Wine PhD

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 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.