the new california wine by jon bonné - excerpt

7/27/2019 The New California Wine by Jon Bonné - Excerpt

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Introduction 1

PART 1 - Searching for the New California

Te New Winemakers 8

Te Rise and Fall 23

Te New Farming 41

Te Secret Life of Grapes 63

Te Myth of the Estate 76

Te able Wine Dilemma 86

PART 2 - The New Terroir: A California Road Trip

Te Meaning of Place 102

Contra Costa County 106

Sonoma 108

Sierra Foothills 120

Santa Cruz Mountains 127

Lodi 135

Anderson Valley 143

Santa Rita Hills 148

Paso Robles 156

Ventucopa 164

PART 3 - Wines of the New California: A Guide

Pinot Noir 174

Chardonnay 192

Cabernet 204

Revising the Rhône 220

Te New Whites 238

Back to the Future 257

Maps 274

List of Producers 288

Acknowledgments 291

Index 292

Contents



vi Te New California Wine



1

“I hear you hate California wine.”

Te spokeswoman for one of the state’s most

powerful wine personalities was on the phone. I

wasn’t in the mood.

“If I hated California wine,” I replied, “would I

be doing what I do?”

I knew, when I moved to California in 2006, that

I was facing long odds. I had come to a place thatbelieved, above all, in the superiority of its wines.

Anyone who didn’t embrace that belief was viewed

as a threat. And in the past I had dared to voice my

dissatisfaction with a California wine culture that

I saw as often self-satisfied and underwhelming.

Worse, I was from the East Coast, an outsider. My

years spent in New York, where I learned from my

father about European wines from Vouvray to Val-

policella, were a liability instead of an asset.

Six years earlier I had moved to Seattle, and

while there I came to love West Coast wines—in

particular the pioneering wines of Washington

State. I began my wine-writing career there. Clearly,

Introduction



2 Te New California Wine

Why, then, had California wine fallen into such

a stupor years later? Tat was the question I set

out to answer. I wanted to reconcile these two

Californias—the one I remembered that was so full

of promise and life, and the one that was stuck in

a self-satisfied funk.

My first couple of years in California were tough. I

hunted desperately for local wines worth praising

while I featured lots of imports in the newspaper’s

wine section, arguing that the Bay Area in fact had a

critical mass of great importers (like Berkeley’s Ker-

mit Lynch). Tis argument did not sit well among

partisans of California’s wines, but I couldn’t over-

look the sad fact that Napa had become a bombastic

shell of its earlier, humbler self. Its top names—

Beaulieu and Beringer and even Mondavi—had

grown into big corporate entities, while its smaller

labels were locked in an arms race, each trying to

create bigger, riper, and more outrageous wines.

Still, I had come prepared with good leads. Just

two weeks into the job I had to choose our wine-

maker of the year, and quickly enough I selected

Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards. Draper’s work wasbeyond reproach: for nearly forty years he had been

at the helm at Ridge, where he made not only the

state’s benchmark Zinfandel-focused wines, Geyser-

ville and Lytton Springs, but also one of the finest

Cabernet-based wines in the world, Monte Bello.

My choice of Draper came with a subtler mes-

sage. In the midst of an industry that had blindly

embraced technology and by-the-numbers winemak-

ing, he was an outspoken traditionalist. He rejectedcommercial yeasts and fancy flavor-enhancing tech-

niques and was a vocal critic of the science-minded

efforts of the University of California at Davis, one

of the top winemaking schools in the world.

I was no foe of American winemaking. But none

of that mattered the moment I landed at the Oak-

land airport.

I had come to the Bay Area to run the wine sec-

tion of the San Francisco Chronicle, six to ten pages

of some of the country’s most influential wine journalism. Te California wine industry was not

pleased: their work was about to be judged by some-

one whose palate was honed not on hefty Cabernet

and Zinfandel but on nuanced Old World wines.

I approached my work earnestly. But from the

moment I arrived, I had to confront my own deep

skepticism about California’s winemaking reality.

Again and again I was disappointed by what I found

to be the shortfalls of California wine: a ubiquity of

oaky, uninspired bottles and a presumption that

bigger was indeed better.

Te truth was, I had come to California to be

convinced. I was looking for signs that skeptics like

me were wrong, and that what had long been a near-

magical land for wine could still achieve greatness.

Whatever I might have thought about Califor-

nia wines at that point, I had started from a place

of love. In February 1985, when I was twelve, my

father took our family to California. At the time Iwas far more interested in the Apple factory tour

in Cupertino, but Dad had always brought us up

around wine. He gave me my first glass at age five,

and soon enough I was having a bit with dinner

most nights. When he took us to Napa Valley, it

was clear we were somewhere special. We visited

the Robert Mondavi Winery, with its campanile

and familiar arch, the brick-and-mortar icon from

the labels I had often seen around the house. Eventhen I knew we had arrived at the cradle of Ameri-

can wine. California wines at the time were vibrant,

the industry invigorated by its speedy rise to rival

Europe in quality.



3Introduction

approximated those of Burgundy—and paid a crit-

ical price over the years for stubbornly refusing to

give in to the whims of fashion.

Slowly, I encountered other winemakers with

similar beliefs. I found people who remained com-

mitted to restrained, compelling wines that spoke

clearly of their origins—and who shared my frus-

tration with California’s modern style.

Some, like Draper and Jensen, had been toil-

ing for decades; others were upstarts with the same

energy and ambition as the pioneers from previous

generations. Eventually, the brushstrokes began to

turn into something recognizable: the seeds of a new

movement, a new California wine in the making.

More than that, he believed that the making

of wine was sacrosanct, a true expression of the

land. Wine “was traditionally the central symbol

for transformation, because the grape transforms

itself simply by being broken by man, because it

transforms itself with nothing else,” he told me at

the time.

By choosing Draper, I had set a theme for my

work. I quietly kept searching for wines that I felt

reflected what I knew California could offer. Te

following year, my winemaker of the year wasJosh Jensen of Calera. Known as Mr. Limestone,

Jensen in the 1970s had pioneered the quest for

great Pinot Noir grown on calcareous soils that



4 Te New California Wine

New California’s winemakers share similar sensibil-

ities: an enthusiasm for lessons learned from the

Old World, but not the desire to replicate its wines;

a mandate to seek out new grape varieties and

regions; and, perhaps most important, an ardentthe belief that place matters. Tey are true believers

in terroir. Tis is crucial because California’s future

ultimately depends upon wines that show nuance,

restraint, and a deep evocation of place.

But California is also somewhat obsessed with

size. Although there are hundreds of small fam-

ily wineries throughout the state, the industry is

dominated by its Big Tree: Gallo, Constellation

Wines, and the Wine Group. In 2011, according to

industry investor David Freed, the Big Tree were

Tis was more than just a blip. Wines from

emerging producers like Lioco, Broc Cellars, and

Matthiasson, which just a few years earlier would

have been decidedly fringe for California, had by

2010 amassed a loyal audience. Tey were being

sought out by the disillusioned fans of an earlierCalifornia generation who believed that modern

winemaking had forsaken them. Tey also attracted

sommeliers and wine buyers who had previously all

but written off California as well as those who had

shunned domestic wine in favor of imported until

finally finding bottles that spoke their aesthetic lan-

guage. Tat year, I wrote a piece for Saveur magazine

making a case for the New California wine—and by

that time, talk of a grand revival no longer seemed

unrealistic.



5Introduction

to understand the thousand tiny things that allow

you to make great wine.

Te winemakers you’ll find in the following pages

aren’t meant to represent all of the state’s ambi-tions. Rather, they are pioneers, setting the agenda

for the New California wine.

Not every young winery appears. Some are too

wedded to the aesthetics of the previous genera-

tion; others may be too new. In this book you’ll

also find some older wineries like Calera and Ridge,

with reputations that stretch back for decades. Tey

appear here because they have stayed the course

through darker times.

Te book is divided into three sections. Te first

part, “Searching for the New California,” aims to

take you along on my journey to discover the many

changes taking place and meet the people behind

them. Te second part, “Te New erroir,” is a road

trip through some of the regions that are helping to

redefine California winemaking. Te third, “Wines

of the New California,” lays out essential producers

and their wines and discusses the changes in wine-

making and wine styles in recent years.Each section addresses an aspect of what I’ve

come to believe: this is the best time in a genera-

tion to drink California wine. More than that, today

marks the arrival of a mature American wine cul-

ture, where producers are confident enough not to

mimic the Old World or obscure the nuances of ter-

roir with clever cellar work, but rather seek great-

ness in a uniquely American context.

hat is the wonderful reality of the New

California.

responsible for more than 64 percent of the state’s

wine shipments; they made two of every three bot-

tles of California wine. If you don’t recognize their

names (though certainly Gallo is ubiquitous), you

know their brands. Gallo’s empire covers every-

thing from Barefoot to Louis Martini to Apothicand urning Leaf. After a blitzkrieg buying spree

over the past decade, Constellation now owns Rob-

ert Mondavi, Ravenswood, Clos du Bois, and nearly

two dozen other labels. And the Wine Group con-

trols much of the rest of the supermarket shelves,

including brands like Franzia, Cupcake, Glen Ellen,

and Concannon.

Tat doesn’t even factor in the massive influence

of Fred Franzia’s Bronco Wine Company, maker of

twenty million cases worth of Charles Shaw wines

(better known as wo Buck Chuck) and dozens of

other labels. It is estimated that Bronco and the

four next largest labels—rinchero (Sutter Home,

Ménage à rois), Kendall-Jackson, Delicato (Gnarly

Head, Irony), and reasury Wine Estates (a former

division of Australian brewer Foster’s that encom-

passes Beringer, Meridian, and more)—account for

another 20 percent of the California wine industry.

In other words, sea change in the overall marketfor California wine only happens when the Fred

Franzias of the world get involved.

Yet California’s state of the art has typically

been judged on an elite roster of producers. When

the state’s wine style shifted in the 1990s, it hap-

pened not among makers of table wine but among

a small set of mostly Cabernet specialists.

Tat’s why, when I sought signs of change in

California winemaking, I knew I needed to hunt

among the little guys. Change always comes first

at a small scale—in part because, as vineyard

owner David Hirsch might put it, you have to

apply yourself to a specific place in order to begin



274

Mendocino andAnderson Valley,

page 278

Sonoma,pages 276–277

Napa, page 275

Sierra Foothills,page 279

Contra Costa County,Lodi, and the Delta,pages 286–287

Santa Cruz Mountains,pages 280–281

Central Coast, page 284

Paso Robles, page 285

Santa Barbara and theSanta Rita Hills, pages 282–283

San Diego

Merced

Monterey

Santa Maria

BuelltonSanta Ynez

San Jose

Barstow

Paso Robles

Santa Barbara

Camarillo

Ventura

Long Beach

San Luis Obispo

Palm Springs

Stockton

Oceanside

Mendocino

Vallejo

Santa RosaHealdsburg Calistoga

NapaSonoma

San Bernardino

Crescent City

Oakland

Needles

San Mateo

Los Angeles

Redding

Berkeley

Santa Cruz

Mt. Shasta

Pasadena

Bakersfield

Ukiah

Eureka

San Francisco

Salinas

SACRAMENTO

Irvine

Riverside

Fresno

5

5

5

5

5

5

15

15

15

40

10

10

8

80

80

101

101

101

99

99

58

14

152

50

0 100 mi

0 100 km

Maps VINEYARD KEY

Red grapes

White grapes

Both red and white grapes

LIST OF VARIETIES

Pinot Noir

Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot Syrah

Zinfandel, Carignane, and field blends

Other Rhône-style reds

Gamay Noir, Trousseau, Italian- and Spanish-style

reds, and other reds

Chardonnay

Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon

Italian-style whites

Spanish-style whites

Rhône-style whites

Grüner Veltiner, Riesling, Chenin Blanc, and

other whites

Note: Certain maps include some well-known

American Viticultural Areas for reference. However,

these maps are not intended to provide a complete

depiction of all the state’s AVAs.



Copyright © 2013 by Jon Bonné

Photographs copyright © 2013 by Erik Castro

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by en Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing

Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

en Speed Press and the en Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks

of Random House LLC.

Some material in this work includes quotes from or is based on pieces by Jon Bonné

originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Grateful acknowledgement is made for

the use of this material, as well as additional material from pieces originally published in

Decanter and Saveur magazines.

Te photos on pages 15 and 35 appear courtesy of ed Lemon

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bonné, Jon.

Te new California wine : a guide to the producers and wines behind a revolution

in taste / Jon Bonné.

pages cm

1. Wine and wine making—California—Guidebooks. I. itle.

P557.B64 2013

641.2’2—dc23

2013017577

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60774-300-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60774-301-9

Printed in China

Design by Katy Brown

Cartography by Moon Street Cartography, Durango, Colorado

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition



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the new california wine by jon bonné - excerpt

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