Day 3 in Wine Country: From Spring Mountain back down the hill

The tasting trailer

After a picnic lunch at Smith-Madrone, we drove up the hill to the Behrens Family winery. Although Spring Mountain is a mom-and-pop place, Behrens does have a professionally landscaped garden, a beautiful view, and a dedicated tasting room. Well, tasting trailer. Their director of marketing is Robin Cooper, and she pours the wines as she unfolds the story of the Behrens Family Winery. The family history is complicated, and at times almost operatic. One confronts a bewildering array of names, both because several wineries operate off of the property, and because the winery itself changed names more than once. So, one might drink an Erna Schein, a Behrens and Hitchcock, or something with the word Drinkward in it and be drinking one of the Behrens wines.

OK then.

I chose to visit Behrens for two reasons. First, it was a small family winery, which appeals because they are not constrained by having to produce 10,000 cases of $20 pinot noir for the mass market. The small wineries can produce more distinctive wines. Second, the winery's reputation was for risk taking. They produced "rich" and "powerful" wines. This is usually a danger sign, signalling fruit bombs, but the welter of reviews online suggested that they made interesting wine. It is one thing to appreciate the hand-crafted elegance of Smith-Madrone; another, however, to be excited by experiment. My taste in most everything is driven by a terrible ambivalence. I lean conservatively towards tradition in my music, food, art, and wine tastes. But I am also attracted to the avant garde. The edge. Throw the rules to the wind. Take risks. Fail. This yin-yang between tradition and experiment informs an aethetic dialectic that keeps me confused about what really is beautiful. Or even just good.

Behrens was busy when we arrived. There were two different wineries running tastings (Behrens and some other one that operates on the space). But I should use busy in a qualified way--this was not the tasting room at Kendell-Jackson, with a long stretch of bar jammed with tourists just off the bus and "intimate tours" conducted every thirty minutes by some schlep. Or at least this is what I presume Kendell-Jackson's tasting room would look like--I've never been. Behrens-busy just meant that there was a terrace pouring going on and one in the trailer. We sat with a couple from Tennessee under the canopy and chatted about what we like about wine.

the gardens at Behrens

Robin (whom I recognized from her picture on the website), ushered the prior guests out of the trailer and told us she'd be with us shortly. I passed the time photographing the gardens. The midday heat was upon us, and the thermometer was quickly approaching the mid-nineties. This was a forty plus point swing from the morning, and I was beginning to regret my decision to forgo my fedora. So when Robin ushered us into the air-conditioned trailer, I suddenly felt sorry for the poor folks having their tasting on the terrace.

Robin walked us through a history of the winery that unfolded with each new wine. Her presentation was well scripted--clever and informative. This was someone who loved the wines she poured, and whose affection for the winemakers was genuine. It lent itself to a nice conversation in the trailer as we enjoyed pour after pour. We learned along the way that the husband-and-wife team that ran the winery had originally owned a restaurant, had started this as a hobby, and that they had been able to turn their attention full time to winemaking after Robert Parker had announced that Behrens' wines were "the next big thing."

Uh oh. Parker is the critic that everyone loves to hate. His famous 100 point scoring system and taste for big fruit favored the New World over the Old, the fruit-forward wine over the tanic-and-acid, and has prompted more than a few winemakers to urge more than a few grape farmers to delay the harvest, over-ripen their fruit, and otherwise make their wines bigger and bolder. Parker's oversized influence has, according to some wine writers, contributed to a "dumbing down" of wine by the creation of a mass palate. As more and more winemakers try to impress Parker, the argument goes, wine becomes standardized. It tastes more like every other wine and loses its sense of "terroir," or place.

I'm not sure I buy the argument. The development of a larger market for wine would necessarily include the production of large-scale, inexpensive quantities to satisfy its burgeoning middle, but that would only seem to multiply the niches of anti-Parkerites out there. I am investigating this phenomenon now, and will post on it later.

But I digress. If I rewind back to the trailer at Behrens, to Robin's announcement that Beherens wines were once (some ten years ago, I believe) christened by Robert Parker as "the next big thing," I can report that I felt the mental equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. I detest jammy wines, especially when they come advertised as claret. I associate Parker with jam, so now I was associating Beherens with it. And this doubtlessly colored the rest of my tasting. Association is a powerful phenomenon, and I could not get over the fact that the fruit was now just a little too big. The alcohol a little too high. These were hot wines. Not quite jammy, but definitely big.

But then we tried the Cab Franc. This is a wine that I have never tasted properly. The grape usually finds itself rounding out a Bordeaux in my glass, rather than standing alone, so I didn't know what to expect. And it tasted ... vegetal to me. Almost stewed. But these are words typically used to describe Cabernet Sauvignon grapes that have soaked up too much water and nutrients on the valley floor. But if a Cab Franc is supposed to taste different, then, well, vegetal might not be the word to describe it. All of which is to say, I was tasting the wine expecting a Cabernet Sauvignon. Which is like tasting pork when you think your tasting steak and then complaining that the flavor is not rich enough.

By now I was confused and petulant. Each wine we tasted came from a different winemaker somehow associated with Behrens. The $100 Cab Franc reminded me of V8. I was losing patience even with the labels, which were small paintings and sported names like "The Road Les Traveled," a tribute apparently to Les Behrens's favorite poet, Robert Frost. Except with the bad pun. ("The Road Les Traveled.")

I honestly have no clue what this was.

I'm fairly certain that the marketing director was losing patience with us as well. The couple who shared our tasting was quite nice, but knew absolutely nothing about wine. The woman kept telling us how much she loved the stories, and it was clear after several wines that they were not going to buy anything. I didn't think we would either, but we ended up leaving with six bottles.

Which, I think, was fitting. The wines were creative. Feisty. Surprising. This was the experimental side of the wine world. Even if the mess of labels, absence of adequate branding and occasional lack of focus was annoying, it was still intriguing.

We made our way down Spring Mountain, hit Lava Vine, and then collapsed back in our room. We had a big night planned at a fancy Yountville eatery, but after drinking too much wine at Jolé while we ate our nightly helping of Padrones peppers, we decided to stick to Calistoga and put the car keys on the shelf.