Lenné Estate

Does great wine go with food?

It is January and being bored, I organized a few tastings for my wine club members called the Rootstock Club. The first Saturday tasting featured a comparison of wines form the two main soil types in the Northern Willamette Valley. After a blind tasting we sat down to lunch. Two of my club members were sitting next to me and uttered the unthinkable, "we really don't like wine that much with dinner, we like it better afterwards."

It made me think about something Hatch, the winemaker at Fromm told me when we were in New Zealand. He said we are all trying to make great wines, but most days I just need a good wine with dinner. Sometimes I think that most great wines are destroyed by food. It's the perfect food and wine match that brings out the best in each other. But who has time to sit around and come up with the perfect food and wine match? In reality, it is the simplest of foods that works with great wine. We should probably have simpler wines with more complex meals or keep food simple when we are having a great wine.

The problem is none of us eats simply when we are out. I went to a very well know Portland eatery recently,  a place with well known chefs and a restaurant that has sadly lost it's mojo. Well, maybe food for thought for another blog on the life cycle of restaurants. But while the mojo was missing, the food was still good and the wine was great(if I say so myself), the 2006 Lenné Estate Pinot Noir. The wine is finally out of bottle shock and has opened like a rose, with amazing mid palate and finish. You will have to excuse my immodesty on this wine, but it really sinks into the mid-palate with an almost savory quality.

I suppose I look for length above all else in categorizing a wine as great. Not that wine can be reduced to one element, but I know that without length, I can't think of a wine as great. That length is almost always diminished by food. Perhaps I should re-think my definition of great wine, but I will stick to the idea that great wines can't be put down, they hold your interest after the meal is over. On the night in question, the wine was obliterated by a first coarse which included a garlic laden salad and a spicy curry soup with ginger. It was a good exercise in how to make a great wine taste bad. In a perfect world, I would have ordered an Alsatian wine or Oregon PInot Gris for the first coarse but, too many wines and such a small liver.

In any case, the wine went better with my duck and horrible with my wife's scallops. And yet, another problem with food and wine pairing, a wife who doesn't eat meat. I can tell you that by the end of the meal, the wine started to taste recognizable but it made me think about the kinds of wine we make and what their place is with food.

Matt Kramer had a good article recently about food and wine. I loved the line: One thing is certain: Food gives wine meaning. I know what he means and yet really have no clue. We spend a lot of money meticulously managing our vineyard to produce wines of depth, very perceptible on the mid palate and finish.  While wines always help clean food off your palate and these wines add to the overall meal, I almost always find them diminished by food. Sacrilegious! Probably, but thats why I keep that inexpensive bottle around, a little more restrained, higher in acid and perfectly good with dinner.

My mid week drinks...

After a hard day of laying out line posts for the last 2.5 acres of trellis, there is nothing like coming home to a great bottle of wine. But its mid week and hard to justify opening a bottle of good Pinot Noir. I think that is going to be a lot easier two or three years down the road when our label is out in some volume. When I say volume, believe me it is a relative term. I am talking about when we produce close to a thousand cases. Our initial vintage, out in May, will be only 140 cases. As good as the wine is, I don't think I will be drinking a lot of it. I have to sell it. It is going to break my heart. You are always in love with your first wine, but even more so when it delivers all the promise of the piece of land you have worked on for 5 years. The wine will be the 2004 Pinot Noir. I just tasted the 2005 which is in the barrel. Not drinking much of the 120 cases we will have of that wine will break my heart even more. It is the light at the end of the farming tunnel on this very difficult site called Lenne Estate.

I won't be able to afford my own wine on a daily basis for some time, so I look for wines that make me happy on a Wednesday. Thankfully, many seem to exist and remind me how my palate is ever changing. The inexpensive wines I used to drink five and six years ago bore me to death now. I am talking about the usual suspects, reasonably priced Australian wines and well made, single dimensional wines from California.  They were all warm, full bodied with some fruit and easy tannins. Today I can do a half a glass of them before I lose interest.

Instead I have turned to Spanish wines. Right now I think they represent the best value on the market for holding my interest. I recently mentioned a wine from Jamilla(Bodegas Luzon) as being one of the top values I have found in wine this year. After a case discount I ended up paying a little over six dollars a bottle. This week I bought a wine I have had before from a  previous vintage:
Bodegas Castano 2003 Hecula. Parker gave this wine an 90 and I knew exactly from that score, what the wine would be like. I could go on and on about how this wine could get an 90 and an Oregon Pinot from a good producer and vintage could get the same score. I could talk about how you would never think twice about this wine...unless you were writing a blog...and how the Pinot would take you through its layers of flavor and pop into your mind a week later. But why belabor the point. It was a Parker 90 and it delivered on the promise of what I expected from a 90 point Parker wine that was ten dollars.

The Castano Hecula is Monastrell(Mouvedre) and though in American Oak, which can normally ruin a wine for me, the barrels must have been neutral. There is no pitchy notes in the wine at all and the fruit is effusive though the wine isn't all that complex. Castano also makes a seven dollar version, the 2004 Castono Monastrell, which has been fermented using carbonic maceration(25%) and spends little time in oak. It is perfectly acceptable plonk for a wine professional though I didn't quite get the 89 Parker points. It may be a little more like their web site, flashy and fun to visit once, but would get annoying on repeat visits....we will see.Bodegas Castano

As good as the Spanish reds are, I still drink a little white wine before dinner and am about to bite my tongue with my next recommendation: the 2005 St. Michelle Riesling. I tried the 2004 version which I liked better, but the 2005 is nearly the same. I am not referring to the Erioca, which is a stylish wine that I have had in several blind tastings, I am talking about the six dollar Columbia Valley Riesling. I can only imagine how much of this wine is produced by Chateau St. Michelle and you have to be impressed with the wine making. I think this type of wine making rarely gets the streamers and confetti. Normally we reserve that for wines that come from great vineyards. In reality it should be the other way around. A winemaker that works with a great vineyard just has to make sure he or she doesn't screw it up. Here, the winemaker has to bring a fair amounts of different sites together and come up with a blend that works.

This is a wine that I sense the wine making and many wines like that are easy to dislike. But to their credit, they made it work. I don't know that you could ask more from a six dollar bottle of Riesling than you get from this. It is simple, quaffable, with good fresh fruit in the nose and a beautiful floral note. Okay, maybe it has been acidulated or something else accounts for the slight roughness on the finish, but I continue to quaff away.  This wine is built for Wednesday and Thai food and made me realize, how lucky we are to have such a simple pleasure of Thai food and Riesling, for so little money and even that mega producers get it right sometimes.

A matter of taste

After nearly thirty years of enjoying wine, I am not prepared to say that taste is all relative, but it is not far from it. If I were to take 10 wine professionals from the Napa Valley, lets say marketing people-not winemakers, put ten young Burgundies blind in front of them and throw in a Russian River Pinot Noir, what wine do you think they would like best? I am willing to bet that eight out of ten would prefer the Russian River wine. I think you could almost reverse this with Oregon wine professionals and the same would hold true.

Our palates become accustomed to certain wines. When I lived and worked in the Napa Valley in the 80's, wines from Oregon tasted overly acidic to me. Granted, the wines were more acidic then because of vineyard over-cropping, but enjoying an Oregon Pinot Noir then was a rarity for me. Now, after years of working with Oregon Pinot Noir, I've lost my taste for the cloying, Parkeresque wines, especially from Australia. This has to do almost as much with the abundance of American Oak found in those wines as well as the lack of acidity. In Oregon, American oak is rarely used anymore and would seem very out in a Pinot Noir. The pitchy, cedar-like aroma is so off putting to me, that I can't drink more than a couple of sips even if the wine did get a 94 in The Wine Advocate. That, coupled with the high alcohol and low acidity, make these wines clunky and uninspiring to me. I prefer a wine that dances ac cross my palate, leaving a lasting impression, but not an oil slick.

Well don't get me wrong, I still buy some wines based on Parker reviews, I guess old habits die hard. But they are mostly inexpensive Spanish wines. And I don't jump on the acid band wagon either. It seems fashionable to praise high acid wines these days, many I find out of balance. There is that word again, balance. It is the one of the few truths in wine. Wine should be balanced, the acid, tannin, alcohol, should all come together so that none alone form your lasting impression of the wine. The problem is, we all have varying amounts of receptors on our palate for each component, so I guess we are back to all taste is relative. I can also still appreciate a wine with low acidity as long as it has plenty of tannin to add to its richness. Wines that have high tannin and acidity are my least favorite. That is why we have trouble understanding young Burgundies.  If you lined up ten young grand cru Burgundies if front of me, I would appreciate them for their potential, but maybe not for the way they taste today. Chances are I would find them to be hard, acidic and closed. I don't think many young Burgundies have suppleness. I am not sure when they get it, but I know how Pinot Noir changes, it is staggering at times. Oregon Pinot Noir really doesn't become supple until the third to fourth year after the vintage. In a hard vintage, even longer. So what does it all mean? I think the point is that most of us are provincial in our tastes. It means that we should always keep an open mind and be willing to try new things. You wouldn't believe how many arms I had to twist in tasting rooms to get people to try Rieslings. You should have also seen the looks of people from outside Oregon, when they would try Pinot Noir. Many admitted, after several days of trying Pinot Noir in tasting rooms, they just didn't like them. Of course, they were used to lower acid, bigger wines and were trying Oregon Pinot Noirs at 2 years old without food. My guess, they wouldn't like 2 year old grand cru Burgundies either. For a good technical discussion of the mechanism of taste, see the following link: http://avalonwine.com/Tasting-Wine.php