lgsjr – Page 40 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

They Ship, You Sip

These days, it’s easy to find good, great and even exceptional wines in Wine Country. The problem is how do you get the wine you like onto your dining room table? If you live in the area of wineries you like, this really isn’t a problem at all. You simply buy some wine, load it into your car and drive home. But for those less fortunate and for those who like to include wine tasting in their travel plans, especially overseas, getting the wine home is tricky.

Wine clubs Wine clubs are one way to solve the dilemma. If you live in a state that allows out-of-state shipping (most of them, these days) joining a club means that wine will show up on your doorstep at regular intervals, usually four times a year. This is, after all, the raison d’etre of these clubs in the first place. It benefits the winery to be sure, but there’s a lot of benefit to the buyer as well, especially if you are a collector and are willing to let some of the wine age for a bit.

The problem – and this is a common theme – is the shipping cost. Almost all clubs offer you a discount (20% is common) but the cost of getting the wine to you often cuts, if not wipes out, the discount. Some wine clubs are becoming sensitive to this and are offering special deals and flat rate shipping, but this only benefits the individuals who buy in volume. For example, a $15 shipping charge for three bottles adds five dollars to the price of every bottle. That’s cost is not unusual.

Shipping services The wine clubs are great if you want a case a year from one producer. But if you are on a wine tasting trip, you are more likely to buy one bottle from each of twelve wineries than twelve bottle from just one. Here’s where shipping services come into play. Of course, there are UPS and FedEx and they are usually present in the towns of Wine Country. But check first; not every common carrier has a license to ship alcohol and those that do don’t have it in every office.

Another alternative is specialized shippers whose primary business is to send wine home to people just like you. They specialize in packing and shipping delicate freight, i.e., wine bottles. A few that we have used are Fitch Mountain in Healdsburg, Buffalo’s Shipping Post in Napa and Safe Haven Wine Services in Paso Robles. A quick Google search will help you find more shippers wherever you may be going.

A variant on these services is to let your hotel take care of it for you. Many have arrangements with shipping services that allow you to bring your bottles to the front desk, fill out some inventory forms and they take care of the rest. It’s very convenient and we’ve never had any troubles using the service from hotels we have stayed in. But it is a bit nerve-wracking to leave your precious cargo in the hands of a hotel clerk.

The process of these services runs around $60 per case. In other words, you’re back to adding five bucks to each bottle. If you are proud of a fabulous little low-priced gem you found somewhere, an additional $5 takes away much of the bargain.

Lug it yourself There is the option of carrying your wine home yourself. The economics make sense. Almost any winery will sell you a foam insulated box for under $10. So fill it yourself and take it with you. It may cost you another $25 to include the box with your luggage, so you might be saving $25 in total. And, oh yes, remember to bring packing tape and scissors with you.

That may be good for your wallet but it’s bad for your back. You have to get the wine into the back seat of your car (in summer at any rate; in winter it can go in the trunk), out of the car and into the terminal and then reverse the process on the other end when you land. If your car is a rental, there’s one additional step. Don’t even think about sending wine as luggage if you have a stop on your itinerary.

You are also subject to the tender mercies of two sets of baggage handlers. For the most part, bottles we have taken home this way have arrived intact, but there have been some sad counter-examples. When we travel to Europe, we generally limit our purchases to the legal limit (four bottles per couple), wrap the bottles in bubble wrap that we have brought from home and put them in our luggage. We have had no horror stories thus far, but time will tell.

Joining a Wine Club

In almost all California wineries, when you go wine tasting you’ll find a brochure (or your server will give you one) inviting you to join their wine club. At that very moment, it usually seems like a great idea. The few sips you’ve had so far appeal to you; the room is warm; the server is friendly; and the wine is beginning to lighten your mood. So why not?

There are some very good reasons to join a wine club and about as many that would lead you to decide not to. Being a member certainly makes a difference to your wine tasting experience, as we have written previously. So let’s give some thought as to how you might decide whether to join.

The first question you should ask yourself is whether you like the wine. Even more, do you like it enough to want to receive a case every year? If the answer is “yes”, by all means join the club. But if not, think twice. That’s because by joining you are signing up for at least a case annually. A slightly more nuanced question is whether you like all of a winery’s production, or just certain (usually the top tier) wines? If you would welcome getting some but not all of their wines, you should follow up with some more questions.

Can you select just the wines you want? Or as we call it, can you customize? Many clubs will offer you just the whites or the reds or the sparklings or however they split up their production. So if, for example, you like all their red wines but aren’t eager to get their whites, limit your deliveries accordingly.
But what if you only like some of their reds? Again, some wine clubs will allow you to specify certain varietals. For another example, we are members of a few wine clubs in the Carneros region from which we only receive Pinot Noirs .
But what if you only like one or two of their wines? That’s a bit tougher and many wineries won’t let you choose only one or a few. But some do, and then you’ll get a dozen bottle of the same wine year after year. Do you really like it that much?

For the most part, wineries select certain wines for you for each shipment and that’s what you get. You may not even be allowed to cancel an order you don’t want. Some, however, will allow you to change their selections to your preferred wines. This is another way of limiting what you get to what you like.

Another reason for you to join a wine club is to have the opportunity for free tastings whenever you visit. So before joining a club, ask yourself whether you like the experience in a particular winery enough to come back. Or put another way, would you like to come this way again repeatedly? If you don’t see yourself in that part of Wine Country very often in the future, maybe it’s a good idea to pass on this club.

For some people, a consideration is how often a wine club delivers. One of our clubs send two bottles every two months. That’s six time a year waiting at home for UPS, which can be a drag. The ones we appreciate most have two annual shipments; the norm is four. They usually arrive in spring and fall, since shipping can be tricky in deep winter and wines don’t like cross-country transportation at the height of the summer.

We travel to California for wine tasting every year, so we have certain places where we like the wines a lot, find the tasting rooms and their outdoor areas very inviting and the servers to be congenial and welcoming. So membership makes sense for us.

At a certain point, you may find your wine rack overloading with wines from one or more of your clubs. Maybe the wines appealed more to you on vacation than when you started drinking them at home. Maybe the food you make in your own kitchen isn’t very compatible with the wines you loved so much on that visit two years ago. Maybe enough is just enough. Then quit the club! It’s not a lifetime commitment and you can always join a different wine club and fill out your cellar.

Lousy Wineries

There are two good reasons to visit a particular winery on any particular trip to Wine Country: to taste good wine and to experience wonderful places. Unfortunately, there are some wineries that have neither attribute. (It is not Power Tasting’s policy to give derogatory reviews, so we’ll withhold names. But take it from us, they exist and they’re no fun.) So why go to one of these wineries?

The easy answer is, “Don’t go”. But that’s not always easy to do. For one thing, you don’t know you’re going to have a poor experience until you have it. And there may be reasons why you are at a particular winery that are beyond your control. Perhaps you’re with someone who doesn’t know anything about wine but likes the sound of the wine’s name. Maybe your client has an interest in a winery. Maybe it’s just there on the road, so why not. These have all happened to us, at one time or another.

It’s sort of like being at a dull party; you’re already there and maybe something will come up. How can you leave five minutes after arriving? At one of these sad wineries, you brace yourself and try your best to seem interested. You hold onto a glass for longer than usual, looking around, not actually tasting more than the barest sip and saying things like:

“I’ve never tasted anything quite like this before.”
“What a unique presentation of the varietal character”
And the always popular, “Hmmmm”.

Some of the grand palaces being erected by wineries these days at least offer the possibility of architectural interest. But what about wineries that are no more than a suburban house or, worse, an industrial shed? You can’t just jump to conclusions; great wineries come in modest homes. For years, Ridge’s Lytton Springs winery was in the barrel room. Iron Horse has a wooden, outdoor shed. Heitz Cellar is a modest stone building. If you can’t tell a book by its cover, you can’t tell a wine by its winery, either. But you can be forewarned. If it doesn’t look too good and there are no cars in the parking lot, maybe you should think twice about entering.

There is a variant on the Lousy Winery phenomenon. You’re hating everything about the place: the wine, the tasting room, the noisy people assembled at the bar. But everyone else, in particular your companions, is loving it. And it’s raining so you can’t just wait outside. This is the time to recognize the wisdom of Orr’s Law from Catch 22: If you’re bored, time goes more slowly and you live longer. Okay, it’s not a very good rationale but it may be the only rationale you have.

We have recently been travelling in some lesser known wine making areas in France and California and we have happened upon some of these unfortunate wineries. Sometimes we were the only ones there so we couldn’t leave without being rude. We sipped; we sighed; and we left. We recommend this strategy if you find yourself so entrapped. You never know, the next place down the road may be wonderful. Or not.

Dining and Drinking in Lyon

Let’s say you want to go wine tasting in France. That’s a good idea but France is an awfully big place. The question then is where in France? If you go to Bordeaux, you get to taste Bordeaux wines. In Burgundy, you get Burgundies. It makes sense, doesn’t it? But there is one place where you can have two totally different styles of wine to enjoy and that place is the city of Lyon. A half hour north is Beaujolais. The same distance south and you’re in the Rhône Valley (at least the northern end of the valley with appellations like Côte Rôtie, St. Joseph and Condrieu.

The primary grapes of the northern Rhone are Syrah and Viognier. Beaujolais makes wine from Gamay. The vineyards in the Rhone grow on terraced mountains that seem from even a short distance to be sheer cliffs. Beaujolais’ vineyards are on lovely rolling hills and valley. As we say, two totally different wine tasting experiences.

And right in the middle of it is France’s third largest city, its temple of gastronomy, the capital of the east: Lyon. Sure, go wine tasting all you want but leave time to explore this wonderful city. Of course, there are historic churches, grand plazas and elegant shopping. But if you are a wine lover, it’s a sure bet that you love food, too, and dining in Lyon is, simply put, great fun.

You can indulge yourself in the highest of high cuisine. Just twenty minutes’ drive from downtown is the Taj Mahal of French cookery, Paul Bocuse. It has had three Michelin stars for more than fifty years and will surely continue to do so as long Maître Bocuse is alive. He’s 90 now, so if you want to have a meal under his tutelage, go soon. It’s expensive. If you can afford it, it’s worth it. The wine list is also quite pricey but there are some bargains to be found if you search for them.

One step down are the bistros and brasseries in Lyon. Perhaps the best of them also have Monsieur Bocuse’s name on them. Several of his associates have opened top-end brasseries named (with a certain lack of imagination) Est, Ouest, Nord and Sud (East, West, North and South). They feature the classics of French cuisine. Onion soup, anyone?

You don’t need a fat wallet to enjoy Lyonnais dining. The city is full of little restaurants known as bouchons, French for corks. In these places you can choose among numerous regional specialties like salade Lyonnaise (salad with big chunks of bacon and a poached egg), cervelas briochée (a hot dog-like sausage baked in brioche, chicken fricassee with morels, quenelles de brochet (a poached fish cake in a rich crawfish flavored sauce) all finished off some creamy St. Marcellin cheese. Don’t even think about rushing your meal. You’re going to take your time to enjoy the food, the surroundings, the French families at the other tables and, not least, the chatter of your waiter. In the best places, he’ll speak English and if you speak French, so much the better. He’s explain the menu, the weather, the history of France and a little bit of life lessons as well. Enjoy the show.

The bouchon Les Lyonnais

And enjoy the wine. While some bouchons have broad lists, most focus on just the local wines. But when “local” means Beaujolais and the Rhône, that’s not too bad. Go ahead and order what you like, but the true glory of a bouchon is the house wines, each served in a 40 cl. bottle called a pot (pronounced poe). Pots are inexpensive, always good, never great and just not quite enough for a meal. So you order another – hey, why not, you’re having a great meal in a great city in a great country. And you know what, two isn’t quite enough either to have some to go with the cheese, so… Three hours later, you waddle out of the bouchon content and ready for bed.

There are hundreds of bouchons to choose from. Some are of relatively modern vintage, others are more than a century old. There is a web site of the organization that is trying to preserve the authenticity of these wonderful restaurants, www.lesbouchonslyonnais.org. Even though it’s in French it will give you lots of excellent recommendations. But don’t restrict yourself to this list. Explore a little and you’ll find that some are just as good. It’s really hard to have a bad meal in Lyon.

Testarossa Winery

California makes wine. California makes software. You just don’t expect those things to happen in the same place, but in silicon Valley’s Los Gatos you can find Testarossa, makers of fine Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. (http://www.testarossa.com/) Even better for the visitor, the winery and its tasting room are in a building with genuine historical and architectural interest.

Testarossa is in the Santa Clara Valley, a part of California’s Wine Country we had never visited before…at least not for wine. Of course we knew the more famous places like Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles, and to be honest we had low expectations of Santa Clara. To be even more honest, many of the wineries where we tasted fully lived up to our low expectations. But Testarossa was the happy exception.

You approach Testarossa up a steep and winding roadway leading to a large parking lot with a rather large and austere building on top. It was once a Jesuit seminary, dating from the 1880s, and was also the home of Novitiate Winery, which the brothers ran to fund the school. The wine making facilities are used by Testarossa today. Visitors enter the tasting room through a long, arched stone arcade, which opens up into a rather capacious facility with two long bars. On weekends they add tables to serve guests in other parts of the room. There is also a wine bar on the grounds.

Photo courtesy of Testarossa Winery

One factor that makes a visit to Testarossa particularly enjoyable – other than the wine itself, of course – is the fact that the servers are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. The winery provides ample training and all are at least level one sommeliers. It is not an exaggeration to call them wine educators. Not that they’re snobby and professorial. Quite the opposite. They set a tone that says, “Wine is fun; good wine is great fun”.

We must say that we enjoyed what we tasted and were particularly interested in their approach to wine making. Testarossa has no estate wines. That means that they do not grow grapes on their own property. The Jesuits did grow on the grounds, but after more than a century, the vines had given out. Today, Testarossa sources all its grapes from vineyards up and down the California coast, from Russian River and Sonoma Coast down to the Santa Rita Hills. To our tastes, their best wines come from the Santa Lucia Highlands, but then we’re very favorable towards wines made from grapes grown there.

A highlight of a visit is tasting the wide array of single vineyard wines that Testarossa makes. They’re picking up some fancy numbers from the rating magazines and we feel that they’re well justified. At the same time, we gravitated towards the blends, especially from the aforementioned Santa Lucia Highlands. The reserve tasting is definitely worth the extra expense (not that much, really, since at $20.00 it’s only $10.00 more than the regular one).

We recommend that, when visiting Testarossa, you take your time and ask a lot of questions. You’ll get knowledgeable answers and once you show your interest, your server is likely to open bottles that aren’t on the tasting list, even on a weekend. It would be worthwhile visiting this winery just for the history. In these days of vanity wineries, it’s a pleasure to see software folks who hit it big – it is Silicon Valley, after all – making the commitment to fine wine and a great tasting experience.

A Field Guide to Servers – Part 2 – The Hosts

This is a continuation of Power Tasting’s guide to the different sorts of Servers wine tasters may encounter in their expeditions into Wine Country. The previous edition introduced the Pourers, the lowest form of Server. In this section of the field guide, we present the Hosts.

What is a Host? A Host pours wine and delivers it to wine tasters. He or she knows nothing about wine in general or even the wine that is going into the taster’s glass. The Host’s objective is simply to make sure that everyone is having a good time. This is often an admirable trait and it can be quite pleasant to deal with a Host in his or her own habitat. Unfortunately, interacting with a Host can be quite frustrating if a taster is interested in knowing anything about the wine being consumed. It is unclear whether a Host can tell the difference between a Pinot Noir and a Petite Sirah, or a Chardonnay for that matter. But while in the company of a Host, it’s Party Time!

hostcat

How can you recognize a Host? A Host appears to be in perpetual motion, moving from taster to taster quickly enough to avoid questions. You will often hear the cry of the Host, “What’ll you have next?” If you are able to stop a Host long enough for a question, you will be promised an answer shortly, often giving the Host a chance to ask someone else behind the bar for help. Hosts can be recognized by

Big smiles, even when inappropriate
Fast talking
Eagerness to explain his or her life story, but not to say anything about wine
Two or more bottles in his or her hands

Hosts will keep refilling your glass, which is both a positive and a negative.

What can you expect from a Host? Wine. Lots of it, along with a smooth patter and a snappy joke. When being served by a Host, it’s often a good idea to just catch the spirit and go along with the party atmosphere. Wine is a social lubricant and there’s nothing wrong with having a good time. Who doesn’t like a good party? As would anyone throwing a shindig, the Host will introduce you to fellow tasters, get a conversation going and keep you involved. The risk, of course, of dealing with a Host is overindulgence, so know when to say you’ve had enough for a while.

How to get the greatest advantage from a Host? Let the Host run the party; you taste the wine. Have fun by all means but do it slowly. For one thing this keeps the party going longer. For another, you can actually get to appreciate the wine, often in the type of setting when you might be serving it back home.

Where are Hosts found? Oddly, Hosts may be found in really fine wineries as well as in sellers of plonk. You are most likely to meet one on a weekend when tasting rooms are the most crowded and the winery needs the most people to serve their visitors. Look around for a happy, giggly party in a corner of a tasting room. You’re likely to see a Host pouring the wine.

Signorello Estate

A visit to the Signorello Estate (http://signorelloestate.com/) winery can take on a few different personalities. Let’s focus on the easy one first, tasting their wines. We rather like them, especially their Cabernet Sauvignon and their Syrah. According to Signorello’s web site, their wines have been receiving considerable attention from the point-giving magazines. They are certainly a mouthful, with strong varietal flavors. Their top wines are now allocated, so if you’re not a member of Signorello’s wine club, the only way you’ll taste their top-rated wines is to visit the winery.

The tasting room is spacious and kept a little on the dark side, for a chateau-like atmosphere. In fact, as you drive up to the winery you may be reminded a bit of a slightly modern French chateau. And indeed although the owners bear an Italian surname, the wines are very much in a Napafied French style. There is a grandeur to the Signorello winery, combining the architecture and the landscape. You know you’re in Napa Valley. In fact, you’ll have just the sort of experience that many wine tasters came to Napa Valley for.

If you’re lucky, your server will be Nathalie Birebent, whose lilting French accent makes the wines taste a little less Californian and a little more French. (More about Mme. Birebent later.)

You may enjoy your tasting at the bar of the tasting room or outside on a sunlit terrace, and it is there on the terrace that the split personality of a Signorello visit kicks in. There is one of those infinity pools that seems to disappear over the edge, leading to a lovely view of Signorello’s vineyards and Napa Valley generally. It is hard to think of anything more attractive on a lazy summer afternoon.

But summer afternoons at Signorello are anything but lazy. Signorello has a working restaurant kitchen just opposite the bar and they do use it. The winery offers several different wine and food pairing tours and on the weekends there is often quite a party going on. So the calm of the interior belies the jangle of the terrace. If the latter is the scene you like, there are fewer places better than Signorello to enjoy it. If not, we recommend you visit Signorello on a weekday.

We have a special affinity for Signorello, beginning with the aforementioned Nathalie Birebent. Not only is she the spirit of the tasting room, but she’s also the wife of Pierre Birebent, the winemaker. So Mme. Birebent brings a special level of knowledge to her service which magnifies the wine tasting experience. Lucie is a native francophone (and Steve can get along in French) so our conversations over a few pours is always quite lively when we visit Signorello. On one occasion, Pierre gave us a private tour which was a pretty amazing way to visit a winery.

Overall, a visit to Signorello combines many of the elements that make wine tasting exciting: fine wine, knowledgeable servers, resonant architecture and (if you like) a party. There’s the little thrill that comes from discovering wines that you can’t find on the shelves of your local wine shop. We always leave Signorello with a smile on our faces.

A Field Guide to Servers – Part 1 – The Pourers

If we think of our passages through Wine Country as nature expeditions, then it’s important to recognize the flora and fauna we find there. The flora, of course, are grapes. It’s the various forms of wildlife we might see that get our attention here. We refer specifically to Servers. The four species of Servers are the Pourers, the Hosts, the Sellers and the Educators. Each has distinctive features and habitats and so Power Tasting is pleased to offer this field guide for those of you who will be encountering Servers in their native sites. In this issue, we introduce you to the Pourers and will continue with the other species in future issues.

What is a Pourer? A Pourer is a person whose sole activity is to remove wine from a bottle through the neck and place it in a glass. A Pourer knows nothing about wine, even the one he or she is serving. In most cases, the Pourer is an employee of the establishment where he or she is found but may in some cases be a son, daughter or close relative who has been dragooned into pouring duties instead of hanging out at a mall. Portions served by a Pourer are generally small, probably because he or she has been instructed to do so by the proprietor of the said establishment. The proprietors are cheap in serving wine because they are cheap in everything or they never would have hired a Pourer.

How can you recognize a Pourer? Pourers are generally encountered alone, often in periods of the day in which wineries attract few visitors. In fact, Pourers are often sited in tasting rooms that have relatively few visitors at all. Pourers can be recognized by the following characteristics:

Poor posture
Dull, lifeless expressions
A general unwillingness to communicate
The presence of a cell phone in the hand not serving
You immediately feel like you are disturbing him or her

Pourers don’t want to be wherever they are and don’t want to talk with anyone, especially you.

What can you expect from a Pourer? Not much. But you will get wine in your glass, so make the most of it. Take your time. Swirl your wine gently in your glass. Savor each sip. These actions are likely to make a Pourer rather nervous and may lead to a bit more attention to you than you might otherwise expect. (Sadly, the type of wineries that employ Pourers often have lousy wine, so taking your time may be a test of your endurance versus his or hers.)

How to get the greatest advantage from a Pourer? Since questions won’t result in meaningful (or even intelligible) answers, don’t waste your time. If you do want some more information and there is no one else around, ask if there is any literature available, such as descriptions of the wines on offer or tasting notes. If you really do care, ask for the web site address.

Where are Pourers found? While you might encounter a Pourer anywhere, it has been our experience that they tend to appear more frequently in the in-town tasting rooms of wineries you’ve never heard of but which have nice signs out front. They pop up on weekends although the general busy-ness of those days call for a Pourer to be accompanied by someone who knows what he or she is doing. You’re more likely to see a Pourer in the wild on a rainy weekday morning.

Here’s to the Wines of Yesteryear

In our youth, most people we knew who did drink didn’t drink wine. Oh, there would be an occasional bottle on a special occasion, but the alcoholic beverages of choice in those days were whisky and beer. Many of us were the first in our families who took wine seriously, both as an accompaniment to a meal and as a drink that would give unique pleasure on its own.

So what were we drinking back then? By our current standards, it wasn’t very good. For one thing, we were students and we didn’t have much money. Even if a Mouton Rothschild could be had for around ten dollars, that was a lot for a starving scholar then. Also, there weren’t as many wine stores such as we see today; there were liquor stores with a few bottles of red and a few bottles of white somewhere in the back. (It was a little better if you lived in an area with Italian, French or Spanish immigrants, but not a lot better.)

Photo courtesy of J. Crew

If you were anything like us, the first wine you actually went into a store and bought for yourself was one of these: Lancers, Mateus, Mouton-Cadet or Gallo Hearty Burgundy. All these wines are still available for purchase. (One of the reasons for buying Lancers was that it came in a nice clay bottle that you could use as a vase, so it maybe doesn’t count as a wine, but let’s include it.)

Lancers was and is a light bodied rosé from Portugal. Amazingly, it is produced by the great port house, Fonseca. It was created for American tastes and it succeeded quite well in that regard. Described as “moderately sweet” on the Fonseca web site, it tastes pretty sweet to us.

Its competitor for American attention was Mateus, which some of us pronounced mat-OOS and those affecting a European elegance said ma-TAY-us. We don’t think anyone knows to this day. It’s also Portuguese, sweet, comes in a pretty, mandolin-shaped bottle and was impressive to bring on a date. It showed you were too cool for Lancers, which after all had an English name.

But what could be better than a French name, and that of a French baron no less? Mouton Cadet was originally the name that the French branch of the renowned Rothschild family gave to wines it didn’t think were worthy of being called “real” Mouton. By the time we were buying it, Mouton Cadet had morphed into a thin, acidic, mass produced wine. But we liked it. Just perfect for anyone who knew nothing about wine…and that was us. By the way, these days it’s not bad for the price.

Finally, Gallo Hearty Burgundy was, as Gallo calls it today, their “original red blend” which of course had nothing to do with Pinot Noir from the east of France. But it tasted pretty good and showed your fraternity brothers that you were above (sneer) mere beer. You probably can’t do much better even today for six bucks.

Other than a nice walk down memory lane, what’s the relevance to today’s wine tasters of even moderately good taste? These wines are where we got our start. Even if they weren’t very serious wines, we took them seriously. If we’re honest with ourselves, we liked them back then although we couldn’t have said why. They brought a little glamor and sophistication into our lives and opened some horizons as to how people lived across the ocean or the continent.

In short, these wines of yesteryear were the first steps that led us to wineries in Napa Valley, Tuscany, Bordeaux and numerous other outposts in Wine Country. Sure, we can look down our oh, so elegant noses at those bottles we wouldn’t think of buying today. But consider: there’s probably some wine you like today that won’t be as appealing to you in a few years. Our tastes grow and change, and they had to start somewhere.

Lost Wineries

This is an unusual “Places to Visit” article, because you can’t visit the places described here. They’re gone, vanished into corporate policy, Napafication, wine economics or just the passage of time. We’re talking about wineries that we have loved in the past that are no longer there. These musings were occasioned by a recent visit to Joseph Phelps’ Freestone winery in Sonoma county. Phelps is one of the best known Napa Valley wineries and they added a tasting room way out towards the Sonoma Coast when they bought vineyards in the area in the late 1990’s. It has been open since 2007 and as of December 31, 2016 it will be closed.

phelps_freestone

Joseph Phelps’ Freestone Visitors Center

The tasting room had a gracious farmhouse feel to it and we hope that someone else decides to share their wines there. Even if someone does, it won’t be the same without those wonderful Phelps wines, which will still be available at their St. Helena winery. How sad that future wine lovers won’t be able to enjoy it the way that we did. (Actually, we’d love to buy it as a home but Phelps isn’t offering and we doubt that we could afford it.)

Not so many years ago, Michael Mondavi Family, owned by the son of the great Robert, had a winery in Carneros. It was similar to the Phelps Freestone winery in that it also gave visitors a sense that they were stopping by an old friend’s home. Sure, there was a bar and a server, but with a fireplace and some easy chairs, you felt that Mike would be dropping by any minute to offer you a glass and a welcome. Okay, this was all in the imagination but for one thing, wine tasting calls for some imagination and for another, that feeling is part of the experience.

[Today the Michael Mondavi tasting room has been replaced by that of a businessman who has turned the winery into a monument to ego and garish taste. No more need be said about the sense of loss.]

The former Michael Phelps Family tasting room

Perhaps the saddest loss was the Stag’s Leap tasting room built by the master winemaker, Warren Winiarski. Oh, you can still visit Stag’s Leap Vineyards and taste their famous wines. But Mr. Winiarski hasn’t had anything to do with them for some years now, since he sold his vineyards and winery to a conglomerate. Today, there’s a stunning stone and glass Visitors Center there, a truly modern Napa building. But there used to be a wooden building, a bit too crowded to be sure, with an inviting terrace and shady trees that told you that wine making is about farming and artistry, not just business.

The former terrace of the Stag’s Leap winery

There was that same sense in a lot of the wineries that have upgraded to meet the demands of tourism and trade. Perhaps it’s just wistfulness, but there was an immediacy to the experience when you stepped up to a plank stretched between two barrels and got a glass of wine from the fellow whose name was on the bottle. You can still experience that in Paso Robles and other out-of-the-way corners of Wine Country. But for Americans, it all started in Napa Valley and it is missed there.

There is more than simple nostalgia to these memories. Wine has a history; that’s why they give it vintage years. And wine tasting, as a voyage and as an experience, has a history as well. Our children won’t encounter a visit to Wine Country the way we did. It will be great fun for them too, but it won’t be the same fun. We have no yen to bring back the good ol’ days. They weren’t always that good; some poor wineries have been replaced by great wineries
in places that were only orchards back then. But it is important to keep the memory alive, if only to measure progress. As the economics of wine making and selling have changed the product, so it has changed the sensation one gets when going wine tasting. As wineries like Phelps Freestone and Michael Mondavi Family disappear, a bit of our lifetimes disappear with them.