Clos De La Tech

Vintage 2000
Pinot Noir

Domaine du Docteur Rodgers 2000
with 16-Megabit SRAM chip

We at Clos de la Tech winery are proud to announce our first release: the 2000 vintage from our Domaine du Docteur Rodgers vineyard.

Clos de la Tech (Klō deh lah Tĕk) borrows its name from the great Burgundy vineyards that often use the word “Clos” (translation: enclosed area) in their names. Examples include Clos de Vougeot, Clos de Tart, Clos de Lambrays, etc. The reference comes from the rocks that were removed from the vineyards to form stone walls, enclosing the vineyards. The “Tech” part of the name is connected with the silicon chip on the neck of every Clos de la Tech bottle. We have always liked the practice of Chateau Mouton Rothschild, which puts a new piece of modern art on its bottle each year. We decided to put “chip art” on our bottle—in the case of the 2000, two real silicon memory chips with 107 million transistors on them embedded in sealing wax. Each year, we honor Cypress Semiconductor’s most successful chip that way.

YEAR	CHIP TYPE (# OF CHIPS)	COMMENT
1996	4-Megabit SRAM (2)	SRAM, Static Random Access Memory. The first chip designed by Valeta at Cypress. 52.4 million transistors. Now obsolete.
1997	Microsoft Mouse Chip (48)	Tiny computers with a RISC CPU, SRAM, EPROM and analog circuitry. Used to connect a USB computer mouse to a PC. 300 million sold to date.
1998	Motorola Cell Phone SRAM (6)	A 2-megabit SRAM that uses only 1/50 of a watt of power in cell phones. 83 million transistors.
1999	4-Megabit Dual Port RAM (2)	A special communications memory used in cell phone base stations. 53 million transistors.
2000	16-Megabit SRAM (2)	The transistors on these SRAMs are manufactured at a cost of only 7 microcents each. 107 million transistors.
2001	POSIC (1)	Packet Over SONET IC. A data communications chip for traffic at 2.48 gigabits per second on the SONET (phone) system, the Synchronous Optical NETwork.
2002	72-Megabit SRAM (2)	This memory can store a 5,000-page book in .001 seconds. First wine ever with one billion transistors on the crest.

Valeta and I have been on a quest since 1994 to make the world’s best Pinot Noir. We make approximately 100 cases of wine yearly from Clos de la Tech’s first vineyard, which surrounds our home in Woodside. Our first vintage, the 1996, was quite good, but a lucky accident enjoyed by rookies. After two “cycles of learning” (Silicon Valley jargon for failures) in 1997 and 1998, we produced what we consider to be world-class Pinot Noirs from 1999 through 2004. The 2000 is the first of these vintages to be ready for commercial release.

We make our wines with the same method used in the 1830s by Ouvrard, the owner and winemaker of Romanée-Conti, the most famous of all of the Burgundy estates. We use closely spaced vines of the best available Pinot Noir clones, hand-tended vineyards, cluster-by-cluster hand harvesting, whole-cluster fermentation (no destemming), foot crushing (the French call it pipéage), native yeast fermentation (spontaneous fermentation without added yeast), gravity transfer (no pumping), aging in the finest French oak barrels from the Bertrange forest (made by the premier Burgundian barrel maker, François Fréres), and gravity-fed bottling without filtration. Native yeast, foot-crushed, whole clusters, unfiltered—the way great wines were made in Burgundy in the 1830s.

Not everything at Clos de la Tech comes from the 1830s. For example, Pasteur discovered the existence of yeast in 1868! In addition, we use enzymatic testing, various spectrophotometer and gas chromatograph measurements and high-pressure liquid chromatography to maintain a detailed understanding of how the anthocyanins (color), catechins (tannins), tartrates and maleates (acids), glucoses and fructoses, amino acids, and the dozen or so alcohols present in wine evolve from berry to bottle.

While it is true that Valeta foot-crushes each of our small-lot fermenters daily, it is the output of a daily spectrophotometric test that tells us the ratio of tannin to color in the fermenting grape juice or “must.” That ratio determines whether or not she foot-crushes the grapes once, twice or three times the next day—or just leaves them alone. In other words, we don’t just taste the wine, we analyze it scientifically on a daily basis and use that information to adjust the numerous parameters available to the winemaker—even while using winemaking’s methode ancien.

We now have three vineyards: the original one-acre Domaine du Docteur Rodgers; Domaine Valeta, 30 acres residing at the 2,300-foot peak of the Santa Cruz Mountains; and Domaine Lois Louise, 160 acres of very steep terrain at a 1,750-foot elevation on the ocean side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The high vineyards regularly receive snow in the winter. They were planted to provide a cooler growing season for Pinot Noir, which ripens early and makes more complex wines in cooler weather. (The latitude of the Burgundy region is close to that of Seattle.)

We enjoyed a big victory when we hired our vice president of winegrowing, Rex Geitner, in 2003. We first met Rex when he chaired a symposium on close-spaced vineyards at the 1998 Seattle meeting of the American Society for Enology and Viticulture. Rex managed the vines at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa. Stag’s Leap became famous when it won the famous 1976 Paris wine tasting, beating out wines including Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Chateau Haut-Brion—in a competition run by French judges. We courted him for five years until he decided that he, too, was ready to focus on making the World’s Best Pinot Noir.

Our consulting master sommelier, Robert Bath, described the 2000 Clos de la Tech, Domaine du Docteur Rodgers this way: “Medium to medium-dark ruby. Ripe, forward, focused aromas of red berries and plum. Medium to medium-full bodied, rich and expressive on the palate, with dark cherry flavors and a strong, concentrated finish.”

I like to describe the 2000 in terms more familiar to me. “Bud break” occurred on March 17, 2000, when the first green shoots appeared on our vines, as they have within two days of that date every year since 1996. We now know that the fairly precise biological clock of the vines leads us to harvest 95% of the time in 179 ±10 days after bud break. In 2000, we harvested on September 12, exactly 179 days after bud break. The sugar level in the harvested fruit was 24.8°B (degrees Brix, meaning the grape juice must was 24.8% sugar by weight), giving an alcohol content of 13.0% by volume. California Pinot Noir gets a “hot” taste if the alcohol is over about 14% (over 26°B) and may taste “leafy” or “green” if the harvested grapes are not completely ripe at sugar levels below 24°B. The acid measurements were pH=3.67 (normal 3.50 – 3.90) and titratable acidity at TA=6.76 grams per liter. Wines with TA=5.5 lack acid and are “flabby” or flat tasting, while wines with TA=7.2 are often too tart. The sugar, acid and alcohol parameters in the 2000 vintage were all in line to make a Pinot Noir with fresh acidity and medium alcohol. The parameters above never in themselves determine whether a wine will be great or even good, but they can flaw a wine if mismanaged.

On the other hand, the amino acid content of the grapes does matter in the making of a great wine because these 20 acids—essential to human life—are converted by yeast into a complex group of so-called “heavy” alcohols (not ethanol) that are very fragrant bouquet elements. For example, phenylalanine, an essential amino acid, is converted by yeast to 2-phenyl ethanol, a compound that is literally the concentrated essence of rose petals. With our amino acid concentration at a hefty 302 parts per million in the grapes at harvest, we knew the bouquet of the 2000 would be concentrated and “perfumey.”

The body of any wine is determined to a large extent by its tannins, which are measured by a spectrophotometer at a wavelength of 280 nanometers with ultraviolet light, which is strongly absorbed by tannin molecules. At an “absorbance” of A280=40, this wine is quite heavy in tannin for a Pinot Noir, but the tannin is also highly polymerized (linked in long chains, which happens during a long ripening cycle), making it exceptionally smooth, yet providing good weight on the palate. The smoothness of a great Burgundy—the positive feeling of silkiness on the palate—is not caused by a lack of tannin, but by a significant concentration of the right tannin.

Finally, the color of the wine, measured by the absorbance of green light at 520 nanometers is A520=2.7, making for a medium-dark wine. Some of the 2002 wines from Domaine Valeta on the mountaintop have already come in at color levels of A520=5.5, darker than many Cabernets!

So I describe the 2000 as having medium color, a big body with smooth tannins, and a complex bouquet—in which, in addition to the fruit component, I smell “spice,” which comes from eugenol (also known as oil of clove), a natural by-product of Pinot Noir fermentation. The bouquet also has an understated hint of vanillin, an aldehyde that is the active ingredient in vanilla extract. Vanillin is a natural byproduct of the oak-toasting process.