Beauty and the Beast

It was the end of a working day last week, and I wandered into my wine cellar in the garage looking for a bottle of Pinot.

From the 2005 vintage, we had produced a number of very small (some only a single barrel) offerings and will have 11 separate single-barrel releases in 2009. Anyway, I found a bottle of one of the 2005 wines wedged behind some Cabernet.

The 2005 Pinot Noir - Mission Ranch, Pommard clone is both beautiful and ugly simultaneously.

Shortly after I acquired the La Rochelle brand from my cousins, we decided to change the packaging to more clearly delineate what we wanted La Rochelle to be. Before our current label design (created by Nick McNeill), we developed a new look that was just horrendous. The picture to the right shows the abomination (kids, this is why you leave the label design to the pros!).

The wine inside the bottle was wonderful. Explosive aromatically (fresh raspberry and cranberry fruit, spice from barrel), the wine had a beautiful, silky mid-palate, open fruit flavors, and great acidity. I had it with roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and corn. Yum score = 100.

Beautiful labels, do not guarantee delicious wine, and - thankfully enough, in this case - the ugly ones don't also describe the wine inside.

2006 Pinot Noir, Santa Cruz Mountains Released

While single-vineyard wines make up the backbone of our Pinot Noir Program (in fact, we will release a wine from the Deer Park Vineyard from Santa Cruz Mountains for the wine club later in the year), our appellation wines boast a complexity and deliciousness that typify our best offerings.

Grapes have been grown in the Santa Cruz Mountains since the 1850s with Pinot Noir a growing contributor to the overall acreage planted in the appellation, especially recently. Unlike other more hill-challenged appellation, many of the vineyards in this appellation are small, the average size (according to John Haeger in his seminal book North American Pinot Noir) being just 11 acres.

The Deer Park Vineyard provides the vast majority of fruit for this offering with the San Vicente Vineyard adding the last few percent. This wine is dramatic, imbued with wonderfully intense dark-berried fruit, great mid-palate acidity and a fair amount of tannin. This is one of those wines that needs some time before it shows its best.

When it does, though, the results will be stunning. Only 80 cases of this wine were produced and can be ordered in our on-line store.

The Game's all About Food

We may root for a particular team, wear that team's jersey, live and die with the fortunes of that team...but we all really know, the big game is about the food and wine. I am serving the dish below...what Pinot would go best?

In Good Company

There are a lot of great wines produced in California. It has always been a goal (especially in our Cabernet House where the Livermore Valley appellation doesn't get the credit it deserves) to make wines that are considered among the best.

And while I am deeply conflicted about the wine reviewing process (more on that another time), the benefits of a positive review are undeniable. Jim Laube, the California wine reviewer for the Wine Spectator magazine, just published a list of top scoring Pinot Noirs from last year, and our Garys' Vineyard from 2005 is included.

We are re-releasing the last 120 bottles from our Library. The limit is 2 bottles per person. The price is $75 per bottle. Click to order Pinot Noir - Garys' Vineyard.

Making Sense of La Rochelle

The world of Pinot Noir can be confusing... the myriad flavors and aromas and appellations and clones... lots of stuff to know.

In an effort to give you more information, we have created a Pinot Noir Characteristics matrix that details information about all of our wines.

Find the downloadable Matrix here. We will update it regularly.

It's Soy Good...

Soy. Not a descriptor I would normally attach to a wine. Sushi maybe, wine no. I've seen this word used before to describe wine and as a matter of fact I have heard Steven refer to it several times with some of our pinots in La Rochelle. I never could quite get the soy. I just chalked it up to my amateur palate. Then I opened a bottle of the 2003 Garys' Vineyard Pinot Noir which was created especially for the Steven Kent Future Release Program. One sip and I was hit with a soy bomb. Yes, a soy bomb! It was unbelievable. Not only was the flavor amazing, but the mouthfeel was silky and coated my tongue like a cashmere jacket in autumn. It was perfect. How could I have missed this?

I thought back and remembered when we released this wine in 2005. We had never done a pinot before and I was not familiar with the grape. Sure, I had pinot noir prior to this but it was a casual acquaintance, not a varietal I could appreciate. I remember tasting the 2003 and enjoying it, but thinking I enjoyed cabernet more. Since its release I have had the honor of tasting many more pinots, whether our own at La Rochelle or those we bring in for tasting to compare and contrast with our own. While I still enjoy my cabernet, I have come to appreciate what pinot noir has to offer. I enjoy opening each bottle, wondering what flavor awaits me…will it be earthy…dark fruit…perhaps cardamom - a favorite of mine, or another spice??? Or maybe this time it's soy.

Grab a bottle of pinot and open it up…what do you taste???

(ed. note: Just our opinion, but the wines that are predominantly made from Sleepy Hollow Vyd. fruit also display this soy quality in spades.)

Pressing Matters...Harvest is Over

Harvest time is always the most exciting time of the year, not always for positive reasons however. Wine, for all its importance if culture and history, is still - at its core - an agricultural product. As such, the grower ceeds much control to Mother Nature. We are never comfortable about the vintage. We're a little more at ease when all the fruit comes in, but then there is the next important matter of when to press wines off the skins.

This is where we are now with our Pinots. All of our fermentations are done in 1.5 ton open-top fermenters. Tom Stutz tastes each of these fermenters (we have over 30 going at any one time) every day tracking the progression of flavors, aromas, sweetness, tannin, and the like until he feels that the wines can come off the skins. We tend to leave our wine in fermenters nearly until the point the caps submerge (this indicates that there is no more production of carbon dioxide, a by-product of fermentation and the substance that keeps the cap afloat).

Once the wine is pressed off the skins you can't go back. You can't add more color, more tannin, more extract (you can technically, but those kinds of manipulations are not in our winemaking playbook). Essentially, the wine is made. Any flavor and aromas changes to the wine will come from the presence (or lack) of new barrels and exposure to oxygen.

Over the course of the next week or so all of our wines will be in barrel undergoing the next phase of their lives.