Valeta and I spare no personal effort or expense in our quest to
make the world’s best Pinot Noir. We make approximately 100
cases of wine yearly from Clos de la Tech’s first vineyard
that surrounds our home in Woodside, California, modestly named
Domaine du Docteur Rodgers.* Our first vintage, the 1996, was quite
good, but a lucky accident enjoyed by rookies. After two “cycles
of learning” (a.k.a. failures) in 1997 and 1998 and a “jury’s
out” year in 1999, we produced what we consider to be world-class
Pinot Noirs from 2000 through 2005. The 2000 was the first of these
vintages to be ready for commercial release last year. It featured
a classic Pinot Noir floral perfume bouquet, along with the aromas
of spices and red berries, as well as the silky-smooth body that
is characteristic of great Burgundies. Relative to the 2000, the
2002 bouquet contains black fruit (black raspberries and black currents)
rather than red fruit in the nose, silky tannins and a slightly
more delicate body (the French would call it a more “feminine”
wine). It’s more Burgundian than the 2000 and therefore our
favorite of the two.
As Pinot Noir grapes ripen, the wine produced
from them improves in several ways. Under-ripe tannins are often
described as astringent and thin. “Thin” means that
the tannins do not provide any mouth-filling body, while “astringent”
means that at the same time the body is lacking, the tannins pucker
the mouth unpleasantly, giving a squeaky sensation as the tongue
moves over the palate—because the astringent tannins chemically
react with the proteins in our saliva, destroying its lubricating
property, causing us to literally feel the bumps on our tongue.
Astringency is therefore a feeling, not a taste. A small amount
of astringency is present in almost all red wines, giving them “grip,”
as Clive Coates (British Master of Wine) puts it, but Pinot Noir
should never be as astringent as a typical California Cabernet.
During the ripening at Clos de la Tech, our Pinot
Noir tannin improves in stages from astringent to bitter, then to
“round” and finally “sweet, ” as we have
learned by making wines from early and late harvested grapes. A
very subtle bitter aftertaste adds to Pinot Noir quality but wines
with a high concentration of bitter tannins are unpleasant. As the
grapes ripen to produce “round” tannins, the wine takes
on a mouth-filling property without much accompanying bitterness
or astringency. Finally, our late harvest tannin gets “sweet,”
that very pleasant sensation produced by the tannin in the best
Burgundies that not only fills the mouth, but also leaves a non-sugar,
slightly sweet sensation in the aftertaste. I aggregated these words
from Clive Coates’ reviews of four of the very best Burgundies
of the 2002 vintage: “very ripe and rich;” “full
bodied, firm, rich;” “fat, firm, rich;” and “ripe,
almost sweet on the palate.” The progression of tannin ripeness
at the Domain du Docteur Rodgers vineyard (this phenomenon is vineyard-specific)
is depicted in the figure above. The ripening progression of the
fruit flavors and the bouquet is also given.
In reality, the final tannin in the wine is never
simply described by one phase of the ripening spectrum; it typically
has two or even three overlapping characteristics that are perceived
sequentially. One typical example of sequenced tannin flavors is
sweet followed by a slightly bitter aftertaste. This is the same
order of sensations as perceived in a gin and tonic cocktail, which
starts with a non-sugar “sweetness” and ends with a
more bitter aftertaste than wine. (Tonic water—water with
the bitter quinine extract of the bark of the Cinchona tree in it—was
used on a daily basis by the British in the colonies in the 1700s
to prevent malaria. The bitterness of the medical quinine molecule
was “sweetened” with a dash of gin to make it more palatable.
Preceding the daily cocktail with the toast, “Here’s
to your health!” is not a meaningless gesture.)
California’s longer ripening season—we
enjoy a longer “hang time,” as California vintners say—improves
not only the tannin quality, but also the quality of the fruit flavor
in the grapes. As our Pinot Noir ripens, the intensity of its fruit
flavor increases and its flavor changes in this progression: melon
to strawberry, then cherry, followed by red fruit (raspberry, currant),
black fruit (again, raspberry and currant)—and finally a raisin
flavor, as the grapes shrivel, like the ones used to make the Amarone
wines of Northern Italy.
Finally, Pinot Noir’s bouquet gets both
more intense and more unique (less grape-like) as the grapes get
riper. Along with those silky tannins, it is the unique bouquet
of Pinot Noir—a complex floral perfume that is as far from
“grapey” as a smell can get—that causes Pinot
Noir to be our sole passion in winemaking.
The tannin, fruit and bouquet of the 2002 Domaine
du Docteur Rodgers are characterized graphically below, along with
a comparison to last year’s 2000 release.
So, we describe the 2002 as having medium color,
a medium body with sweet tannins, and a complex bouquet—in
which, in addition to the black fruit, we smell “spices,”
which come partly from eugenol (also found in oil of clove), a natural
byproduct of Pinot Noir fermentation. The bouquet also has the floral
perfume characteristic we love in Pinot Noir, which probably has
several components, which have not yet been definitively identified
in the literature. There is also a faint vanilla smell in the background
that comes from vanillin, a byproduct of oak barrel toasting.
Next year, we will have a new wine to offer,
our 2002 Domaine Valeta, the first wine from our new mountain top
vineyard, planted in 1999. We almost offered the Domaine Valeta
this year, but its tannins are currently still somewhat astringent
and need another year in the bottle.
Appendix A: OUR WINEMAKING
PROCESS
Appendix B: GEEK DESCRIPTION
OF THE 2002
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