. There’s such a thing as a wine that’s too new. We once had the experience of a private visit to a fine winery in Bordeaux, in September. The grapes had just been pressed and the juice had been fermented only a few days before. Our host, with a subtle smile, gave us a little taste. Ugh! It was awful, although we knew that in the years to come it would become wonderful.

That’s an extreme case of a truism: Wine improves over time. Like so many truisms, this one comes with lots of exceptions. Some wines improve over time. At a certain point they stop improving. Beyond that point, many of them become worse. And then a lot worse.

The cellar at Volpaia in Tuscany.

For the most part, wineries offer the latest releases for their wine tastings. There is an implied commitment that once the wine is put up for sale, it’s drinkable. Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean it’s at its peak. Many wineries offer tastings of so-called library wines, of older vintages that are supposed to show what the potential these wines have for improvement over time.

Here are a few tips for balancing the new and the old wines you might have the opportunity to sip when you visit a winery.

Use your imagination. As you taste a recently released wine – or even better, if you are offered a barrel tasting – mentally trick your nose and tongue into recognizing what a wine could be, beyond what it is. Wine critics and importers do this all the time. Oh, you’re not a critic or an importer? Do your best or consider some of these other tips.
“Age” the wine artificially. As we have written previously, we bring a clef du vin (or wine key) with us. This handy little tool simulates the aging process, giving an idea of what a wine might become. There’s no way to know if it creates the exact tastes and aromas that will be there five years hence, but it gives you an idea.
Compare a library wine to the current bottling. The 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon may be delightful, but the 2010 of the same grape is profound. Or not. Some people prefer the youthful exuberance of newly bottled wines to old, tired stuff. Then there are those who won’t open a bottle for the first decade after the grapes were picked. There’s nothing like a side-by-side comparison to calibrate your palate.
Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. Just because you paid extra to sip a vintage from yesteryear doesn’t force you to prefer it. And if you liked the older wine at one vineyard more than another, that’s okay too. It’s okay to speak your mind, but do so quietly if you’re not a fan of the library wine you’re tasting. Of course, if you do think the older wine is fantastic, say so openly and with gusto.

The Ferry Building

For many Americans (and visitors from abroad as well, for that matter), wine tasting in the US means a trip to Napa Valley and maybe Sonoma County if they’re adventurous. There are other vineyard areas dotted around California, but these are surely the Big Two. If visitors do not reside in Northern California, they probably arrive by air, usually at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). Then, as we often do, they drive north to either the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridge, barely passing through San Franciso itself.

Photo courtesy of the Ferry Building Marketplace.

That’s a shame, because San Francisco is a beautiful city with many attractions. It’s worth taking a day or so away from wine tasting and stop at the City on the Bay. (Actually, there are two; Oakland is on the same bay. But as Gertrude Stein said of the second city, there’s no there there.) We’d like to present one of our favorite stops in Frisco (a San Francisco term the locals hate): the Ferry Building.

It is a handsome building with a clock tower that once was a highlight of the San Francisco skyline. All the tall buildings obscure it now, but it still is a central part of the harbor. Its original use, as the name implies, was to provide an entry point to the city for ferry boats arriving and departing from all points of the bay. At the height of its usage, thousands of passengers passed through every day and the grand hall of the building, known as the Nave, was used for baggage and freight handling.

When the two bridges were erected, ferry traffic abated and the Ferry Building fell into disrepair. Then in the early 2000s, the building was lovingly repaired, restored and reopened as a marketplace, while still acting as the terminus for ferry traffic, which has once more picked up in popularity.

Photo courtesy of Project for Public Spaces.

Today, the Ferry Building is a foodie’s wonderland. There are a few bakeries (think sourdough), a charcuterie, a fromagerie (cheese shop) that sells all the Cowgirl Creamery cheeses and a shop that sells just mushrooms. Don’t overlook the chocolatery, the patisserie, the empanada maker, the Japanese deli, and, and, and…Oh, yes, and the wine shop.

The Farmers Market is open year-round on Saturdays and hosts more than 100 stalls featuring the produce that Northern California is famous for. (Yes, they grow fruits and vegetables there, other than grapes.) One nice little feature of the Saturday market is what they call the Veggie Valet, where you can temporarily drop off your purchases, while you dine or tour around. There are also smaller markets on Tuesday and Thursday markets. The city estimates that 25,000 people shop at the Farmers Market every week.

There are a number of restaurants in the Ferry building that we have enjoyed, although each visit seem to offer a different roster. One of them is the same Gott’s Roadside that we enjoy in St. Helena in Napa Valley. We miss the Slanted Door, our favorite Vietnamese restaurant anywhere, that didn’t make it through the pandemic. We understand that there are plans to reopen it soon.

Sure, we understand the urge to get right out to the vineyards. But give your heart a chance to be left in San Francisco as well.

Brick Barn Wine Estate

There’s a wide variety of wine tasting experiences that one can experience. They include from quiet, almost meditational tastings in ancient facilities. Others are like a night out or a visit to a family home. And some just seem dedicated to fun, however one defines that word. Brick Barn, in our opinion, fits into that latter category.

One of the patios at Brick Barn, showing the Spanish influence on the architecture.

The winery sits in Buellton, nestled in the Santa Rita Hills. It is a new operation, founded in 2018. The winery itself is a handsome, Spanish mission-inspired building, with a very large capacity for tasting visitors. That size, and the variety of venues at Brick Barn define the wine tasting experience there.

The bar area at Brick Barn.

Let us describe several different experiences to be had at Brick Barn. The first is a rather traditional. There’s a tasting room with a bar, where you can enjoy a selection of their recent bottlings. The selection of wines is quite varied, about which more later. The tasting room itself is beautiful, with a large bar decorated in tiles reflecting both Spanish and Native American heritage. The chandeliers and the assortment of interesting shopping add to the pleasure of the room.

The lounge area.

Visitors can have their wines served in another large room, decorated to resemble a private club. It invites consideration of what’s in the glass and low-voiced conversation about it. We have reason to believe that there is no rule of silence, however.

Tasting, picnicking, trees and views.

Then there are the three patios outside. Here you can sit under umbrellas and spreading trees, admiring the views of Brick Barn’s vineyards and the Santa Ynez mountains beyond them. (The parking lot in between doesn’t spoil the pleasure. After all, the cars have to go somewhere.) Visitors are invited to bring picnics, enjoy their tastings of a buy a bottle, and simply relax. If that’s your idea of fun (and it is ours) Brick Barn is the place for it.

Finally, there’s party time. Brick Barn is open most days from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. In other words, it is the place to go for tourists and locals alike at the end of the day. Happy hour can be very happy there and the tasting facilities can become a bit crowded. There’s live music on weekdays and we’re told that the joint rocks until closing time. It’s not our thing, but if it is yours, party hardy.

Brick Barn makes an enormous variety of wines: ten whites, two rosés, four sparkling wines and eight reds, plus four that they consider their top-tier wines, which they call Fatalist. (In our opinion, that’s not the most alluring name for a wine.) This variety is both a strength and a weakness. It pretty much assures that any visitor will find a type of wine that they enjoy. But, as we have said before about other areas of Wine Country, making too many types of wine often undercuts the ability to make anything particularly well.

We fear that that’s the case at Brick Barn. Their wines aren’t to our taste, but that’s unimportant. We write about the tasting experience, which is excellent there. We’re not wine critics and evidently many people like the wines there. So, if you’re in the Santa Rita Hills, you can have fun at Brick Barn.

Dégustation, Degustazione or Whatever

Often as we travel in Europe, we visit towns that are central (or at least near) to the area’s winemaking. The one thing they all have in common is that they are heavily visited by tourists. These have included Taormina in Sicily, Beaune in France and Dubrovnik in Croatia. Often, as we walk around the towns, we see signs that say, “Dégustation” or the equivalent in the local language. Degustation is an English word that means “tasting”, so the shops that the signs are in front of could be bakeries or delis, but they’re always in front of wine shops.

A scene from the film, La Dégustation.

There are always bars that we could go to – and have gone to – where we could sample the local wines. We well remember such a bar in Épernay, France with four glasses of Champagne lined up on our table. But that’s not what a Dégustation is. Nor is it a bistro with a good list of wines by the glass. It’s a store, where people can go in and buy bottles.

When talking about wine, a Dégustation is, as the word implies, a wine tasting. It’s not at a winery and in fact it usually consists of a selection of wines from the vendor’s stock. They are meant to show off the best, or at least typical, wines of the region where the shop is located. A good one really does highlight top wines. Others are more likely to feature bottles that the shop is trying to get rid of. (You can almost hear the shop owner saying, “Heck, they’re only tourists. They won’t know the difference and I’ll never see them again.”)

We’ve run into both types. How can we tell the difference? In most instances, we’ve never been to that town before and are unlikely to go there again. And we don’t know the wines on offer. So all we could do is try our luck, winning sometimes and not in other cases.

As said, Dégustations are not bars. Customers pay a flat fee for four or five tastes. In this way they differ from Italian enotecas, where we could also buy wines by the bottle, for consumption on-site or back home. But in enotecas, we could buy wines by the glass.

One virtue of Dégustations is that the vendor often acts not only as a seller of his own wines but as an educator on the wines of the region. For example, there are plenty of Degustaziones in Montalcino. We know in advance that the shop will be serving Brunellos, because that’s what they make in that Tuscan village and its environs. Ah, but which ones? We are familiar with a few and we enjoy a good Brunello, but we’re hardly expert enough to know which are the best and which are just ordinary. So we listen as the shopkeeper explains the climate and soil conditions around the village and how they affect the aromas and tastes of each wine. If we show a little interest – even better, buy a bottle or two – the server is likely to open some extra wines, to tempt us further.

Dégustations are not better than visiting wineries, but if we are on a trip where we don’t have wheels, they’re a great opportunity to become acquainted with the wines made where we happen to be.

Heitz Cellar

In thinking about Heitz Cellar, our memories break down into two periods: when Joe Heitz was alive and afterwards. Let us be clear that in both periods to vineyards produced world-renowned wines, particularly their Cabernet Sauvignons. But the wine tasting experience became very different once Joe passed away.

Heitz – the winery and the man – are true pioneers of Napa Valley winemaking. He founded the winery in 1961. To put that in perspective, that was 15 years before the famous Judgment of Paris put California wines on the oenological map. Heitz Cellar’s 1970 Cabernet Sauvignon was one of the American wines tasted on that historic occasion.

For most of its existence, the Heitz tasting room was an unassuming, sparsely furnished stone building on Route 29 in St. Helena. The winery was generous in pouring many of their best wines, including the most famous one, the Martha’s Vineyard. Joe Heitz believed that wine was for sharing and so tasting at his winery were free. That remained the case until Joe’s heirs sold the winery to the Lawrence family in 2018. But Joe lives on, on the Heitz Cellar labels, checking out his wines in the aging room.

The old Heitz Cellar winery, circa 1990. Photo courtesy of Wine Spectator.

The Heitz winery today has been rebuilt as a sleek building and tasting room, not a Napa Palace but a long way from two barrels and a plank. As is the case everywhere in Napa Valley, the tastings are sit-down affairs and there is a fee, one consistent with other top-end vineyards in the region. Tastings are available at the original location, now called the Salon, and in the Vaca Mountain foothills, at what they term the Estate.

Tasting at Heitz’s Salon. Photo courtesy of the winery.

The wines available for tasting lean heavily towards the Cabernet Sauvignons that made Heitz so well-known. Martha’s Vineyard is still the flagship wine, and now has a picture of the old winery building on the label. (Sadly, a former favorite of ours, the Bella Oaks, is no longer made.) Some of what makes a visit to Heitz so exciting is that all their wines are sourced from single vineyards, so one can taste the regional variation in Napa Valley in the hands of a single winemaking team. Oh, yeah, they have some Chardonnays and a Rosé too. They’re not the reason to visit Heitz Cellar.

Power Tasting isn’t qualified to compare the wines the way Joe Heitz made them to those made with his name on the label today, but we can compare the experiences. Previously, visitors were made to feel like Joe’s guests, sharing in the bounty of his vineyards and his winemaking skill. The wines were and are powerful and elegant, but the experience was casual and down-to-earth.

A visit to Heitz Cellar today is more like dinner at a four-star restaurant. It’s classy and makes one feel special, but it’s removed from the earth the grapes grew in. (There is a vineyard tour available, so we guess that isn’t always the case.) Honestly, we preferred the old way, but those days are gone and we enjoy the way things are now.

A word about the name. It’s Heitz Cellar (singular) although we’ve always pluralized it. We don’t know any other singulars.

Big Sur

The Big Sur is a stretch of coastline running from the Carmel Valley in the north to the San Antonio Valley in the south. We mention these viticultural areas because we recommend that if you are ever on a wine tasting trip in these AVAs, or nearby as far as Paso Robles or Monterey, you should take some time to see this natural wonder.

Photo courtesy of See Monterey.

Of course, you wouldn’t be able to see if it weren’t for the man-made road, California Highway 1. That stretch offers some of the most stunning coastal vistas in the United States. The view of the Pacific with mountains on one side of the road and sheer cliffs on the other is overwhelming. At each turn of the highway, and there are many, there are vistas that no photograph can do justice to, much less words.

But Power Tasting is about wine tasting, with a monthly recommendation of Places to Visit while on a tasting trip. Big Sur is certainly one of them, but not after visiting any wineries. Highway 1 along the Big Sur has hardly any guardrails, due to the cliffside erosion. Drivers must keep their eyes on the road and not do more than glance at the scenery. Passengers get the most enjoyment, except in looking down those cliffs as they drive by.

Another problem with driving the Big Sur is that there have been some pretty bad landslides. We don’t think there’s too much risk of getting caught in one; the highway authorities take care of preventing cars from entering dangerous zones. But often – most recently in 2024 – landslides have closed large sections of the road to vehicular traffic. So at the present you can go south as far as Esalen and north as far as Lucia, but not in between.

Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Courtesy of California Beaches.

There are a few attractions on or near the Big Sur besides the vistas. The best known of them is Hearst Castle in San Simeon, near the southern extreme. It is the mighty pleasure dome erected by the newspaper publisher William Randoph Hearst. He inspired fear and derision in his time, which ended in 1951. He is best remembered now as the inspiration for the movie Citizen Kane. His mansion is a relic of a lost age of California wealth and folly, preceding the Silicon Valley excesses of our own time. Still, tourists flock to see it.

There is also the village of Big Sur, about 24 miles south of Carmel. In itself, it’s undistinguished. But it’s a place where people can park their cars and enjoy the view without having to drive. There’s access to hiking trails and to beaches. The latter are not really for bathing, being much to rocky. But we understand surfers like to do their thing near there. We once went to a dinner show in nearby Ventana and recommend it if you like amateur theatricals.

The Esalen Institute is along the Big Sur, if you want to have your spirits enlightened. And you can visit a museum dedicated to Henry Miller, if Lady Chatterley is to your taste. But really, the reason to go to the Big Sur is to take in the magnificent views. If you visit California for wine tasting, take a little time off to see Big Sur.

Advice to New Wine Tasters

A few issues back, Power Tasting gave advice on teaching new wine tasters about wine. We’d also like to advise on what to tell new wine tasters who are interested in going on a wine tasting trip if they ask for your input. A lot of them will want to go to Napa Valley, because that’s the American winemaking region best known to them.

Photo courtesy of Forbes.

Focus on the experience and not just the wines. If it were just about wine, they could stay home and open bottles. Take in the scenery, the scented air, the architecture, the little side roads, even the restaurants. For the first-timers, the trip should be more than an introduction to wine; it should also be an entry into what Robert Mondavi called the good life.
Take a winery tour. And maybe take it at the first place they visit. If in one stop they can see the vines, the winemaking facilities and taste the wines, they will get the full spectrum of wine: agriculture, industry and art. We, experienced tasters, get a bit blasé about winery tours; seen one and we’ve seen them all. If we give advice we should try to remember when we hadn’t seen one at all.
Try a lot of different types of wine. One of the advantages of tasting in Napa Valley is the existence of wines made from so many varietals. So if in visiting just a few wineries – and sipping, not gulping – they can experience Chardonnay next to Sauvignon Blanc; Cabernet Sauvignon next to Merlot next to Zinfandel next to Pinot Noir. That’s an education!
Show the server an interest in learning about wine. From a purely commercial perspective, it pays for the tasting room personnel to go out of their way to aid new tasters. Today’s young, innocent faces are tomorrow’s clientele. Beyond that, servers generally love wine and even if they’re not themselves educators, they probably know more about the subject than the new wine tasters in front of them. New visitors should urge their servers to share their knowledge.
Talk to each other about what they’re smelling and tasting. (We’re assuming that they’re not tasting solo, which introduces a lot of other issues.) Just because they’re inexperienced doesn’t mean that new wine tasters don’t have good sense…and good senses. Finding ways to express their sensual reactions will help them to solidify their learning. And it’s fun to stick their noses into a glass and find the words for what they smell. Talking about it is even better. One’s smell of strawberries are no better than another’s pencil box , but it does lead to some interesting conversations.

Discovering California Wine

Our very first wine tasting trip occurred in 1977, when we visited Napa Valley for the first time. By this point in our lives, we were wine enjoyers, not yet enthusiasts. Almost everything we drank was either French or Italian. Sure, we had some California wine, but it came in jugs and we served it at parties. We were too classy (meaning snobbish and uninformed) to drink American wine.

The iconic Robert Mondavi winery.

But then the newspapers became full of articles about a wine tasting in France that has come to be known as The Judgment of Paris. In May, 1976 California wines, mostly from Napa Valley, had competed side-by-side with the top tier of French wines and (amazing!) the American wines came out on top. So we started to buy some wines from California that came in regular wine bottles. But we didn’t know what to buy and even if we did, the distribution networks that exist today weren’t there in those days, so better California wines weren’t in our stores.

So the next year, when as luck would have it, we attended a conference in San Francisco, we took an extra day to voyage across the Bay Bridge and see what Napa Valley was all about. There were nowhere as many wineries in the valley as there are today. By this time, we had learned about a few of them and made sure to try the ones we’d heard of.

Memory is a bit foggy nearly a half century later. We know we went to Chandon. The bubbly wine that we tasted – we were warned not to call it Champagne – was wonderful! So much better than the plonk we were used to back home. And we went to Robert Mondavi, which was a revelation. It wasn’t just the wines, though they were amazing. It was the beauty of the architecture, the grounds and the vineyards that blew us away (and made us into wine tasters to this day).

And we’re sure we had a tasting at Louis M. Martini. Memory may be playing tricks, but we think we got to meet Mr. Martini himself on that occasion. It was definitely a simple operation, unlike the elegant tasting facilities at Martini today. Here were hearty, accessible wines that we could afford to buy. Their wines became a mainstay of our cellar (that was actually the bottom of the linen closet).

Without getting into a comparison of French, Italian and Californian wines, it is fair to say that in those early years of our wine-drinking lives, the quality difference at the price point we could afford in those days – five dollars was a lot – was pretty great. Decades of inflation and some improvement in our tastes make wine rather more expensive nowadays, and our cellar contains wine from more places. There will always be a place for California wines. Their power is unmistakable, both in terms of flavors and the amount of alcohol (although climate change is forcing the Europeans to bottle wines that are catching up to California in that regard). But in the 1970’s all we knew was we had discovered something new that opened taste vistas for us.

Overlooked Places

Each month, Power Tasting features a Place to Visit when someone is on a wine tasting trip. These are not wine-related locations, but interesting spots in some region of Wine Country that deserve a visit when in the area. Many are fairly obvious, like Paris, Porto or Vienna. Others are popular with tourists who come into that area. But there are a few that are forgotten; actually, it is more that they are overlooked.

These places are never destinations. We just happened to be in them and found them charming and welcoming. There were no buses; no crammed parking lots and virtually no visitors other than ourselves. San Gimignano in Tuscany was like that the first time we stopped there; now it is as crowed as Times Square. We can even remember when it was difficult to find lunch in Healdsburg. The kind of places we are talking about are still unspoiled.

A Buonconvento street scene. Photo courtesy of castellotoscani.com.

When you’re wine tasting in Tuscany you may find yourself on the road from Siena, on your way to Montalcino. There will be a sign pointing to Buonconvento, literally meaning the “good convento” but interpreted by the locals as “a happy place”. We once pulled off the road and found ourselves at a standup cappuccino bar, with a few older folks staring at us. They were friendly but curious, wondering “why are you people here?” In fractured Italian we explained that we just wanted some coffee and a rest stop. They, in broken English, urged us to take a look around the town.

The streets were clean; children were playing; and the local church was quite pretty with some interesting frescoes. We have read since that it is considered to be one of the most beautiful villages in Tuscany. We can’t speak to that, but it was very typical of what we expected a Tuscan village to look like and were glad to have stopped.

Peniches along the Canal du Midi in Poilhes.

Another such village is Poilhes in southern France. There is some dispute how to pronounce it, but the closest we can get is “poo-yeh”. There are vineyards surrounding the commune extend as far as the eye can see, so the surrounding area is a great destination for learning about Languedoc wines.

You can drive from one end of Poilhes to the other in about two minutes. If you don’t blink, you’ll see the Canal du Midi and rental boats called péniches moored there at the end of the day. There’s a chic restaurant we found overrated, but the boating tourists flock to it. We preferred a simple café nestled under a spreading platane tree, run by a couple of British emigrants. Even more so, we loved wine store-cum-hotel called Vinauberge, which we have profiled previously. There is a huge selection of local wines that can be sampled by the pour.

There’s nothing much going on in Poilhes. You can walk along the canal or visit the cemetery with its poignant memorials to wartime dead. That’s about it. And that’s the point. It’s a great place to do nothing.

Storybook Mountain Vineyards

There are fashions in cars, clothes and cosmetics. And there are fashions in wine, even in the popularity of wineries to visit. When we first started visiting Napa Valley, there were not nearly as many wineries as there are today. And not all of them were open for tasting. The top attractions were names like Mondavi, Chandon and Heitz. Small, out-of-the-way wineries were barely talked of.

The view from Storybook Mountain winery. Photo courtesy of NapaValley.com

But those in the know, mostly West Coast friends would tell us, “If you get as far as Calistoga, you must go to Storybook Mountain winery”. Frankly, it sounded more like a ride at Disneyland than a winery. So we went and we liked it very much. It is hard to call Storybook a forgotten winery, especially since they have been making wine there since 1883. But people no longer whisper its name anymore, so we will speak of it, out loud.

Storybook isn’t exactly off the beaten path, but it is at the northern end of it, four miles north of Calistoga. Go only a little further and you’re in Knight’s Valley. It’s way up in the hills, perhaps why it’s not so well known these days.

The name of the winery is a story in itself. It was started by a German immigrant named Adam Grimm, who was soon joined by his brother Jacob. So: the Brothers Grimm, hence the storybook. Their label is a fox trying to reach up to some grapes, which is an Aesop fable not a Grimm fairytale. But you get the idea.

The ancient caves at Storybook Mountain. Photo courtesy of Crafted Brands.

After Prohibition, the winery was abandoned until a scholar named Jerry Seps bought it in 1976. From the outset, they planted Zinfandel and that’s the grape used in the wines for which Storybook is best known. They make four of them plus a Zin rosé. They also have a Cabernet Sauvignon and a single white wine, a Viogner.

One of the great attractions in visiting Storybook is the beauty of the place. All visits include a tour and a tasting. The caves survived from the times of the Grimm brothers. The land is surrounded by a redwood grove, which is part of the tour. The views from Storybook – it is a mountain – are ravishing.

Come to Storybook for the wine and the views, but also appreciate the history. It isn’t only that the land was producing wine grapes for over 100 years. This vineyard has roots (pun intended) in Europe but also in the revolution in American winemaking that began in Napa Valley in the 1960’s and 70’s. They served Cabernet Sauvignon at that famous taste-off in Paris in 1976, so Storybook couldn’t have been there. But they have had their wines served at White House dinners and they were among the first, along with Ridge and Trefethen, to see the potential in the Zinfandel grape for wine greatness.

So take the tour, enjoy the views and sip the wines, knowing that you are partaking in a story (also intended) that goes back deep into Napa Valley’s past.