Wine PhD

Last week we tasted the second half of the Zinfandel vertical.  The vintage range was similar but the character of the wines was so different to the wines from the first tasting.

For the second tasting, we tasted:

NV Nichelini Napa Valley Zinfandel
1968 Sutter Home California Zinfandel, Lot Number 1, Deaver Vineyard
1972 Mayacamas Late Harvest Zinfandel

1978 Grgich Hills Zinfandel, Alexander Valley
1980 Edmeades Vineyards, Mendocino, Zeni Vineyard
1984 Viano Vineyards Private Stock California Zinfandel

1987 Marietta Cellars Zinfandel, Sonoma County
1991 Orleans Hill Organic Zinfandel, Amador County, Clockspring Vineyard
1998 St. Francis Old Vines Zinfandel, Sonoma County
2003 Marietta Cellars Zinfandel, Sonoma County

The first two flights were interesting. The Nichelini was suprisingly still alive. I thought that the Sutter Home held up best of the tasting - 1968 and it still had fruit and tannins. The late harvest Mayacamas was not my favorite wine - thin and alcoholic, sightly raisiny - consistent with it's labeling but it didn't stand up to the dry wines that surrounded it in the lineup. The Grgich Hills was quite good - lots of fruit and structure, but it had some sort of sulfur problem leading it to have a pronounced boiled onion/beef broth aroma. The Edmeades was doing ok, as well.

Then came the last 5 wines. Oh goodness. This turned into a match-the-flaw-to-the-bottle game. The first wine, the Viano, had a noticeable does of out of place Brett. The first Marietta unfortunately had a TCA/cork issue. The next wine, the Orleans Hill smelled overwhelmingly of bread and butter pickles.

Next came what I have to believe is the worst case of diacetyl in a wine that I have ever encountered. The St. Francis wine was a direct replacement for a popcorn flavored Jelly Belly. It was just plain horrible. The last Marietta was probably the most Zin-like wine of the night. It still had all of its fruitiness, jammy ripe flavors. It also had a lot of alcohol, but that is the style à la mode.

Overall the two tastings together were informative, interesting, and enlightening. CA Zinfandel from the 1960s and 1970s can survive. The 80's were doing ok, as were the 90s. How are the Zinfandels of the 2000s and 2010s going to fare? Will they make it 50 years? I guess we will have to reconvene in 2050 to find out.

Here is a photo of the students tasting.

Over a two week period the students (and staff) in the Dept. of Viticulture and Enology will be tasting 23 Zinfandels produced between the 1960s and the 2000s.

The first tasting happened last Thursday, July, 22.

The wines from the first week:

1967 Souverain Mountain Zinfandel, Napa Valley

1968 Mirrassou Zinfandel "Third Harvest", Monterey County (Tasting note from Fredric Koeppel here, created almost exactly 25 years to the day before we tasted these wines.)

1968 Louis M. Martini Mountain Zinfandel, California

1970 Souverain Mountain Zinfandel, Napa Valley

1979 Fetzer Zinfandel "Scharffenberger Vineyard", Mendocino

1980 Milano Lane Late Harvest Zinfandel "Scharffenberger Vineyard", Mendocino

1986 Kendall-Jackson Zinfandel "Zeni Vineyard", Mendocino

1991 Rosenblum Cellars Zinfandel "George Hendry Vineyard", Napa Valley

1991 Oak Ridge Vineyards Zinfandel, California

1998 Robert Mondavi Old VIne Zinfandel, Napa County

2001 Steele Old Vine Zinfandel "DuPratt Vineyard", Mendocino

Not surprisingly, the progression in age was the most notable aspect of the tasting. The old wines had the dried leaf, tobacco, musty, neutral flavor while the young wines had a fruity, jammy, oaky flavor.

Less pronounced by just as obvious was the shift in oak usage over time. The older wines (before 1990) had little or no apparent oak influence. As the wines got younger, oak began to play a much more pronounced role. My favorite wine, the Rosenblum, has just enough oak to let you know it was there, but not so much as to be considered a major flavor characteristic. The youngest two wines were almost completely oak dominated.

Another interesting note is the change in acidity over time; the old wines were very tart. We speculated that it may be because the grapes were picked less ripe. Other explanations involved the concept of field blending: When the Zinfandel grapes were harvest, other varieties interplanted in the vineyard were harvested and mixed in with the Zin. A high-acid grape like Barbera may be contributing to the acid structure. We also found a little bit of Brettanomyces going back to the vintages of the 1970's. Though none of the wines were medicinal or fecal, there was some barnyard-leather going on in a few of the wines.

The first week was an informative tasting. None of the wines were so dead that they were unenjoyable to taste. This week we will have 10 or 11 more to try. I will update with another post after that tasting.

I want to share my favorite label design. I think Roy Lichtenstein would approve.

Budbreak has occurred in my backyard in Davis, CA. I look on with mixed feelings. This will be my baby Viognier's 4th leaf and I'm not sure I will be there with her when she fruits. We are possibly going to move this year and I don't think I will be able to transplant her successfully.

A look back at year 2: That was a lot of growth for April!

Here are most of the labels from the Sherry tasting. It took most of a day to remove them from the bottles. The bottles are another story - they are beautiful. The colors of glass used in the bottles are unlike the colors used today. That will be for a later post.

I really like the tax stamp that was on the Diezmo bottle. The last two or three labels were beyond salvage. I will try to get a label from those in the future. Each label will link back to a full resolution version at flickr.

What does it mean to be unique, in the context of wine tastings? I'm proposing the following definition:

"A wine tasting is unique if it cannot be replicated under any circumstances other than using wine from the 'wine unit' as the original tasting"

By wine unit, I mean the same case, the same shipment, the same allocation, etc.

I admit that this definition is somewhat contrived in that it was designed to highlight exactly how unique the tasting I am about to describe really was.

Under this definition, very few tastings are truly unique. A 25 year vertical of all 5 First Growth Red Bordeaux wines? Special and rare, indeed... but not unique. The same tasting could be constructed from cellars over and over and over again. What about a Screaming Eagle tasting including every year of Screaming Eagle produced? Quite repeatable under this definition.

Last night VITIS, the wine tasting group of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis, under the direction of Darrell Corti, the proprietor of Corti Bros. Market in Sacramento. For those of you who have not met Mr. Corti, I can say with quite a bit of confidence there there is not an individual anywhere who knows as much about so many subjects relating to food and wine. We are fortunate to have him so near to Davis and lucky that he is able to spend time with us.

So why is this tasting truly unique under my definition above? We tasted 21 sherries made sometime around 1940. Most of these sherries are Fino Sherry, which was not created to be kept in bottle for 60 years. As such, there is a high likelihood that today these wines do not even exist in the cellars of the producers. Furthermore, many of these producers do not exist any longer, making this tasting not only unique but also a slice of history.

In the early 1980's the sherry collection that now lives in the UC Davis Enology cellar was donated by a merchant who bought the contents of a closed-down bar in Burgos, Spain. It has sat in the back of the cellar untouched since. Last week, Mr. Corti came to the cellar to pick through the wines and put together what he believed would be an "interesting" tasting. "Interesting" turned out to be apropos.

A part of my job for the tasting was decanting all of the wines. When a wine stands upright for 25 years, there is a fine, clay-like deposit that forms on the bottom of the bottle. In order to keep the wine clear, I decanted by siphoning in order to keep the clay-like sediment in the bottom of the bottles.

Below is a list of the wines we tasted. Sherry, by nature of going through the solera system, is a non vintage product, so no vintage is listed. Based upon the history of the collection and the presence of some extinct brands, the wines are dated to just after World War II.

Wines
Flight 1 - Fino Sherry
Gonzales Byass - San Lucar - Manzanilla
Herederos de Argueso S. A. - Manzanilla Pasada "San Leon" - San Lucar de Barrameda
Sancho - Jerez Fino Delicado - Puerto de Santa Maria
M. Misa - Fino Marques - Jerez
Bodegas Castillo - Fino Catillo - Jerez de la Frontera
Pedro Domecq - Fino Lamero - Jerez de la Frontera

Flight 2 - Fino/Amontillado Sherry
Bodegas Delago - Moriles La Cadena Fino - Puente-Gentil (Cordoba)
M. Misa - Solera Fina Carrascal - Jerez
Bodegas del Diezmo Nuevo - Melquiedes Saenz Amontillado Fino - Moguer

Flight 3 - Amontillado Sherry
Jose Pemartin - Macharnudo - Jerez
Pedro Domecq - Jandilla - Amontillado Macharnudo (375 mL) - Jerez de la Frontera
Pedro Domecq - Jandilla - Amontillado Macharnudo (750 mL) - Jerez de la Frontera
Juan de Burgos Luque - Lagar de Benavides - Aguilar de la Frontera

Flight 3 - Dry to Sweet
Marques de Misa - Abolengo - Jerez de la Frontera
Osborne - Solera India - Puerto de Santa Maria
Agustin Blazques - Jerez Seco No 2
Sanchez Romate - Jerez Especial - Jerez
Alverez & Mayol - Finisimo - Vino para Damas - Jerez de la Frontera
Sancho - M. Oscuro Dulce Superior - Puerto de Santa Maria

Flight 4 - Flight of Fancy
Perdo Diaz Lopez - Especial para Enfermos - Jerez
Ricardo de Valderrama - Salus - Real Aperitivo Tonic Sherry Wine - Jerez
Osborne - Jerez Quina - Vino Tonico Aperitivo Digestivo - Puerto de Santa Maria
J. Luis Mondina - Vino Tostado Gallego - Vigo (Galicia, Spain)

Flight 5 - Licor
Valvanera - Licor from Rioja, Spain

So there it is. A crazy tasting of forgotten sherries.

For me the highlights of the night were some of the non-traditional sherries. I really liked the J. Luis Mondina Vino Tostado Gallego. It possessed so much life - aromatics, deep, slightly caramelized flavors as well as still being a relative of fino sherry. I also liked the Valvanera liqueur. It was some sort of wonderful cross between an anise liqueur like pastis and Jagermeister and something even more herbaceous than either of those. It was very sweet and viscous. I hope to find it again somewhere. From what I can tell, it is still made to the tune of 15,000 bottles per year

Here is a link to a slideshow with pictures from the tasting. I will be adding pictures over the next couple of days, so check back often.

Next week Vitis, our student tasting group, is putting on a tasting of some old sherries. We went and selected wines for the tasting this morning with Darrell Corti, the founder of Corti Bros Market in Sacramento, CA.

Here is one of the wines that we will try. After the tasting I will post my impressions.

I was recently asked by a friend of mine to describe my five and ten year life plans. My gut reaction, the reaction on which I acted, was to say "Who knows." With a few more more minutes and I bit more prodding, I came up with something mildly substantial. 5 years - just having finished my PhD program, I will go post-doc in the lab of another wine scientist somewhere in the world - maybe Germany, maybe Portugal or France, maybe Italy, even possibly Australia. As for a ten year plan - I was compelled to reiterate "Who knows." And who does know. The ultimate goal is to be a professor and wine researcher. Maybe buy a house.

It turned out that The Genius and The Goddess was a one day read. As I put it down on the coffee table, I intended to take a few minutes to think about what the book meant - what I could learn from it. Unfortunately, it did not play out as such. I looked over at my wine fridge and realized that I had a better 1, 5, and 10 year plan for drinking my wine than I did for my own life.

1 year

Drink 1983 Kopke Vintage port that we received as a wedding present from Beatriz and Antonio. It seems like an appropriate time to drink it. It's 26 years old, I love vintage port, and our wedding was over a year ago. I already drank the other two bottles of wine we received as wedding presents - a 1982 Haut Batailley and a 1982 Ch. Lafaurie-Peyraguey from our friend Billo, who just started his own winery Rasa Vineyards.

5 years

Drink 2004 Pahlmeyer Merlot. My most striking memory of Merlot came at one of the dinner parties that Billo would throw when he was at school at Davis. The first time I went there, he brought out a 1997 Pahlmeyer Merlot. Little did I know that two years later I would be harvest intern for this winery. This was such an intense but elegant wine, not even giving a hint to its then 10 years in bottle. I have often said, and told the winemaking staff at Pahlmeyer on many occasions that this is the best Merlot I have ever tasted. Maybe I have had a few Bordeaux wines that were as good and had some Merlot in them, but for a pure Merlot, I have not yet had better. The 2004 should be nice and ready in 2014.

10 years

Drink 2005 Domaine Tempier Bandol Rouge. Two years ago two friends, Scott and Wynne, and I made wine from a vineyard in Mendocino County, just outside of Hopland. It was called Rd. 29 Vineyards "Red Gate" Chardonnay. The owner of the grapes fed us lunch and poured a Domaine Tempier Bandol Rouge from the early 80's. I can't really remember much of how it tasted, but I remember it to be a complex and aromatically-pleasing wine. The next time I was at Kermit Lynch in Berkeley, I picked up a bottle. 2019 seems like a good year to open this one.

There you have it - my 1, 5, and 10 year wine opening plan.