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.

Day 3 in Wine Country: Smith-Madrone triumphant

Curly, the official winery greeter

Our third day in wine country began much the way the others had. The weather was almost sweater-worthy. The fog obscured the mountains around Calistoga. We pointed the car south on the St. Helena highway, picked up some picnic items in St. Helena, then took the right turn to head up a narrow, windy road to Spring Mountain. Our destination: Smith-Madrone. Finding the winery was a bit of a challenge, but the directions the winery provided us were helpful ("when in doubt, turn right!"). Smith-Madrone is a working winery with no tasting room, no dedicated pourers, and about as little pretension as one might imagine. We parked the car in what looked like a parking ... area and were greeted by an English setter (I think). He led us down the walk to the winery. Stu Smith, one of the two owners, was up on a ladder tripping the hedges. "That's Curly," he told us. "The official winery greeter." I knew it was Stu Smith because of his distinctive facial hair, a full beard and walrus mustache. He eyed me steadily from the ladder. "Are we expecting you?" he asked. Indeed you are, I replied. "Then Curly will take you around the way," he said. Then he went back to work. Curly was as good as his word. Stu's older brother Charles was in the winery, working when we pushed open the enormous sliding door and stepped inside. He turned and greeted us, and asked if we could wait a few minutes. We assured him it was no problem. "Let me pour you something," he said, and promptly poured a glass of Chardonnay for each of us. We walked out, past the holding tanks, and into the vineyards, which start literally right outside the winery's doors.

Hillside vineyards

The vineyards at Smith-Madrone sit on a steep slope. The mountain loam seems fertile enough, but the tough vines look dry and haggard. They practically scowl at you from the roots. The Smith brothers used drip irrigation to establish the vines but now dry farm the vineyard. So the roots dig deep into the mountainside in search of water and nutrients. If the Chardonnay in our hands was any indication, the minerality was apparent, as were subtle flavors past the usual Chardonnay tropical fruits. Here were wines of complex flavors and a round quality.

Charlie, meanwhile, had opened up the doors and called us back in. Curly trotted along after us. We talked for a few minutes, getting to know one another, before Stu came in for some reason or another. He talked briefly with Charlie, who introduced us all around. The Smith brothers were particularly keen to learn that my wife was from western Canada, as part of their clan was located out there. They all talked briefly about how beautiful Banff was. "Watch out for the elk during mating season," my wife said. "They have been known to go after cars." Stuart Smith was unimpressed. "Not if I have my gun," he remarked. If the boar's head on the wall was any indication, we had stumbled across an avid hunter. 

the tough mountain vines

Stu left to go back to work, and Charlie began pouring other wines. Smith-Madrone is famous for their Riesling, which may well be the best in North America. That, of course, is a loaded claim for which there will be no definitive proof, but even the great Steve Heimoff, whose affection for Sonoma County vineyards is no secret, pays homage to the Smith brothers' grapes. I loved the Riesling. It is a wonderful wine, pairable with spicy food, and good on a hot day when a sip or two brings memories of drinking from a mountain spring, with that hint of limestone especially in the back of the mouth. 

As if we needed any reminder that this was a working winery, or that it was the owner who was talking to us, Charlie kept having to take phone calls during our visit. They were always quite short, and it allowed me a chance to take photographs or pet Curly, who had taken up residence under the casks. We tasted the Cabernet and the new Cabernet reserve--Cook's Flat, which is only the fourth varietal that Smith-Madrone produces. It is also four times the price of their Cabernet. This is a wine made for collectors, not for drinkers. It was noticeably different from the Smith-Madrone cab, both by its elegance and range of flavors.  It carries the promise of ageability, if that is even a term. I am obviously out of my depth here.

A barrel in the storage room

"I don't like to describe a wine before you taste it," explained Charlie, apropos of nothing in particular. But it was thrilling to taste a wine that didn't have a paragraph of praise written by the winemaker instructing the taster to find "kiwi, strawberry, and hints of passion fruit" followed by a palate of granite and a "touch" of asphalt. It reminded me of how poor my palate really is, but it also allowed me to explore and expand it. What struck me immediately and has stuck with me ever since my first taste of their wines was just how elegant and, well, European, they tasted. Charlie and Stu prefer balanced wines, not the heavy fruit bombs lobbed into the market by the unthinking producers searching for strong Robert Parker reviews. I got the distinct sense that the Smith brothers make the wine that they want to make. Reviewers be damned.

Curly in the vines. Chewing on a rock.

We shook hands at the end of the tour. Although another group was waiting, he let us hang around to talk about our respective childhoods and, of all things, the Civil War. He wrote down a few of my book recommendations. We said our goodbyes. Charlie told us both to come back to the winery if we were ever back out in Napa Valley.

All of which sounded quite good.  We walked up the hill to the winery's picnic spot. Curly dutifully trotted after us. As I trained my camera lens on vines and olive trees and circling red-tail hawks, I couldn't help but feel like I'd seen something special. As Stu said to us, "once you've seen the top of Spring Mountain, nothing else compares." It was definitely a hidden part of Napa. Perhaps not too hidden, but away from the investment bankers and oilmen who prowled the tasting rooms looking for $1000 Cabernets to show off and the half-in-the-bag bridal parties coasting the wineries in slender sundresses before the big send off. It was quiet up here. And the wine was ... beautiful.

The view from Spring Mountain

Spring Mountain invoked for me memories of growing up in the cattle country of southern Arizona. The Smith Brothers could easily have been ranchers and the community of Sonoita back in the 1970s probably bore a lot of resemblance to Napa, at least in terms of the characters it attracted.  But the economic dynamics were worlds apart. Cattle take more resources than grapes, and that industry was doomed for the small producers, at least in the water-parched desert where 15,000 acres was needed to run 500 head of cattle. When the federal government contemplated tripling grazing fees in the 1980s, the last of the small ranchers headed out, and ranches became land-investment properties for the über-wealthy. Corporatization has also taken Napa and Sonoma. But small producers still have a niche to fill, so we still get to enjoy Smith-Madrone wines. And we are better for it.

Fertilized

Simple record of fertilization. 2 gallons on tomatoes and peppers.

Wine Country 2013: up and down the Silverado Trail

We arrived Thursday, late-afternoon, and fought the vicious San Francisco traffic out of the bay, through Oakland and Berkeley and countless other Bay area cities until we had passed the last of the tolls and were skating quietly towards the northern mountains. The cool air followed us in, even if the fog moved more deliberately. We arrived directly on time at the Farmstead Restaurant for our reservation at 7:15 p.m. We wouldn't have needed a reservation, although the restaurant was plenty busy. The Farmstead is what passes for a family restaurant in the affluent town of St. Helena. It is warm and inviting, unsupervised children run around in the garden, and everyone seems happily intoxicated. On wine, of course, from the Long Meadow Ranch winery, which runs the restaurant. The food is comfort food, which in St. Helena translates into superbly crafted meals, although the portion sizes are too big and they are served on oversized plates. And so passed our first night in Napa--sitting on a garden terrace surrounded by plum trees trained on trellises to resemble grape vines, a lush set of garden rows sporting melons and squash and tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers a stone's throw away. We finished off the evening by driving to Calistoga and dropping in at the Hydro Grill for a nightcap.

Day 2 was low key. Calistoga sits at the north end of Napa, tucked into the hills where it is a little cooler than the valley. It is also more relaxed than the affluent environs of St. Helena, or the over-the-top luxury appointments of Yountville. We took a walk around the town, ate a big breakfast at the local diner, hopped into our Toyota Camry and drove the Silverado Trail to Rutherford to visit the Elizabeth Spencer tasting room.

At the Elizabeth Spencer tasting room

We had chosen Elizabeth Spencer because it was one of the first good wines we had ever tasted. Our old friends at the Chicago Wine Merchants shop in Lincoln Square had, over ten years ago, first introduced the neighborhood to fine wine, hosting unpretentious tastings and offering expert advice when asked. We were serving lamb one night, and Gerard (may he rest in peace) suggested we go with an Elizabeth Spencer pinot noir. At the time, the winery was only six years old and the two wine makers who owned it--Elizabeth Pressler and Spencer Graham--were better known for their work at other wineries. We were immediately impressed, and we have never forgotten them.

Nor did they disappoint us in person. We began the tasting with a Russian River Valley Chardonnay that was so elegant, refined, and flavorful that we were instantly converted to the grape. I've always been contemptuous of chardonnay. If it wasn't slathered in oak, then it seemed austere and almost sour. I had no use for it. But this grape was different. Complex, buttery, mild fruit, toasted almonds. We swooned. In fact, the entire tasting was brilliant. Elizabeth Spencer makes elegant and beautiful wines. They are sometimes a bit too big for my taste, but somehow the winemakers can make big seem elegant. We joined their wine club, which amounts to an expensive commitment to drink at least a case of Elizabeth Spencer wines every year, and will more than likely result in more.

From the succulent Sinsky garden

We wandered back to the Silverado Trail and dropped by the Robert Sinsky winery. They have a spectacular tasting room flanked by organic gardens and vineyards. They serve small plates with the tastings. The winemaker is apparently also the photographer and he composes some pretty pictures (which one can find on the website). Our pourer chatted about changes in the valley over the past few years, and recommended we stop by Lava Vine on the way back to Calistoga. "If you ever need a reminder that at its heart Napa Valley is an agricultural community," he said, "Lava Vine is the place to go." He was right. The vintners are the pourers at Lava Vine. You can only get their wines through their tasting room, which is in a barn and is dog friendly. The vintners are California-relaxed, chatty, and the tasting fee is only ten dollars, waived if you buy a wine. (Of course, this latter policy is the industry standard.) Upon hearing that Jan was a musician, one of the vintners came out with an autoharp. We would learn later that they regularly book musicians and comedians in their small storage room. These people were really having a good time--that much was obvious. There was so much conversation, in fact, that we only made it through three wines before we had to run back to Calistoga for an appointment. The vintners told us to come back tomorrow rather than pay up front.

Getting down at Lava Vine.
That thing is an autoharp.

That night we went for dinner at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's place in Yountville. I was underwhelmed. It seemed a high energy food mart more than a restaurant. The steak on the steak frites was slathered in onions. Preparation was otherwise flawless. But boring. We were frankly more moved by the appetizers we had at Jolé in Calistoga, which consisted of Pádrones chilies perfectly prepared in olive oil and sea salt, and a few cheeses (all local). The bartenders are knowledgeable, affable and the crowd much more laid back. It is likely Calistoga's best restaurant, although the chef up at Solbar is louder and gets more attention. We'll take Jolé.

Of Serendipity and Cliché: Wine Country 2013

Trips to wine country are perhaps a rite of passage for the American bourgeoisie. Affluence, after all, brings with it certain responsibilities, and traditionally that has been a greater appreciation for the arts, for fine dining and intelligent conversation, and of course for wine. All of America caught the bug more than a decade ago, and the explosion of wine culture followed.

It really was wine culture that exploded. It was not just that people drank more wine--although they did. But it was much more. Suddenly people expressed interest in grapes and clones and terroir and vintages. The shopping market wall full of labels both graphically funny and austerely intimidating became an object of curiosity and exploration. And most promisingly, strange and arbitrary rules were probed and questioned. My favorite was the old saw "whites with fish and foul, reds with meat" was abruptly disproved one day more than a decade and a half ago when my then-girlfriend announced that it no longer applied. "They don't say that anymore," she informed me. "They say to drink what you like with what you like." I never asked her who the "they" were. I didn't drink wine at the time. But in retrospect, that was an amazing moment. Somebody, somewhere, was telling the consuming public that they needed to develop their own palates and their own ideas.

And develop them we did. About the time that the movie Sideways appeared, wine was everywhere. Tastings were commonplace. To be able to talk about wine in a sophisticated way--to understand the difference between a Rioja and a Rhone, or why the Languedoc-Roussillon was France's most exciting wine region--was, well, cool. No longer the province of just the snobs, wine culture became about craft and style. One could enjoy it, marvel about its subtleties, and never stop learning about it. And it helped usher in interest in craft beers and craft cocktails. Perhaps even the slow food movement. I'm a little sketchy on the timeline, but the case can be made for wine driving interest in food. Why not?

Yet it took me nearly ten years after my first interest in wine developed to make my own pilgrimage to wine country. Forsaking a year's of savings, my intrepid wife and I cast out into the perilous wilds of Napa and Sonoma counties to see what all the fuss was about.

The Curse of Temperance

Temperance, at least in its non-ironic form, would seem a virtue. Certainly for weather, where temperate climates attract swarms of humans. I certainly pine for temperate weather when the hottest and coldest days are upon us. But this summer, in the middle of July, I find myself wishing it were hotter, more humid, sunnier. I would like to sweat my body weight every day. I want to feel like a salty heap.

But why? Why? After all, am I not enjoying the morning walks with my dog, feeling chilly in a t-shirt? Am I not enjoying seeing 70 degrees on the coke sign thermometer outside my downtown office? Am I not pleasantly surprised when I wear a hoodie all the way home without realizing it? (That one does require a modicum of explanation--my office is sometimes air conditioned to sub-arctic levels, and I put the hoodie on in my office. Then I went home, and realized, half way, that it was still on.) So why? Because my tomatoes are not coming along. We are in mid-July, and I've had only a few beefsteaks and a few handfuls of cherries. The vines are not fruiting. The fruits are not growing. By now in any given year, my diet consists largely of tomatoes. Tomato sandwiches, tomato salads, tomato just because. I now fear that this will be a lost year.

The peppers are slow to ripen too. I have only two that have begun to ripen past green. My major discovery this year was that pepper plant branches have to be supported, lest the heavy fruit weigh down and rip them off. And i did have them staked--just not properly.

The hot weather will come, no doubt. Until then, we slog along in wet and cool weather. My heart goes out for the poor farmers who have lost their crops. I know my little garden has suffered through, of all things, mild temperatures and lots of rain.

Fertilizing the garden

Fertilized the garden. Yesterday. It has been tough to get to this because it has been so wet. Everything is coming along fine, although I lost a branch on a pepper plant. Too heavy, I s'pose. The squash borer is slowly threatening my summer squash plant, although I have now gotten at least six squash from it and more are coming. We've made one casserole and grilled up the rest. So I can't really complain.

You can kind of see one pepper that is ripening here

The tomatoes continue to sit, and the fruit is not ripening. This is the coldest, wettest summer I've seen since I moved to Atlanta. Whoever thought I would complain about rain! The upside is that I haven't turned a hose on in weeks.

The sunflower my daughter grew. It stands ten feet tall now

Lettuce