A flash mob of Columbia Valley's great wines at the Wine Bloggers Conference

If Napa Valley is the preeminent region for Bordeaux varietals in America, then I would consider Washington’s Columbia Valley as an emerging “1-A”.

 What makes the Columbia Valley unique? It could be the silty mineral-rich soils brought on by the ancient ice-age MissoulaFloods. Or it could be the geography of this northerly region – a high desert made bountiful by the mighty Columbia River. Or it could possibly be a climate where cold harsh winters are balanced by bright, sunny and warm summers that feature longer daylight hours than more southerly wine regions. All this is capped with a 40 degree diurnal shift from day to night temperatures. With these climatic advantages, the chief challenges are potential hard freezes in the winter.

These factors allow for wines with bold fruit and fresh acidity, along with vintages that are consistent from year to year. For me what distinguishes Washington reds, especially the Bordeaux varietals, are the vibrant red fruit-driven flavors solidly structured with mineral, tea and spice depth.

To its credit, the powers that be in Washington wine do a good job in teaching the educated wine consumer about its distinctiveness. From tasting rooms in the Columbia Valley, to seminars conducted during the 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference (held in Walla Walla), they state their case clearly. And although this year’s Wine Bloggers Conference was held in Portland, the Washington Wine Commission managed to steal a little thunder with a seemingly impromptu tasting held on the Friday night of the conference.

Upon returning from the conference’s Friday excursions to the Willamette Valley, the nightcap of the day featured “The Night of Many Bottles”. This was an event where attendees donated bottles for a walkabout self serve tasting held in a hotel ballroom. If it sounds like organized chaos, it was. Nevertheless it was a good opportunity to pick and choose some special wines to taste. Fittingly, there was dizzying array of options. I noted a few of the wines that I tasted. Click the link for tasting notes.

It was pushing late night by the time I made my way through the ballroom for The Night of Many Bottles. Then suddenly, and in what seemed like a flash mob, the Washington Wine Commission had set up shop at a table in the hotel lobby. With them were several big reds from the Columbia Valley being poured from magnums. The vintages spanned from 2006 to 2010 with names like Leonetti, Buty, and Col Solare. Click here for tasting notes on the 7wines that were tasted.

This was a closely knit group of wines from a quality standpoint. All were excellent examples of the Columbia Valley region. My standouts were the 2008 Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, coming from Columbia Crest’s top vineyard sites and aged in new French oak for 25 months. This was noteworthy for a massive structure that held savory complexity to balance its silky elegance. It’s a beautiful wine and quite a value at around $40. I also loved the 2009 DeLille Cellars Chaleur Estate Red from Red Mountain. This is a Cabernet Sauvignon-based blend from two top vineyards in the Red Mountain AVA (Ciel du Cheval and Klipson). It featured focused mineral, savory and cherry notes along with nice depth. Finally, another Red Mountain Cabernet-based blend that soared was the 2008 Terra Blanca Onyx. It comes from the Terra Blanca estate vineyard and is aged for 32 months in mostly new French oak barrels. Here lied a youthful darker savory fruit profile along with nice depth and feel, and another good value at around the $50 mark. I tasted late 90’s vintages of Onyx at the winery two years ago that were still very young wines; this seems to be on a similar trajectory.

Look for world-class reds at reasonable prices from the Columbia Valley. You don’t have to look far.

Napa Vintners tasting of 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon from the Wine Bloggers Conference

I normally miss the cool stuff. By the time the outrageous happens, I’ve already left the party. Or if I manage to be in the loop I end up talking myself out of going. Often the stars just aren’t aligned.

The Wine Bloggers Conference last week in Portland was the opposite. Whether a late night meetup and tasting with an old wine friend as in my last post, or the excursions that I wrote about prior, it was a magical few days in my passion for wine. For those few days the highlights aligned right along with the stars.

Friday morning of the conference I tasted several wines at the Napa Vintners table during a trade tasting. The following day they were to host a private tasting of 2002 Napa Cabernet Sauvignons. 2002 is regarded as a very good to excellent vintage in Napa Valley, yielding wines of good concentration and structure. All this without leaving the hotel… So I etched the time in stone and looked forward to Saturday!

After three unusually hot days in Portland and the Willamette Valley, Saturday turned out to be one of those damp and cool days that you associate with cities like Portland. The cloudy view from the Napa Vintners suite overlooked the Willamette River, downtown, and some residential areas up in the hillsides. The suite quickly filled with people, and seriously tasting these wines among this crowd became more of a mission than leisure.

 There were 11 wines- Spottswoode, Opus One, Heitz Martha’sVineyard, Pride Reserve, Dyer, BV GDL, Far Niente, Chateau Montelena Estate, SpringMountain Elivette, Robert Mondavi Oakville, and Corison. I tasted 10 of the 11 -- by the time I got to the Corison it was gone. Click here to read all tasting notes.

Of the 10 wines that I tasted, there were certainly many highlights. The Chateau Montelena Estate stood out for its earthiness, balance and elegance. Spottswoode and Opus One were so seamless, intricate and complex that one could state just about any descriptor coming to mind and be accurately describing them. Both had supreme elegance and deceptively firm structures. The sleeper for me was Dyer Diamond Mountain. This wine had a beautiful blend of savory brawny mountain notes along with an airy floral quality and expressive fruit.

The wine of the flight for me however was the Heitz Martha’s Vineyard. I was blown away by its exotic aromas and the yin/yang effect of the palate- dark & brooding vs. pretty & expressive. This was a powerful wine with a finish that went on forever.

There were a couple of disappointments. The Pride Reserve promised nice savory complexity, but ultimately carried too much sweet oak and licorice notes with less grip than the others. Similarly, the Far Niente was showing a little too much sweet cherry and spice notes for what I was looking for.

Ultimately it was quite a showcase for 2002 in Napa Valley. I appreciated the opportunity to be there.

Suburban Wino and friends- two amazing wines from the Tre Venezie

Hell Yes! part 1

Last Thursday night I happened to catch a tweet from my old Atlanta wine blogger friend Joe Herrig. He was having a late dinner at an Asian restaurant in Portland called Biwa and was opening a couple of very special wines from the Friuli Venezia Giulia and Veneto regions of Italy.

Settled in my hotel room for the night, the tweet offered quite a dilemma. The prior day’s pre-conference excursion, detailed in the lastpost, had been two hot days in the sun. Back in Portland on Thursday for the eve of the Wine Bloggers Conference, there was a tasting of Oregon wines at the hotel. After all this I was a little spent and happy to be calling it a night.

So after a little back and forth with Joe, and a little hemming and hawing with myself, I was dressed and walking out of the hotel lobby in search of a cab to Biwa. A short time later I was crashing Joe’s dinner with his wife Heather and several local friends from the Oregon wine community. A spot was warmly made for me and it wasn’t long before Joe so graciously opened up these two majestic wines.

First up was a 2005 Azienda Agricola Stanislao Radikon JakotVenezia Giulia IGT. The Radikon is 100% Tokaj Friuliano fermented with no inoculation on the skins in oak vats with frequent manual punch downs. It rests in oak casks for 36 months and is bottled without filtration, clarification or added sulfites. Winemaker Stanko Radikon is famous for these gold/orange tinged whites from Friuli, and for good reason, this was a transformational wine. Imagine the power and intensity of great Sauternes, but finishing completely dry.

The next was from the late legendary Veneto producer Giuseppe Quintarelli. The 1992Giuseppe Quintarelli Cà delMerlo Veneto IGT is from a single hilltop vineyard, made from the traditional red Valpolicella varietals Corvina, Molinara, Rondinella and Negrara. A portion of the grapes are late harvested and the wine is made through the ripasso method, with extended aging in large wood vessels. What stood out here to me was the electric juiciness of the fruit cutting the raisiny sweetness, along with beautiful savory depth and length. Beautiful indeed.

Biwa seemed like a cool late-night spot for dinner. It was fine company and amazing wine. Many thanks for Joe’s generosity and inspiration!

Click for tasting notes on these two wines.

Hell Yes! part 2

An in-depth view of the Willamette Valley and its wines from the perspective of the 2012 Wine Bloggers Conference

What do strawberry shortcake, old fabric mills, air & space museums, wiking and scorching heat have in common? All were happening this past weekend in Portland and the Willamette Valley for the Wine Bloggers Conference2012. The Oregon wine community laid it on the line for a bunch of crazy wine bloggers and were truly able to highlight what makes Oregon wine, and pinot noir in particular, something unique and special.

Almost immediately after disembarking the plane, I joined a small group hosted by Travel Salem on a “pre-conference excursion,” which promised us both wine and cultural activity. The wine end of things featured vineyard visits to Johan Vineyards and Left Coast Cellars, just outside of the Eola-Amity Hills AVA in an area they are calling “Perrydale Hills,” potentially a new Willamette Valley sub-AVA.

According to Johan’s owner Dag Johan Sundby and winemaker Daniel Rinke, what makes this area unique from the neighboring AVA is its access to the cooling breezes of the Van Duzer corridor, coupled with the sedimentary soils of Helvetia and Santiam. The hallmarks of Johan include biodynamic farming in the vineyards and terroir-driven winemaking practices. At Johan I tasted beautifully bright gruner-veltliner; crisp and rich chardonnay fermented in concrete and aged in barrel; complex skin-macerated orange pinot gris; and of course balanced and elegant pinot noir. It was an impressive introduction to these wines. (Click toread notes on these wines).

The walk over to Left Coast Cellars took us through the vineyards on both estates. Even in the toasty heat (the visit encompassed three unseasonably hot days by Willamette Valley standards), you felt the cool breeze of the Van Duzer corridor. Left Coast Cellars’ wines are 100% estate grown with sustainable and organic farming practices. The style of the wines is slightly more “new world” than Johan, still showing grace, balance and character. I thought a wine such as their 2007 Left Coast Cellars Pinot Noir  Latitude 45 was a wonderful showcase for their estate, and represented excellent value with pricing in the $30 range. (Click to read notes on these wines).

Day 2 of the Salem excursion included visits to the venerable Willamette Valley Vineyards, where we learned about their volcanic basalt soils at the estate and toured and tasted in the cellar. I was most impressed by their single vineyard pinot noir, made in somewhat of a polished style but with impressive breadth and depth. On the way out we saw author Rex Pickett of Sideways fame preparing a signing for his new book Vertical, the next chapter in the story of dysfunctional oenophiles Miles and Jack who are stuck perpetually in adult-adolescence. Incidentally, Pickett delivered a caustic and bombastic Saturday keynote address at the conference about which I’m certain much was tweeted (as was everything else at the conference). (Click to read notes on these wines).

We were then shuttled to Piluso Vineyards, literally a mom and pop wine operation stationed in a farm house with a vineyard in the front yard. The location is on the sparse eastern side of the Willamette Valley. Here you might see tempranillo, viognier, müller-thurgau, riesling and pinot noir planted in rows right next to each other. I found it to be rather unusual to see pinot and tempranillo in the same vineyard, but by this time I had consumed a fair amount of wine so I was just going with it! The Piluso’s were charming people with a wide variety of good wines that were fairly priced. Incidentally, their estate pinot noir has garnered some nice praise from The Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator. Not bad for the humble Piluso’s! (Click to read notes on these wines).

Outside of wine, we learned that you can waterslide and see the Spruce Goose at the Evergreen Air & SpaceMuseum, and about the history of mill-working in Salem at the Willamette Valley Heritage Center. These were nice diversions. The last stop of this excursion was at EZ Orchards, where Kevin Zielinski is making a méthode traditionelle sparkling cider. Don’t think sweetness here; this is dry and crisp with a nice toasty complexity. Their fresh strawberry shortcake wasn’t bad either.

A second trip down into the valley was made during the conference. We boarded a mystery bus and headed out to parts unknown. Where we ended up was at Willakenzie Estate in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. There we were greeted by five winemaker/proprietors of Yamhill-Carlton wineries: Bernard Lacroute of Willakenzie, Lynn Penner-Ash of Penner-Ash, Brian O’Donnell of Belle Pente, Adam Godlee-Campbell of Elk Cove, and Laurent Montalieu of Soléna. We were treated to a seminar in the vineyard on fruit pruning and the marine sedimentary soils featured in the AVA. We also tasted in the winery a fantastic flight of single vineyard 2010 pinot noir from each producer. Each wine was beautiful and expressive and complex, but the wine of the flight for me went to Soléna’s Domaine Danielle Laurent -- it was all that and more with serious structure. The grand finale involved “wiking” through the vineyards to the crest of a ridge with an epic panoramic view of the Willamette Valley. One could not ask for more breathtaking scenery against which to enjoy a dinner and wine. (Click to read notes on these wines).

It was great to experience the Willamette Valley in new ways and taste the wines in this context. This was my first exposure to the 2010 vintage for Oregon pinot, and it looks like a savory and complex group of wines with nice structure. The links above to the tasting notes include 64 Oregon wines tasted over the weekend. Cheers!

The inside of the Spruce Goose

Dag and Dan from Johan pouring wine in the cellar

Walking to Left Coast Cellars from Johan

Associate Winemaker Joe Wright from Left Coast Cellars

Winemaker Don Crank at Willamette Valley Vineyards

Piluso Vineyards

EZ Orchards 2010 Cidre

Laurent from Soléna Estate talking soils in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA

Adam from Elk Cove and Lynn Penner-Ash talking pruning

The walk at Willakenzie

View of the valley 

At the convention- clonal tasting of Erath pinot noir