While much of Bordeaux is relatively flat, the steep hillside of Moraga Canyon is reminiscent of the best vineyards in Côte Rôtie or Chianti. In 1979, Jones succumbed to the temptation to plant grapes and eventually found that the lower-elevation canyon gravels were better suited to Sauvignon Blanc than to Cabernet Sauvignon. Early vintages were trucked up to Carneros and vinified by Tony Soter, the presiding genius of Etude (since replaced by Scott Rich). From the beginning, Jones was determined to make a world-class wine. “We knew we couldn’t compete on price,” he says. “We had to compete on quality. But some of the best wines in the world are made in small quantities. Look at Romanée-Conti, which is 4.3 acres.”
His early vintages were praised by Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker, and Moraga became one of the first California wines featured on the list of Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris. The former Ducasse sommelier Stéphane Colling calls Moraga his favorite California label. “The wines have so much more depth and character than most California wines,” he says. “For me the white is incredibly refreshing, and the red is like a cross between Latour and Margaux.” And they age well, like Bordeaux: The oldest I’ve tasted, from the early nineties, are wonderfully complex.
Despite his initial success, Jones knew that to get the best out of his grapes, he needed an on-site winery. Before he approached local authorities, he and his wife canvassed some two hundred neighbors to explain their plan. Construction was completed just in time for the 2005 harvest, when Moraga became the first commercial winery to be bonded in the city of Los Angeles since Prohibition.
As ambitious as he is about the quality of his wines, Jones is surprisingly demure about publicizing them, in part because he sells all he can make (about seven hundred cases of the red, even fewer of the white) to a loyal mailing-list clientele and a few select restaurants. “We try to keep a low profile,” he says. When I showed up with Colling in 2006, Jones was taken aback when he learned I was a journalist and tried to discourage me from writing about the place. But after seeing the property, and tasting the 2003 red and the 2005 white, I felt compelled to share the secret. The red reminded me in some ways of a Margaux, the latter of a fine white Graves. But in the end, as with all great wines, it is the singularity of Moraga—the voice of the land, unlikely as it might seem—that makes the story so compelling.
Swashbuckling Dandy: Talbott
You get the sense that Robb Talbott has always been a bit of a maverick, or perhaps “eccentric” is the right word. By the time he arrived at Colorado College, he’d already lost most of his hair, and the ascots and sport jackets he favored must have further distinguished him from his contemporaries. While his father had been a major in the air force, he registered as a conscientious objector; his federal court appeal succeeded just two weeks before he would have been sent to prison. Talbott’s notion that great wine could be produced in Monterey County seemed pretty quixotic back in 1982, when he first planted Chardonnay vines from Corton-Charlemagne on the steep hillside where he was living in a log cabin of his own design. By now, Talbott’s Chardonnays are among California’s signature success stories.
When Robb was just two years old, his parents moved to Carmel to start a luxury tie company; his mother sewed the ties, and his father drove the length of California selling them from his station wagon. Young Robb accompanied them on silk-buying trips to Europe, during which the family frequently visited the vineyards of France and Italy. He remembers tasting his first Burgundy at the age of twelve. Monterey County at that time was known for the vegetables that grew in the fertile Salinas Valley. In the seventies grapes were planted, but they were inevitably sold in bulk to big producers from other areas.
The Talbott family founded their eponymous winery in 1982 with a much loftier ambition: to make wines comparable to those they’d fallen in love with in Burgundy. In 1985, while waiting for the vines at their Diamond T Ranch to mature, they bought grapes from the nearby Sleepy Hollow Vineyard, which had been planted in 1971 by a group of investors looking to cash in on the boom. Sleepy Hollow was planted on the Santa Lucia Highlands on steep benchland above the valley floor. Hillside land was much cheaper than the valley floor, and yet it soon became clear that the grapes it produced were superior to their low-lying neighbors’. (No big surprise to students of European viticulture, such as the Talbotts.)
Over the next few years, the Chardonnays fashioned by the winemaker Sam Balderas under the Talbott label became justly celebrated for their combination of intense tropical fruit and Burgundian minerality. I remember being knocked out by the first Talbott I encountered, in the late eighties, and the critics were equally impressed. Other producers were buying Sleepy Hollow grapes, but Talbott’s were the standouts, which might be why the investors, when they decided to sell in 1994, offered Robb the first crack at their 450-acre vineyard. “I only had forty-eight hours to make up my mind,” he says. “A major buyer was waiting in the wings.” Standing at the lower edge of the property over a decade later, looking up at the rows of vines climbing up to the rugged peaks of the Santa Lucia Range above him, Talbott still clearly recalls the exhilaration and terror of that moment.
He comes across as a man of contradictions, his thick, neatly trimmed beard providing a stark contrast to his shining pate, his solid physique belying a refinement of manner. He’s a kind of swashbuckling dandy, a motorcycle-racing aesthete. It’s difficult to resist the temptation to compare the wines to their godfather: I can’t help noting their combination of power and finesse is fairly seamless. Perhaps we should attribute that to the vineyard itself, its gravelly loam soil, its southeast-facing aspect soaking up the morning sun, dueling against the chilly influence of Monterey Bay to the west. In the end, who the hell knows?
While the Talbott Sleepy Hollow Chardonnay is undoubtedly Talbott’s signature wine, I sometimes find myself preferring its Diamond T Ranch bottling from the original hillside vineyard planted by Robb himself in 1982. Only twenty-two acres on a very steep slope, it usually yields less than a ton of grapes per acre, but that hard-earned juice makes some intense Chardonnay.
The Talbott empire includes several second labels, including Logan, named for Robb’s son, which produces both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the Sleepy Hollow Vineyard. This Chard is more forward and easygoing than the Talbott Sleepy Hollow; the Pinot is often a very good value, although it doesn’t have the potency of the small-production Diamond T Pinot Noir, nor of some of the neighboring Santa Lucia Highlands cult Pinots like those from Pisoni Vineyards. The lower-priced Kali Hart label is named for Talbott’s daughter and uses grapes for its Chards and Pinots from the River Road Vineyards adjacent to Sleepy Hollow. The proliferation of names is confusing, but their labels share the same typography, the same stripped-down graphic design and coat of arms.
Other Santa Lucia Highlands producers worth seeking out include Mer Soleil, the Chardonnay estate of the Caymus producer Chuck Wagner. For bold Santa Lucia Pinots check out Morgan, Pisoni, and Roar. In the early eighties, no one believed that wines like these could come from a place best known for broccoli and lettuce, with the possible exception of the Talbott family.
Better Late Than Never: Ridge
Monte Bello is the California Cabernet I admire above all others.
—Jancis Robinson
I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out why it took me so long to get around to writing about Ridge, famous for its pioneering Zinfandels and for Monte Bello, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest Cabernets. Honestly, I think it’s because ten or fifteen years ago my tastes ran a little more to flash and flesh. Like everyone else, I was impressed with the big ripe fruit bombs that literally exploded in your mouth—the super-concentrated cult wines that first appeared in the nineties, about the same time as Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The Ridge Zins of the nineties were more subtle than the new hypertrophied, high-octane versions, and the Monte Bello certainly wasn’t made for instant gratification, taking years and even decades to really r
eveal its genius.
If the story of Ridge is hardly a new one, it’s worth retelling every few years. In 2006, at the thirtieth-anniversary restaging of the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting at which California wines bested some of the top French growths, judges on two continents picked the 1971 Ridge Monte Bello as the top red. (In 1976 it had placed fifth.) In a competition for new vintages at the same event, the 2000 Monte Bello also placed first. Shortly thereafter, Paul Draper, Ridge’s longtime winemaker and presiding genius, quietly turned seventy and won the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award for wine making.
To find Ridge, you drive south from San Francisco toward San Jose and the congested sprawl of Silicon Valley, then turn right toward the ocean. Civilization has almost disappeared by the time you turn right on Monte Bello Road, a series of mad switchbacks that climb some two thousand feet in less than five miles. At this point you are a long way south of Napa and Sonoma. By the time you reach the lower vineyards of Monte Bello, you’re wondering what kind of madman, or visionary, thought of planting grapes way the hell up here over a hundred years ago. In fact, several did, though it was a San Francisco physician named Oseo Perrone who planted and named the Monte Bello vineyard in the eighteen eighties. It has to be one of the most dramatically scenic vineyards on the planet, spilling down a wooded limestone ridge at the very edge of the San Andreas Fault, high above the Pacific and the fog line.
In 1959, four Stanford scientists bought the property as a retreat and made wine for their own consumption from the surviving vineyards. By 1969, seven years after their first commercial release, the original partners decided they needed a full-time winemaker and turned to the thirty-three-year-old Paul Draper, a Stanford grad who’d been making wine in Chile as a Peace Corps volunteer. (Don’t ask.) Although he grew up on a farm in Illinois, by the time he arrived at Ridge, Draper was a multilingual epicurean. He’d attended Choate, the Connecticut prep school, before moving on to Stanford, where he majored in philosophy. After graduating, he joined the army and had the good fortune to be sent to Italy, where he spent all of his leaves touring the countryside on a motorcycle and becoming increasingly interested in food and wine. After he left the army, he went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. Not exactly a standard winemaker’s résumé, and one can’t help but wonder why the founders of Ridge chose him, but their judgment has been more than vindicated. He’s become a dean of American wine making without sacrificing his broad portfolio of intellectual interests, a sophisticate who retains a youthful enthusiasm and curiosity and seems way more interested in The New York Review of Books than Wine Spectator.
While the north-coast California wine pioneers looked to UC Davis and high technology to reinvent the California wine-making tradition broken by Prohibition, Draper, who’d spent time in Bordeaux, was interested in traditional artisanal techniques, like fermenting with the natural yeasts found on the grape skins and avoiding flavor-stripping filtration in order to express the special character of the Monte Bello vineyard—what the French call terroir. The distance from the more established wine regions north of San Francisco probably helped to foster an independent vision. Forty years later, his peers in Napa and elsewhere have pretty much come around to his way of thinking. His trademark goatee, that Beat-era accessory, likewise made a comeback in recent years. Indeed, Eric Baugher, his wine-making colleague at Ridge, has one that’s almost identical.
Draper’s ambition for Monte Bello, he’s often announced, was to make one of the greatest red wines in the world—in more emphatic moments he says the greatest—and it still is. On the basis of a 1984 and a 1991 tasted at the winery, I’ve concluded that he’s succeeded. But along the way he and his partners realized this goal required cash flow, and they started making Zinfandel from old vines down the road and eventually, all over the state. Ridge almost single-handedly rehabilitated the reputation of that grape, creating spicy, accessible reds. While some of the early bottlings were blockbusters, the prevailing house style aims for balance over power, which has sometimes resulted in Ridge’s getting overshadowed in the numbers game of wine scores.
Though Draper remains the boss—the house palate, as it were—he runs a fairly democratic operation; I sat in on a blending committee session for the 2006 Geyserville, one of their benchmark Zinfandels, where Draper presided over a lively debate about the merits of different vineyard lots and their worthiness to be included in the final blend. One lot Draper judged to be a little too hot, that is, overly alcoholic. “With Zin you want to be in the 14 to 15 percent alcohol range,” he says, even though many of his peers are deliberately crafting fire-breathing dragons with as much as 17 percent alcohol.
His ideal Monte Bello, Draper says, is around 13 percent, a level far lower than today’s average in Napa, if slightly higher than the classic pre-1982 Bordeaux. And in this quest he is aided by his relatively cool, high-altitude site. “I’m not trying to make a Bordeaux here,” he says, although Monte Bello, like Latour and other top Bordeaux, takes years to reveal its greatness, which might be yet another reason he loves Zinfandel. Although they can last for decades—the 1985 Lytton Springs, tasted in 2010, was like a terrific twenty-five-year-old St. Émilion—these reds provide something close to instant gratification. The 2009 Lytton Springs was popping on its release in August 2011.
The 2003 Ridge Geyserville was the red wine I chose for my wedding dinner in 2006—and I doubt the judges of the Judgment of Paris rematch thought any longer or harder than I did before making a decision.
Old World Head, New World Body:
The Reds of Priorat
I’ll never forget my first encounter with 1991 Clos Erasmus, which was pressed on me by the restaurant Daniel’s sommelier Jean-Luc Le Dû in 1996. It was a curious and wonderful hippogriff of a wine with, it seemed to me, a New World body and an Old World head—a sort of thinking man’s fruit bomb with lots of structure and a deep mineral undertone. It was a big wine with nuances. The next day I tried—to no avail—to track down a case or five. These wines were, and are, made in minuscule quantities; the hills are steep, the soils are poor and rocky, and the vines are stingy.
Even today the area feels isolated, though it’s just ninety miles from Barcelona, the landscape primitive and almost lunar. In the twelfth century Carthusian monks planted the first grapes here, but by the middle of the last century many of these hard-to-work vineyards had been abandoned. Stately, plump René Barbier Sr., descendant of a wine-making family from France’s Rhône Valley, was the guiding spirit for a band of five friends who resurrected the old terraced vineyards, planted new vines, and released their first wines in 1989. These five shared the same primitive winery until 1993. Within a few years of the first release, Priorat had become a destination for wine wonks (Gratallops, with a population of 224, now has at least five serious restaurants), and those five wines—Clos Mogador, Clos Martinet, Clos de l’Obac, Clos Erasmus, and L’Ermita—had become as sought after as almost any Grand Cru Burgundy or first-growth Bordeaux.
The lanky and garrulous Carles Pastrana was a childhood friend of Barbier’s in the seaside town of Tarragona. Pastrana followed Barbier into these hills and made the first vintage of Clos de l’Obac in consultation with his friend. Pastrana waxes lyrical when he speaks of those early days, of restoring tumbledown Romanera terraces by day and talking wine and poetry into the night. “When you’re young,” he says, “you have time to lose. Your capital is your time.” They resuscitated the old Grenache and Carignan vineyards—which are still, especially the former, the heart and soul of the best Priorats—and planted French varietals like Syrah and Cabernet. They quoted Ortega y Gasset (“I am myself and my circumstances”). The harsh landscape and the isolation made them dependent on each other. This idyllic era culminated in the spring of 1992 when the French publisher Gault Millau touted Clos Mogador and Clos de l’Obac in a guidebook to the Catalonia area for the Barcelona Olympics, giving both wines 18 points out of 20. Robert Parker was close behind. Perhaps it’s a mark of t
he success of their joint venture that Barbier and Pastrana no longer speak, although their wineries are literally next door to each other.
Alvaro Palacios, the fifth of nine brothers from a wine-making family in Rioja, was the last of the founding five to buy in. It wasn’t until 1993 that he released what is arguably the most celebrated Priorat. Palacios’s L’Ermita is made from centenarian Grenache vines in an insanely steep northeastern-facing amphitheater, which if it were a ski slope would be a Double Black Diamond. (Northeast exposure is ideal, southern exposure being apparently too much of a good thing in this torrid area.)
Scruffily good-looking and laid-back, René Barbier Jr. and his wife, Sara Pérez, both in their thirties, look as if they might be the proprietors of a surf shop in Laguna or a record store in Williamsburg, though in fact they are wine-world aristocrats, heirs to an unlikely success story. As he shows me around the cellars of Clos Mogador, René junior explains that he spent a good part of his youth living with “my hippie parents” in a trailer here near the tiny hilltop town of Gratallops while his father pursued his quixotic dream of reclaiming the moribund wine-making traditions of this rugged backwater of Catalonia.
What makes Priorat special, most local winemakers believe, is the soft blue slate and schist that underlie the vineyards. Though the degree to which decomposed minerals are absorbed by roots is a matter of some dispute, most experienced tasters would agree that the best Priorats, like the best Mosel Rieslings, exhibit a stony character that sets them apart. An earlier generation believed that the source of Priorat’s distinction was divine; in the twelfth century a local man reported seeing angels carrying grapes up a stairway to heaven, after which a Carthusian monastery was established here. Priorat’s wines enjoyed increasing renown until phylloxera wiped out the vineyards at the end of the nineteenth century. When Barbier and friends arrived in the eighties, the growers that remained sold their grapes to village cooperatives that produced inconsistent and often indifferent wine.