Clos De La Tech

Vintage 2003
Pinot Noir

Domaine du Docteur Rodgers 2003
One PSoC chip
and Domain Valeta 2003
One PSoC chip

Fellow Pinot Noir Lovers,

Valeta and I are proud to announce our fourth release which for the first time features wines from two vineyards, one old and one new—Domaine du Docteur Rodgers and Domaine Valeta.

The2003 Domaine du Docteur Rodgers (DDR)is the fourth release from our one-acre vineyard in Woodside, California. It is the biggest, darkest, lowest yielding (only 87 cases) wine ever released from our flagship vineyard. The DDR vineyard usually produces 125 cases of Pinot Noir, equivalent to a yield of 2.1 tons per acre, considerably less than typical commercial yields which range from 2.5-4.5 tons per acre. High yields produce $20 wines that lack the character and concentration of the great wines. In Burgundy, low yield is a fact of life for the great vineyards, each of which has a statutory yield limit defined in French Appellation d’origine contrôlée laws. Wine produced above the legal yield limit must be “declassified”—labeled as a lower-grade commune wine. Romanée-Conti, the most famous of all Burgundian vineyards, yields about 1.8 tons per acre, on average, well below the French legal limit.

Our2003 Domaine Valeta (DV) is the first vintage from Valeta’s 3.5-acre vineyard at the 2,300-foot crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains. First vintages are usually small, and the DV2003is no exception. We produced just 47 cases of wine in 2003 at a yield of only 0.2 tons per acre.

YEAR	CHIP TYPE (# OF CHIPS)	COMMENT
1996	4-Megabit SRAM	SRAM, S tatic R andom A ccess M emory. The first chip designed by Valeta at Cypress . 52.4 million transistors.
1997	Mouse Chip	Tiny computers used to connect a USB computer mouse to a PC. 750 million sold to date and still shipping.
1998	Motorola Cell Phone SRAM	A two-megabit SRAM for cell phones that uses only 1/50 of a watt of power. 83 million transistors.
1999	4-Megabit Dual Port RAM	A communications memory used in cell phone basestations to move data at 6 gigabits per second. 53 million transistors.
2000	16-Megabit SRAM	The transistors on these SRAMs are manufactured at a cost of only 3 microcents each. 107 million transistors.
2001	POSIC	P acket O ver S ONET IC . A telephone system chip carrying traffic at 2.48 gigabits on SONET, the S ynchronous O ptical NET work.
2002	72-Megabit SRAM	This SRAM memory can store five 1,000-page books in .001 seconds. First wine ever with one billion transistors on the crest!
2003 DDR	Radon 2008 RELEASE	“Radon” is a Programmable System on Chip (PSoC™) used for sensing buttons and touch screens on portable electronic devices.
2003 DV	Neutron 2008 RELEASE	“Neutron” is a PSoC chip used for the touch sensitive “Scroll Wheel” interfaces on hundreds of millions of MP3 players.

NEW VINEYARD: DOMAINE VALETA

Domaine Valeta at Clos de la Tech

Our second vineyard, Domaine Valeta, resides at the 2,300-foot crest of the Santa Cruz mountains, on the next mountain top to the west of the fabled Ridge Montebello vineyard. In sunny California, the altitude provides the cooler weather in which Pinot Noir vines thrive.

Every vineyard—particularly those planted with the finicky Pinot Noir grape—has to fight nature virtually every year to make great wine. In Burgundy, they fight for full ripeness—for higher sugar content, deeper color and lower acidity. In most parts of California, it’s the opposite. We fight to keep our Pinot Noir from getting too ripe too quickly. We strive to prevent the sugar content in the grapes from accumulating to 25% by weight, creating a wine with 15% alcohol. Nature is at its worst in California when grapes become “sugar ripe,” forcing harvest, but still having harsh unripe tannins and flavors.

Valeta and I recently presented an invited paper on our Domaine Lois Louise vineyard (a wine we expect to offer to you next year), at the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Enology and Viticulture in Portland, Oregon. The internationally attended meeting focused solely on Burgundy and New World Pinot Noir. A climatologist discussed the effect of global warming on Pinot Noir vineyards. His paper showed that to thrive, Pinot Noir must be grown within an average annual temperature range of only 3.6°F. Pinot Noir is thus the most climate-sensitive of all the vines that produce great wines. Our DDR vineyard in Woodside is slightly too warm. Its 400-foot elevation in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains is the saving grace that provides the cooler weather needed to produce exceptional wines. Nonetheless, we have to fight rapid sugar accumulation with aggressive pruning that leaves our vines only waste-high, similar to the tiny vines in Burgundy.

At 2,300 feet, nature gives Domaine Valeta one to two extra weeks of “hang time” before harvest to ripen the fruit optimally without excess sugar accumulation. The 2003Domaine Valeta is a big wine—bigger than the wine from our DDR vineyard—not only for that reason, but also because young vines tend to produce bigger and more tannic wines before they settle down after the fourth or fifth vintage.

The tasting notes for the 2003Domain Valeta are given below.

Tasting Notes for Domaine Valeta

The 2003 Domaine Valeta bouquet starts with a light floral perfume, followed by red fruit and a minty herbal undertone. The first tasting sensation is of slight astringency, followed by a very big, mouth-filling, “sweet” (non-sugar) tannin body and red fruit flavor. The wine is fully drinkable now but will easily age for a decade. It should be opened one hour before serving. The vineyard has not yet produced the explosive bouquet or refined tannin of our flagship DDR vineyard and will be priced accordingly until it does.

FLAGSHIP VINEYARD: DOMAINE DU DOCTEUR RODGERS

Crushing grapes at Clos de la Tech The photograph shows foot crushing at the DDR vineyard in 1997. Note the small grape clusters weighing 80 grams, or just 2.8 ounces each. Note also that the berries are large (one gram or 0.035 ounces) and uniform in size. The average yield for early harvests at our DDR vineyard has been 2.1 tons per acre, providing 125 cases of wine.

SMALL GRAPES IN 2003

Small Grapes at the winery of Clos de la Tech After a study in 2002, we converted to the pruning method of “tipping” to produce smaller berries. Smaller berries produce darker, more perfumed wines. The picture to the right shows a typical grape cluster in 2003. Note the non-uniform size of the berries and the greater number of grapes per cluster—about 150 berries, each weighing only 0.76 grams. The yield in 2003 was only 1.65 tons per acre (87 cases).

The low yield and concentration of the 2003Domaine du Docteur Rodgers is due not only to tipping, but also to an experimental error. In 2002 we read a paper in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture on the pruning practice of tipping.

Vine clipping at Clos de la Tech

As shown in the picture on the above, in tipping, the tendril and top two small leaves on each cane are manually pinched off after just 10% of the grape flowers have bloomed. With the tips removed, the plant abruptly dumps a spurt of carbohydrate energy into the flowering grape clusters. A typical grape cluster at DDR has 300 flowers. With tipping, about 50% of the 300 delicate flowers in each cluster turn into grapes, rather than the typical 25% yield. Smaller berries make better Pinot Noir by producing a higher skin-to-pulp ratio. The skins contain all the grape’s color (anthocyanin compounds) and the smoothest of the four tannin types (epigallocatechin), as well as important flavor and bouquet compounds. By diverting the vines’ energy from growing green tips to flowering, the number of flowers that successfully turned into berries increased from 80 berries per cluster to 150 berries per cluster in our 2002 experiment. We tipped the whole vineyard in 2003.

That’s when we miscalculated. We expected that the 150 berries per cluster would also weigh about one gram each. To prevent an undesired yield increase, we removed all but nine clusters per vine, down from our usual 15 clusters per vine to keep the wine’s concentration. However, the grapes ended up weighing only 0.76 grams each, due to crowding in the cluster and a reduced number of seeds per grape (that’s also good, since the most astringent and bitter tannin, epicatechin gallate, resides only in seeds). The net result of our new pruning method, plus our miscalculation, was an unexpected low yield of 87 cases from our one-acre vineyard—and a very big wine. Here are the tasting notes:

Tasting Notes for Domaine du Docteur Rodgers

The 2003Domaine du Docteur Rodgers is the most perfumed wine we’ve ever made. The primary floral perfume bouquet is followed by a nuance of cloves and tropical fruit. The body is mouth-filling and very silky, followed by a slight astringency in the finish that gives a pleasant grip to the wine. The flavor is primarily that of bright red fruit. The 2003 vintageis more fruit-forward and California-style than the 2002, which was more Burgundian in nature, due to the cooler growing season.

After harvest, we had the time on weekends to read almost all of the studies on tipping. It seems that our “new” pruning process was first published by Prof. Winkler of the U.C. Davis School of Enology and Viticulture in 1926! Every vintage, starting with the 2003, is now tipped. It’s an expensive process, but it results in a darker, more perfumed wine.