Whenever I’m asked about California wines, I feel a pang of guilt, since my knowledge of them is so sketchy. Half-a-dozen times a year, though, I get to taste something serious from California, and I’m usually impressed. Why? The best have a truth to place and a naturalness of articulation akin to that of the very best European wines … though the place to which they are true is of course very different from Europe, endowed with typical American scale and breadth.
The Jimtown store - a Sonoma landmark Great Californian wine is too rare in the UK, for the best of reasons and the worst of reasons. The best of reasons is that it commands high prices at home. As it should … but the average British wine shopper, lavished with the best from everywhere else, can’t quite keep up. And the worst of reasons is that the UK market is awash with insipid California wine brands, so the whole state suffers from a kind of Liebfraumilch effect. Would you -- the consumer reasons -- want to spend £19.99 on something which might, just might, taste like Blossom Hill Merlot or Gallo Colombard?
Our retailers, too, tend not to search as hard in California as they do in Chile or Spain. That’s a shame.
Anyway, back in April, I got the chance to wander around Sonoma for a while on one of the vineyard walks organised by Zephyr Wine Adventures. It proved to be a trip to remember – for the best of reasons, and the worst of reasons …
What follows are edited versions of two pieces I wrote about this trip, the first for the Financial Times’ travel pages, and the second for Decanter’s 2008 California supplement.
Visitors to the USA arrive clutching driving licences as tightly as passports, since viewing the land of the free usually means handcuffing oneself to a steering wheel first. Many, of course, relish this prospect. An idealised, uncongested, wind-in-the-hair wheel down the the lonely, arrow-straight Interstate Highway is the spawn of countless movies. The reality can be more mundane: slow lines of traffic ambling between sprawling urban nodes, full of reasonless acceleration and deceleration, redeemed only by the singular appearance and sometimes strange behaviour of those caught in the same drift tide.
Vineyards at Michel-Schlumberger What, though, of the landscape beyond? In northern California, the landscape is often beautiful enough to make the car seem like a prison. Smooth, buff hills, round-contoured and undulating, scattered with sentinel live oaks from which lace lichen hangs in airy swags; green stretches of vineyard, suddenly rythmical and disciplined; then thick forest cover beyond, with the redwoods marching up moist folds while tanoaks and madrones filter the light of the higher stands. If you’ve left your motel early, you’ll never forget the interfingering fillets of fog drifting into the valleys, wherever the last million years have left a door open to the cold ocean; better still if you can drive a high road, since then you can gaze down onto the silver vapour, filling the lost floor like a soft tongue. That fog, in fact, feeds everything I have just described: the lace lichen sips it and the redwoods wrestle it down to their roots, while the vineyards use it to mitigate summer’s morning heat and thereby retain acidity in the grapes.
Which is the kind of stuff you can learn on a vineyard walk. Wine tourism may be institutional in California, but it mostly means a series of tasting-room sales pitches linked by another half-hour of cruise control. The vineyards glimmer greenly and the buff hills beckon, but all you’ll normally go home with is a head full of Wine Spectator scores and a little more adipose tissue. So when Allan Wright of Zephyr Adventure Holidays mailed me to ask if I wanted to join him on a Sonoma Vineyard Walk, I was keen. Even for professionals, California vineyard visits mean a short run of tasting glasses followed by supersized helpings of catalytic conversion. I’d always longed to walk those buff hills and Sonoma, with its complex pattern of sub-valleys, was the perfect place to do it from an educational point of view. Maybe I could begin to grasp the subtle differences between Dry Creek Valley and Alexander Valley, and feel the cool of Russian River for myself.
The idea was to tackle two AVAs (American Viticultural Areas) every day, with short walks through each concluding with a tasting by a lake, or up on a hilltop among the madrones. Lunches were generally picnic-style; dinners were more leisurely, in local restaurants. The overall base for the trip was the Flamingo Resort in Santa Rosa, where you can swim in a heated pool at any time of day or night as a pink neon flamingo slowly rotates next to the moon in the night sky, where my breakfast was served by an attentive German grandmother, and where the foyer was full of assertive old ladies trying to get their antiques valued. Jayne Mansfield was just one of those pictured poolside in years gone by (in characteristically pneumatic pose) at what locals know affectionately as the ‘Flaming O’.
The trip surprised me. I had forgotten that the structure of the California wine business is very different from that of Europe. Wineries not infrequently buy all their fruit under contract; indeed wines are often also made under contract, thereby giving rise to the ‘virtual label’, run out of a spare bedroom on a Blackberry and a USP. If you want to understand the fundamentals of California wine, by contrast, you need to visit grape growers – like Richard and Saralee McClelland-Kunde in the Russian River, whose 202 ha (500 acre) estate sells to no fewer than 50 different wineries, each one of which wants something a little different.
Russian River is cool, known for its Pinot, Chardonnay and (increasingly) Pinot Gris, but even here you’ll find California’s signature grape Zinfandel. “I’m very fond of Zindfandel,” confessed Richard as we sat sipping it on picnic tables at the top of his Lion Ridge vineyard, “but it’s so cold around here that we can only grow it … just over there.” He pointed to the small west-facing ridge below us, soaking up the last rays of light, as half the party grumbled about having forgotten to bring their sweaters. We suddenly grasped terroir.
Earlier that morning, I’d had a masterclass in practical economics from vineyard manager Mark Houser of Alexander Valley Vineyards when I innocently enquired why some of the flat benchland vineyards couldn’t migrate up on to the hillsides. The wine might be 30 per cent better, was the gist, but with costs at 60 per cent or more higher, no one was going to be dumb enough to make the experiment. De-alcoholisation of over-strong wines, the vital importance of fog to stop sunburn and the terrifying menace that is the gopher were other topics Mark touched on, pointing out ‘vineyard designates’ (pre-assigned parcels) for this or that winery as we made our way forward. The ubiquity of cover crops as an alternative to herbicide showed how far organic thinking has moved into the mainstream in Californian viticulture. We even visited one Dry Creek vineyard, Truett-Hurst, which was on the verge of a dive into biodynamics (the radical form of organics based on the agricultural lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924). They were about to celebrate with a giant ‘Iron Man’ bonfire.
Leave the car behind, of course, and you are with nature at last. No one knew the name of the beautiful, heavy snake, striped with brown and verdigris, which slithered away at our approach, but we showed it sudden and silent respect. Rod Berglund of Joseph Swann taught us not to touch the innocent-looking poison-oak saplings as we slid down through woodland, “but this one,” he said, tearing out a sapling of pretty, yellow-flowered broom, “doesn’t belong here at all.” There were no mountain lions (cougars) in evidence as night drew on, even up on McLelland-Kunde’s Lion Ridge, though we had seen a bald eagle flap staggeringly by with a steelhead trout in its claws a little earlier that afternoon. Blue herons and turkey vultures were regular companions, the latter doubtless on the look-out for stragglers; and the flowers (wild blue iris, orange poppies and scented chamomile) were surging underfoot. California may be one of the USA’s most populous States, but to European eyes, its emptiness is still vast – and pristine.
The wines we tried on our visit were mixed in quality, but included elegant Cabernet, Syrah and Chardonnay from Michel-Schlumberger in Dry Creek valley and the fresh Russian River Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris of Joseph Swann. The final trip itinerary for later in the year, sensibly, includes a dinner at the Third Street Ale Works in Santa Rosa. The microbrewing revolution in the US has produced many flavour masterpieces to match the achievements of the country’s greatest vineyards. Indeed, a glass of fragrant IPA from Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma brought me back from the brink of despair after the tour, when back pain turned me from pliant human into a disagreeable object made out of tropical hardwood. The pain was not the consequence of excessive hiking, since the walks are all easy and short. I had, though, worn inadvisably light clothes before the sun had crested the ridge line of the Alexander Valley one morning, and close inspection of a 130-year-old Zinfandel vine at Sausal had exposed spare, bare flesh to an icy Pacific blast. I didn’t just understand terroir at that point; it actually stabbed me in the lower vertebrae. I wanted an education, and I got it.
With hindsight, the back problem was amusing; at the time it was … painful. But it was indeed terroir. I remembered this towards the end of July 2008, when I was in Irouléguy talking to Jean-Claude Berrouet, Christian Moueix’s recently retired winemaker. We were discussing ‘thermic amplitude’ (a gallicism: I think proper English would be diurnal or day-night temperature variation), which is often modest during the summer in Bordeaux thanks to the moderating Atlantic and its Gulf Steam. Warm nights and open-air dinners are the result; indeed I ate out next to the pretty river Nive d’Urepel at the Hotel Arcé in St-Etienne de Baïgorry that very night. “I’ve been going to California for 25 years,” said Jean-Claude, “and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of evenings I’ve been able to eat outside.” That great cold snake lurking out in the Pacific (the North Pacific Gyre) is the reason.
It also set me thinking about being unwell in strange places. The chance to travel is the greatest privilege of my work -- but we all get ill from time to time, and the best place to be ill is unquestionably at home. I decided to make a little list of what I’ve had and where. Back pain is what has hit me most often, notably in Corsica, Australia and the Douro valley as well as in Sonoma. Boring as well as uncomfortable: immobilisation is the consequence. I’ve been very sick (yes, that kind of sick) in Porto, and once passed a fevered and delirious December night in a large hotel on Madeira where I saw giant butterflies flitting about my hotel room.
Sleeping under the stars in Egypt’s Western Desert at the end of December was romantically attractive but mad, and gave me one of my worst chest infections of my life. The most painful incident of all, though, was otitis (a middle ear infection) picked up in Ireland. I remember travelling from Bushmills in Antrim by road all the way south to Irish Distillers at Midleton in Cork in February 1995, and having to keep stopping at doctor’s surgeries along the way to pick up stronger and stronger painkillers, none of which were quite strong enough to take the intense pain away. And that was before I got the plane home...
Anyway, let’s get back to Sonoma. Here is the Decanter piece, where the emphasis was less on travel and more on terroir; I’ve put a few repetitions in square brackets for you to skip.
There are many ways of understanding wine, but you’ve never really finished the job until you lace up a pair of boots and leave the car behind. Walking from one vineyard to the next enables you to see, smell and feel how a landscape works, measuring the light and warmth with your own body, gauging the play of soil and stone underfoot, testing the steepness of a slope with your calf muscles. I never understood the rugged mineral power of the Douro, the cloud-shaded, soft-soiled nuance of Burgundy or the blinding solar splash of Marlborough until I felt them for myself. Sonoma had always intrigued and puzzled me in equal measure, so when the chance came to spend three days walking some of its AVAs, I took it with gratitude.
Terroir in California is unusually complicated, and never more so than in here. Geologically speaking, Sonoma has been a crash zone for the last 135 million years. Pangaea, the Earth’s most recent supercontinent, was breaking up at that late Jurassic moment, and the ancient Farallon plate was subducting under the North American plate, creating the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Ranges as it did so. Nowadays, the colossal Pacific plate is doing the same thing – and the result is the celebrated San Andreas Fault, which actually bisects Sonoma County. Vines growing in the Sonoma Coast AVA, for example, root in rock formations which once lay 330 miles south of those found in the Knights Valley AVA. The San Andreas is the biggest but by no means the only fault in Northern California’s geological chaos, and the work of all the rivers, beaches and seas that have formed here subsequently, plus intense volcanic activity over the last 3-8 million years, multiply those complexities. (The Médoc or Chablis is, by comparison, geologically simple.) The thirteen AVAs which lie within Sonoma County mark a first step in trying to make wine sense of the plethora of different growing conditions here, but it won’t be the last.
My Sonoma Vineyard Walk was an abbreviated press preview of the full five-day tour offered by Zephyr Adventures as part of its wine programme. The tour takes you through five of the County’s AVAs (Dry Creek, Rockpile, Alexander Valley, Russian River and Sonoma Valley), and the walking is seasoned with picnics, open-air wine tastings and relaxed dinners; I stayed on afterwards to make a few more visits. The routes are easy rather than arduous, mostly undertaken in the company of a vineyard owner or manager, enabling you to ask the kind of questions (simple or complicated) you want – and get straight answers. [As we walked the benchlands of the Alexander Valley, for example, I wondered why the perfectly exposed hillsides just above those deep loams weren’t also planted – as they would be in any of France’s classic wine regions. The hills have about three feet of topsoil over sandstone, whereas the loams can be 20 feet deep and make a much richer soil medium. Simple, explained Alexander Valley Vineyards’ estate manager Mark Houser. You might get double for your wine, but you’d triple your costs. It wasn’t worth it. ]
There are other philosophies, of course. After the trip was over, I visited Kenny Kahn’s Blue Rock Vineyards towards the north of Alexander Valley. The ‘blue rock’ in question is serpentine. Its chemistry means it is high in magnesium which in turn implies low levels of potassium, making it a difficult growing medium (serpentine soils in otherwise forested areas show up as dry grassland with scattered conifers known as ‘serpentine barrens’). Parts of Kenny’s vineyard are uncultivatable, and much of the rest requires extensive manuring and always gives low yields; Kenny took it on against local advice. The Blue Rock wines are, though, true vins de terroir; indeed, since serpentine is California’s official ‘state rock’, they probably ought to be served at state banquets. I tasted the debut vintage 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon and the 2004 Syrah and both were distinctively different from the relatively lush and generous Alexander Valley norm: aromatically delicate, with intense, almost austere flavours with a distinctive drily mineral, almost salty finish (in addition to magnesium, serpentine is also high in nickel, chromium and cobalt; indeed New Caledonian serpentine is the source of most of the world’s nickel ore).
As in most of California, of course, the most important terroir factor is not the exact composition of soil and bedrock but proximity to the ocean. The churning of the North Pacific Gyre, which sends cold waters plunging southwards from British Columbia towards Mexico’s Baja California, is what creates the state’s famous coastal fogs -- as well as being the reason why those attempting to swim from Alcatraz to freedom never made it. Think of Sonoma County, which fronts the ocean, as a crash-zone maze of hills and valleys interfingered by rivers and creeks; the exact extent to which fog can creep in overnight along those watercourses is what conditions the warmth of a site, the choice of grape variety and the constitution of the finished wine.
In addition to the Sonoma Coast, the Russian River Valley (and its sub-zone Green Valley) as well as Sonoma-Carneros further south are the coolest and most fog-prone parts of Sonoma County: Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are both unproblematically successful here. Knights Valley to the east is the warmest AVA, closely followed by Alexander Valley; while the rest of the AVAs lie somewhere inbetween – including Chalk Hill (whose ‘chalk’ is in fact volcanic ash).
Ames Morison (right) with Kenneth Rochford Altitude, of course, plays a role in Sonoma too, and sometimes a paradoxical one. In most of the world’s vineyards, a higher site is a cooler site. Here, though, height can lift a vineyard above the fogline, giving it extra sunshine hours compared to the vineyards below. You wouldn’t expect Zinfandel to do well in foggy Russian River, for example – yet, grown above the fogline, it can flourish. [As the cool of night drew on, we Zephyr walkers drank an unusually shapely, poised 2004 Trenton Station Lion Ridge Zinfandel from the McLelland-Kunde ranch made by Rod Berglund at Joseph Swan. We were sitting on picnic tables on top of Lion Ridge to enjoy the view – and the vines were just a few feet away, enjoying the last of the light with us.]
That Zinfandel, as it happened, was a perfect contrast to one we had tried the day before in Rockpile, the only AVA in Sonoma where the fog never penetrates. This young AVA promises to be one of the county’s most interesting, though there are no wineries there as yet: we met Lori de Mello, sister of Rockpile Road Vineyard owner Jack Florence, who sells to Rosenblum (recently acquired by Diageo) among others. Rockpile is, in effect, the back end of Dry Creek, where the tarmac runs out high above the reservoir of Lake Sonoma. The lowest point of the AVA is at 800 feet (244 m), and almost all of the 160 acres (65 ha) so far planted lie at over 1000 feet (305 m). Despite its foglessness, there is still a pronounced coastal influence (the Pacific is less than 16 miles away) in the cool winds which harry the vines; soils are relatively thin, too: just a foot or two of oxidized volcanic clay-loam over shale and sandstone, and I noticed quartzite and ironstone, too, as we walked. The end result is low yields of late ripening, small-berried fruit: the 2005 Rosenblum Rockpile Road Zinfandel was full of moist, fruitcake richness yet it is firmly structured, too, with ample tannins and sustained acidity giving it an inner architecture which the more flamboyant examples of this variety can sometimes lack. We tasted it up on a hilltop stand among the vines underneath two shading live oaks, surrounded by paper-barked madrones and tough manzanita bushes, the grass speckled with chamomile, buttercup and wild iris -- and the view beyond as endless as it was rumpled. [Even in populous California, you can quickly leave the world of shopping malls, gas stations and Taco Bells to find natural solitude characterised by an airy spaciousness rare in Europe.]
Dry Creek itself is now a managed sluice between the reservoir of Lake Sonoma and the Russian River, northern Sonoma’s main watercourse, so it’s never dry any more; indeed it had been overloaded to the point of flooding shortly before we arrived, and we saw the stick-strewn aftermath when visiting the newly established Truett-Hurst. This will be a biodynamic vineyard right next to Dry Creek, under the advisory tutelage of Heath Dolan. Owner Phil Hurst, whose Winery Exchange negociant business has been a major California supplier to Tesco, intends to plant Zinfandel and Petite Syrah in this relatively low-lying site. Our other Dry Creek walk was though the higher-sited vineyards of Michel-Schlumberger, with winemaker Mike Brunson and owner Jacques Schlumberger (who, despite his name, is from Houston). Their graceful 2006 Pinot Blanc marks a welcome break with varietal conformity, and his 2006 Chardonnay combines the breadth and depth that seems to be California’s birthright with a pure, green note and a sense of restraint and understatement which should play well in Europe. The effects of height are conventional in these two sites.
In size terms, Alexander Valley and Russian River Valley are the two largest AVAs in Sonoma, both with around 15,000 acres (6,070 ha) planted – and my post-walk visit to Medlock Ames was the perfect place to compare the two, since this outstanding new winery on the southwestern cusp of the Alexander Valley has land in both (it also abuts Chalk Hill). Fog here is a more regular night visitor than in the northern part of Alexander Valley. The 2006 Chardonnay was the finest textured white I tasted during my short visit: supple, spilling and full on the tongue, delicately fruited and spice-nuanced. The 2004 red wines I tried included an enticingly voluptuous Merlot red and an outstandingly well-defined Cabernet with great aromatic finesse, typically soft but ample Alexander Valley tannins and a ripe, black-fruit finish, complex with spice and tobacco. All three wines perfectly exemplified why California’s smaller wineries merit better UK distribution than they get at present: outstanding quality, made with great site sensitivity. In every sense the obverse of California’s big brands.
Compared to Napa, with its wealth, self-importance and marketing overdrive, Sonoma is more homely and understated, particularly once you get beyond the big name wineries in the southern end of the County. It’s beautiful: a chessboard of hills and screening valleys where redwoods march up moist crevices and where, on rounded hills of golden grass, the lace lichen hangs in swags from oaks and madrones to feed on silky morning fogs. [ We never saw a cougar (the ‘mountain lion’ still endemic here) but met snakes, poison oaks, blue herons and turkey vultures; we even watched a bald eagle struggle for lift as a steelhead trout thrashed in its claws.] The manifold complexities of Sonoma’s terroirs, correlated to all that natural beauty, will still be revealing themselves and surprising our grandchildren in fifty years’ time. Walk them while you can.
The picture that caused all the trouble: 100 year-old Zin at Sausal It was a great trip, despite that pesky back, and I particularly enjoyed the cheerful (and – thanks, guys -- sympathetic) company of the North American journalists I travelled with, as well as Allan and Reno from Zephyr. If you want some more terroir-driven reading, this time on the Sonoma Coast AVA alone, then the following link should deliver you Jonathan Swinchatt’s excellent article from World of Fine Wine, available as a ‘taster’ pdf to encourage subscriptions via the www.finewinemag.com website: http://www.finewinemag.com/docs/Swinchatt%20Sonoma%20Coast.pdf
If you like the idea of walking Sonoma yourself, contact the team at Zephyr: Zephyr Wine Adventures, POB 16, Red Lodge, MT 59068, USA (+ 1 888 758 8687, www.zephyradventures.com). There’s another Sonoma walk scheduled for 26.10.08-30.10.08, priced at $1900. Allan Wright of Zephyr also tells me he’s planning to set up a Do It Yourself programme. “The idea,” he says, “is to have 6-8 choices in the Alexander and Dry Creek Valleys. Participants will choose three to do on a three-day trip, with walks led by local guides. The benefit of the program for travelers and wine enthusiasts is it will cost less, take less time, and will be tailored to each person's schedule since they can be booked at any time.” Details should be on the Zephyr website from the end of September.
I’ll get back to California when I can. But no early morning tee-shirt photography next time.
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