What a revelation for me to tour and taste through Skyline Ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains yesterday!

So much of California wine is known for its manicured character. But up on the ridge that looks down to the east on Silicon Valley and to the west out to the Pacific Ocean (about 15 miles away), the landscape is wild and untamed.

It blew me away to find such robust mountain viticulture here. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting.

It was also really interesting to see the San Andreas fault here and learn how the collision of the tectonic plates brought ancient marine bed to the surface.

I’m spending the next few days between Sonoma and Napa working on a new project that I am really exited about. It’s a little too early to reveal it yet but stay tuned.

Thanks to everyone who tasted with me and showed me around yesterday. There is a soulfulness to the place and the people here and it definitely comes through in the wines.

That’s all I have time for today. Now it’s time to hit the road again, taste, and tread through some more vineyards…

Last week, over the course of 24 hours on the ground in Southern California (my dolce natio loco), it felt like I spanned the extremes of viticulture there.

On Tuesday evening, I tasted some of the extraordinary Santa Barbara-grown wines of Scott Sampler, a show business veteran who has been buying and bottling fruit since the 2012 vintage there under the Central Coast Group Project label.

On Wednesday afternoon, I toured vineyards in Valley Center (not far from where I grew up in San Diego) with winemaker and grape grower Chris Broomell whose family has been farming there for five generations.

Chris’ family started growing grapes, he said, in the era after the Second World War when ongoing drought made viticulture more lucrative.

Scott abandoned a robust career in entertainment to become a full-time winemaker.

Chris vinifies delicious, moreish, and highly affordable monovarietal wines for his family’s Triple B Ranches winery. I especially loved his gorgeous Vermentino.

Scott employs extended maceration times to make brilliant, jaw-droppingly beautiful expressions of Rhône Valley grape varieties that cost more than I can afford and sell out as soon as he releases them. I was blown away by his 2013 Grenache, Mourvèdre, and Syrah blend below and its ballerino’s balance despite its muscular alcohol.

Meeting and tasting with both winemakers was an exhilarating and eye-opening experience for me. In part because they each represent distinct and powerful voices in the new wave of California winemaking and in part because they share a vision of transparency in winemaking. And by transparency, I mean clarity and sincerity of fruit in their wines.

Chris and I talked a lot about the historic disconnect between California grape growers and winemakers. California is a great place to grow fine wine grapes, he explained (and we all know this to be true), but until the current generation, Californian winemakers have focused more on their work in the cellar than in the vineyards. When he returned from a year working in vineyards and wineries in Australia early on in his career, he said, he was nonplussed by the way California winemakers interpreted the fruit delivered to their cellar doors by local farmers.

Similarly, Scott seems to belong to a growing number of California winemakers who see their role as custodians or guardians of their fruit. He works with growers who deliver superb grapes to his cellar door and like Renaissance master Pietro Bembo meticulously transcribing the idiograph Italian poems of Petrarch, he appears (at least to me) more as a protector and defender of the berries than their interpreter or manipulator.

Both winemakers have looked abroad for inspiration. And both are making delicious and — in my view — thought-provoking wines, both for their historical perspective and their wholesome deliciousness.

And both of them have me thinking big thoughts. I’ll have a lot more California on my mind this month and the months to follow. Thanks fo reading and stay tuned…

From the department of “nice work if you can get it”…

Above: my friend and client Tony Vallone’s foie gras torchon with “pear cracklings,” crispy pear skins.

Last night found me a guest of my friend and client Tony Vallone at his flagship Tony’s for a wine dinner featuring the wines of Morlet Family Vineyards.

After reading up his California estate, I was impressed by the glowing praise and the across-the-board astronomic scores the wines have received from all sides of the wine writing establishment.

Robert Parker, Jr. has called him a “genius.” Honestly, that doesn’t really score a lot of points with me personally. But then when I saw that Antonio Galloni also wrote about Luc’s wines with superlatives like “off the charts” and scores to match, I began to inuit that Morlet has resonated broadly with the California wine intelligentsia.

I’d tasted a few of Luc Morlet’s wines previously at Tony’s but I had never tasted his top wines and I was very curious meet Luc and taste with him.

Above: Luc’s Sonoma Coast Chardonnay Ma Douce illustrated his deft hand at barrel fermentation and barrel aging. He talked at length about the importance of not filtering. This isn’t a wine that I can afford but I thought it was gorgeous and enjoyed it immensely. Parker called a previous vintage “staggering.”

Luc, who was born and raised in Champagne, where his family continues to produce barrel-fermented wines, didn’t seem keen to talk about the fact that he is one of the premier cooperage brokers in California today. Understandably, he wanted to keep the focus on his wines and he wanted to connect with the well-heeled crowd that gathers at Tony’s for dinners like this.

But it’s abundantly clear that his experience in Europe and his expertise in cooperage has set a high new bar for the use of barriques in California, where, historically, winemakers have often favored oakiness in their wines.

Luc’s Sonoma Chardonnay Ma Douce and his Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir Côteaux Nobles were both fantastic. And they perfectly illustrated how restrained, thoughtful use of oak can deliver wonderful balance and extreme elegance. I liked the wines a lot.

(Luc will be speaking about cooperage and pouring barrel samples today at the Houston Sommelier Association, btw. It should be a fascinating tasting and he’s a great speaker.)

Above: Tony and his chef Kate McLean are geeked about the Crescent Island duck they’ve been serving at the restaurant. I loved its balance of gentle fattiness and earthy flavor. It was a great pairing for Luc’s Knights Valley Cabernet Sauvignon Mon Chevalier.

In the short time I got to speak with Luc intimately, he was eager to talk to me about the Knights Valley AVA where he is growing Cabernet Sauvignon.

It lies in between Napa and Sonoma and the community there has resisted heavy investment in viticulture.

But there are a few growers who have planted to vine there and Luc is one of them.

It’s on the west side of Mt. Saint Helena, he explained, the highest peak in the area, and so it has the ideal elevation and temperature variation for the cultivation of Bordeaux grapes.

I liked the Knights Valley Cabernet Sauvignon Mon Chevalier a lot but I think the wine will benefit from more bottle aging. Here the oak was evident and not yet entirely integrated into the wine, which is from Luc’s 2011 harvest. I hope I’ll have a chance to revisit it in a few years: with great acidity and earnest, classic Cabernet Sauvignon flavors, there’s no doubt this wine will represent yet another great effort from Luc’s cellar.

As he talked to me about Knights Valley, I became more and more convinced that Luc and his approach to winemaking could very well be the future of high-end wine in California.

Whether he’s raising wine in a little known appellation tucked between Napa and Sonoma or whether he’s illustrating the expert application of cask fermentation and aging, he seems always to be one step ahead of his contemporaries.

As the “new California” has begun to reshape the viticultural landscape there, Luc and his “old world” sensibilities align nearly seamlessly with the tastes of current-generation collectors and winemakers.

Very interesting wines. I just wish I could afford them!

Thanks to everyone who came out to my Bele Casel tastings in California! And special thanks to Jill at DomaineLA in Los Angeles and Jayne and Jon at Jaynes in San Diego for hosting.

Prosecco Colfòndo is always a great excuse to get together and reconnect. It was super fun to taste with you.

Of course, I tasted a lot of wines while out in California. Here are some of the highlights.

The 1998 Praesidium Montepulciano d’Abruzzo was stunning, fresh and bright in the glass with evolved tannin. So glad to see these compelling wines in California.

It was also great to see that Carolina Gatti’s Prosecco Col Fondo is now available in my home state. There are now a handful of Col Fondo wines in the U.S. and the number continues to grow. Hers fall on the crunchier side of the category and I love them (she’s also the sweetest lady and very active on social media).

Continue reading →

Wax on, wax off. Yes, Robert Kamen (above) is the dude who wrote the iconic line. He’s also written numerous screenplays that have been made into Hollywood blockbusters.

Yawn. That’s the least interesting part of the story.

In my view of the world, what’s really fascinating about Robert is that he inadvertently and unwittingly financed California’s biodyanmic movement.

Robert comes to Texas every year to speak a wine dinner at the swank restaurant Tony’s in Houston, owned by my friend and client Tony Vallone.

He’ll be there next week, doing his song and dance for the petroleum crowd, but I’ll be in Italy doing a job for a client of mine (the event is already sold-out btw).

So I called him the other day and asked him about how, why, and when he decided to hire Phil Coturri — the father of California’s biodynamic movement — and if he had intended to play the role of the movement’s financier.

The story’s been told many times. Back in 1980, Robert sold his first screenplay and went up to Sonoma to party in celebration. A few weeks later, using the money from the script, he purchased the property that would ultimately become his Kamen Estate, now famous for its “mountain Cabernet” and a line of wines that commands respect among wine professionals who might otherwise write off yet another Northern Californian wine produced by a “Hollywood guy.”

But don’t use the binomial “Hollywood guy” around Robert. It really gets under his skin.

“Look at the wineries owned by ‘Hollywood guys,'” he said to me, obviously ticked off. “They planted vineyards. I planted a farm.”

“We don’t just grow grapes here. Six months of the year, Phil grows grapes. The other six months of the year, he grows cover crops.”

“When I hired Phil [in 1980],” said Robert, he wasn’t “thinking in terms of the future. I just didn’t want to do things that were deleterious to the property.”

At the time “Phil’s rap was so compelling. And it was just fortuitous because the organic movement was just picking up then.”

I asked if he saw himself as pioneer in organic and biodyanmic farming in the Northern California wine community.

Yes, he said, “but I’m not a proselytizer. I’m not a crusader.”

Today, he told me, the Kamen estate in Sonoma (replanted in 1996 after a fire destroyed the vineyards) is the model that Phil uses to show other grape growers who are interested in converting to organic and biodynamic farming.

His farm “was the laboratory” for the biodynamic movement. Today “it is the showcase,” said Robert.

So why, I asked, did he hire Phil in the first place?

“After I sold my first script and came up here, we partied all night long on the property” that he would buy a few weeks later.

“I wanted to meet the guy who grew the pot we smoked… because I wanted to buy more. It was that good. And that guy was Phil.”

I asked Robert if it was okay for me to post this information on my blog. He said, sure, go ahead.

I can’t post the words that he reserved for our president and the federal government’s attitude regarding the states’ legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana. But that’s another story.

And although it really has nothing to do with this story, I just have to share one last nugget.

When I asked Robert where Phil learned to grow grapes, here’s what he said.

“Phil’s a farmer — an Italian farmer. In 1974, he went to work his first harvest at Mayacamus. And the guy who taught him was named Joe Miami. I’m not making that up.”

When a Hollywood New York screenwriter tells you that he’s not making shit up, you KNOW it has to be true.